The Shaggs
Philosophy of the World

We do our best
We try to please
But we're like the rest
We are never at ease

Fremont, Rockingham, New Hampshire, 1968. Two guitars, two voices, a drum, three sisters. The “ruffled” ones.

The fact is very simple, that, “Philosophy of the World”, they recorded it before knowing how to play. And before knowing how to compose. In this, we read, a great temporal disjunction.

It is little considered that it was recorded live, no artifice. Half a day for a dozen tracks. It takes much more time for the same number of eggs to come out of a hen’s behind.

This is part of its beauty, because the sound is extremely clear and present. The voices, most of the time, are out of tune, although there are moments of rare and uncontaminated sweetness. The chords are strummed, undecided, random, but they anticipate the knowledge of the instrument. Therefore, the temporal delay is, besides being involuntary, somehow exhilarating. It is the absolute lack of conventionality. It is backward and forward in times. Theirs and ours. It is the reverie, the meandering of an unaware wisdom. You can only look at it, too difficult to earn.

Oh, the rich people want what the poor people's got
And the poor people want what the rich people's got
And the skinny people want what the fat people's got
And the fat people want what the skinny people's got
You can never please anybody in this world

A naive, naked, simple, frail, emaciated, awkward beauty, but incredibly true and direct.

Was there perhaps coercion from the father Austin? Yet it results in a free, unthinkable sound, paradoxically free from any constraint.

Parents are the ones who will always understand
Parents are the ones who really care

Some kids think their parents are cruel
Just because they want them to obey certain rules

Their album comes out on January 1, 1969. Proto punk? A completely involuntary punk: not knowing how to play and playing despite this limitation. They wanted to imitate pop music. They did not succeed. Their idols were female groups, especially The Angels, Crystals and, hear this, the Beach Boys. And nothing. It all goes beyond intentions, all then seasoned by inexplicable and/or grotesque and/or hilarious facts, like clairvoyance and cartomancy in New Hampshire, Saturday concerts at the town hall (i.e. Fremont dodging vegetables and cans), the producer (of the Third World!) fleeing Massachusetts with 900 copies of the album and leaving only 100 to father Austin. One of the 100 ends up, a decade later, in the hands of some DJs (Terry Adams and Tom Ardolino) from New York’s NRBQ station who make it a cult programming and reprint it. Zappa arrives and declares among the pages of a lifestyle magazine (i.e. Playboy) that it is his third favorite album ever. Likewise, Lester Bangs praised it in the Village Voice article in late January 1981, “Better than the Beatles and the DNA too” (or “not being able to play is never enough”).

The devotion reaches us and is fresh. In all the beauty of its flaws and errors. And this year, the Wilco invited them to sing at their festival, the Summer Solid Festival (sure Betty and Dorothy, drummer Helen is no longer with us, having passed away in 2006). They hadn’t performed since 1975; they had exceptionally sung in public only at NRBQ’s 30th Anniversary Celebration in November ’99! Why did Tweedy and Co want them?

Because it was wonderful to invite them.

They wanted to have them sing and we know they disbanded with their father’s death while they were attempting to make a second album. But for history, the first was more than enough.

What was, rhetorically “is”, in the heart of these girls? They do what they don’t know how to do: play. But like everyone, and the artist often is, they wanted to love and be loved. And so they did. So we can do and continue to do, thanks to the abundant richness of this album. Richness that goes beyond its right to be in the history of music. Beauty that deserves it the place that every failed attempt occupies in itself. Exaltation of all ingenuities free of arrogance. A genuine, flavorful naivety, not frivolous at all. Like the shyness of the first declaration. The fragility of exposing oneself without knowing how to do it, without experience, heart in hand. The reckless gesture of offering oneself fully in a declaration of love. The overwhelming risk of making a fool of oneself. Exposure to failure.

Not very diplomatic, very straightforward. It reminds us how we were, emotionally.

But then again, it’s a beautiful thing! Of something, if it were missing, we wouldn't miss it, but, being there, we deliciously feel the gain; a gain that comes from a presence in a way superfluous but at the same time necessary. The necessary superfluous. Here, the beautiful superfluous. And not just that.

The capacity for giving, the freedom of the gesture, the mysterious will, the fortuitous invention, then, are here a model.

How much of the human weighs on things, the heart put into what one does. Feelings as the essence of human fragility. Fragility that doesn’t push to win, but to live. Only.

