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Week 58/52: The Philosophy of the World


THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD is the debut album by girl group THE SHAGGS, released 1969 to no critical or commercial success, and was as a result nearly entirely forgotten by the music listening world- so why am I writing about it today?


Well, the story of The Shaggs is long and well documented, and one that I'll try and recount as well as exploring this album's musical content- or perhaps lack thereof.


So the story starts with the Wiggins family of Fremont, New Hampshire in the 60's, and more specifically the father, Austin Wiggins. As the story goes, Austin received a palm reading that predicted many things, but most notably that his daughters would go on to become great musical successes. or something to that effect. After a non-zero number of the other predictions came true, Austin decided to try and enact the musical part to come true aswell. And I guess the fact that I and other people still talk about this album more than 50 years after it's release maybe proves it worked. But what's the music like?


Well, the Wiggins girls have no formal musical training- and they also had no informal training- that's to say that their father forced them to practice their instruments with little guidance whatsoever, and you can definitely tell in the album. From the opening moments of the title track at the start of the record it's pretty evident that this is a seriously amateur record. The vocal style is jarring, the guitar work is played in spite of the drumming instead of alongside it The drumming is actually pretty effective if not basic but this is one of the "better" tracks.


Second track THAT LITTLE SPORTS CAR is probably more representative if the album- the melodies are almost totally nonsensical and the chords sound quite bad. The songwriting is (unsurprisingly) unrefined and lacks subtlety at all, maybe aside from the third track WHO ARE PARENTS where vocalist Dorothy Wiggins exclaims "Who are parents? Parents are the ones that really care" despite her father who forced his daughters to start a band with no musical prowess. Also the drumming is pretty lousy on this track too, which is odd because It's pretty good on other tracks. and it's not like these are complicated rhythms either.


MY PAL FOOT FOOT is one of the more celebrated tracks off the record, it has this cool drum intro mirrored in the outro, and until the vocals kick in it sounds like something that could've come out of Andy Warhol's Factory. And I guess the rest of the song does too, it's pretty egregious, even by this album's standards.


It probably sounds like I'm trashing this album by this point- but it's not entirely awful. despite being quite bad by most standards, it does have a weird charm, and at least on the first few listens it's intriguing to see what they'll do next. And that's not to say there aren't songs without merit- SWEET THING is actually pretty decently written and there's some pretty good melodies in it and IT'S HALLOWEEN is kind of fun and goofy enough to forget the sub-par musicianship; however due to the band's obvious lack of musical knowledge in general, the song structures are generally quite similar across the album: there aren't many notably loud or quiet moments or crescendos or anything, it's generally quite compositionally flat.


But for the 50+ years of it's existence this album has lived on in the hearts and minds of music listeners, for the right or wrong reasons, so I guess it must have something to it. And with the band (or at least parts of the band) performing as The Shaggs at Solid Sound 2017, interest in the band still evidently lives on.


I think to wrap this record up, trying to describe it with words on a screen is pretty ineffective- everyone gets something totally unique out of the band (if at all) so I'd say at least try and listen to it. And if you don't like it... hey, I get it. It's not for everyone- but then no music is. So do what you want i guess.

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