The Wiggins, inevitably, lost. But triumphantly. Fragile is to give and receive love, nothing else. They have the all-encompassing beauty of fragility and innocence.

I've looked here, I've looked there
I've looked everywhere
Oh, Foot Foot
Why can't I find you?

Where “Foot Foot” is their kitten, for some the puppy, vanished. Who would sing it today? Nobody, nobody, nobody. But they did, and for this, we are grateful. This is quirky cool! And it eminently is.

Their father said: "They should like you because you know that they are pure. What else do you want?"

What to say?

For art, naivety is virtuous.

From naivety a virtue without art.

From naivety an art without virtue.

Unlistenable, unwatchable, incapable to most. Innocent, naive to others.

The beauty is terrible at its beginning (for Novalis).

This is the measure of their greatness. The excess from every defined taste. That is, the conceptual beauty? No, it’s a true beauty.

The Dadaist gesture of pulling the bottle rack from the cellar and exposing it in a museum? A disruptive, absolute gesture. Assassin. Perhaps it was so for the neo-producers of '81, the DJs of the NRBQ. Certainly not for the Wiggin household. Because “Philosophy of the World” is immediately innocent. Even more, it burns disarmingly with unconscious innocence. It will be the attitude, the unusual stance, the crazy balances, their (don’t) know how.

It's time for games
It's time for fun
Not for just one
But for everyone

How not to adore then the three sisters? Helen, Beth and especially Dot! Who achieved cult status better than anyone else has been able to do.

Art and dissonance have always been missing from each other.

The Shaggs did with arrangements, and Dot with words, what Peggy Guggenheim did with colors and images in her painting attempts. Absolutize primitivism.

What should I do?
What should I do?
Tell me, tell me
What should I do?
Sometimes he's kind
Sometimes he's cruel
Sometimes he's mean
And other times he's true

The father wanted to make them record at all costs, against the advice of the discographers, producers, the Fremont community, against themselves. Which tragic Greek would have orchestrated an equally solemn farce?

Whether you laugh or cry you’re always right. Whether you love, hate, worship, or detest, you’re always wrong. A unicum! The myth of rock forever tarnished, which –a moment before– had forever tarnished the right-thinking society.

You give me three words: fuck, tits, sucks, shithead. That's four! And in their lyrics no swear words, come on! So: dream, team, and infinitive verbs.

When you're far away
You are always in my dreams
And when you're home to stay
We make a perfect team

The Shaggs are incompleteness, inconsistency, incompleteness, and incapacity made into a system and elevated to art. A rolling boulder, age after age.

I cannot not love them. And in the end, I say thank you Shaggs, thank you. The more I wither, the more that pure, uncontaminated, and foolish joy that you give me, mixed with shivers of aesthetic irritation, feverish, mild, perhaps insane, makes me say I love you. I love you as one should love records.

When I ride my horse
I take my companion too, of course
When I go to the beach and run in the sand
I have my companion close at hand
My companion is with me when I drive my car
Even when I go real far

The philosophy of the world made of raw sugar, ineptitude, inexperience, unredeemable mistakes, missed shots. Off-key notes and wrong timings. Incidental, flat, and confused dissonances. Yet all of us are the Shaggs at many moments, for many days. Attempts of people who keep on existing. Attempts to go beyond ourselves, transcend ourselves in art, in thought, in the will to care.

Reality isn’t so harsh if you still rely on that bit of humanity you have left. The Shaggs, in the end, are greater than their very philosophy of the world. Aesthetically and existentially transcend the hic et nunc of their proto album proto punk. They are history, legend, enchantment (the swan’s enchantment?), exaltation of failure, eternal humanization of a fundamentally frivolous world, often ruthless.

You don't like it? You will. Like everything that reaffirms how objectivity is subjective. And vice versa. They are unjudgeable. Modesty and fear grip you.

Sometimes to advance a step, you must fall. Where the risk of getting lost is greatest, the forces that save emerge the most.

Why does the world go unholy?
Why does everyone fight more and more?
Don't they know we have a savior?

And anyway never swear, nor lie!!!

But then there's times when you are very different
I just don't understand
How a minute you can be so mean
The next minute so grand
You used to make me happy
Now you make me sad
You've told me many lies
I've never told you one

You never lied. Only you.

Facts are supposed objective counterparts of true assertions (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein), but about what we cannot speak, it is better to remain silent. The Shaggs, indeed.