999,814: The Shaggs — Who Are Parents?

A group like The Shaggs is not what typically comes to mind when somebody says, "all-girl rock band." Leaving cheap shots about their physical appearance (and tangents discussing what is, in our post-Austin Powers environment, a very unfortunate choice of name) aside, most writing about The Shaggs falls into two basic categories: 1) "this music is horrible" and 2) "or IS it?" Upon first hearing The Shaggs, most would probably agree with the former argument, after they are done laughing. On a second listen, however, they'd laugh a little harder and maybe pee their pants.

That said, once everything that's funny about The Shaggs—remember, this includes name, sound, physical appearance, and lyrics—has been thoroughly exhausted, it might occur that their music is actually pretty challenging. It's challenging in the way that paintings made by schizophrenics are challenging, but nonetheless, if you and two musically-inclined friends sat down and tried to reproduce a Shaggs song you'd have a pretty rough time of it. What initially sounds like crude indifference to such niceties as meter, melody, and other basic musical building blocks is actually a consistent (if arguably unlistenable) approach to song-craft. Which is what led an experimental icon like Frank Zappa to champion The Shaggs as paragons of outsider art rather than merely an ill-conceived vanity project by The Shaggs' dad, Austin Wiggin, Jr.

So "Who Are Parents?" Well, for the Wiggin sisters, parents are the ones who forced them to take music lessons and form a band because of a palm reading performed by their grandma. Parents are the ones who made them write and practice songs, then play gigs at the town hall, as kind of a live-action precursor to the Chipettes. Parents are the ones who ushered them into a recording studio to create an album that will, the adulation of certain artists notwithstanding, guarantee The Shaggs a long half-life of indefinite ridicule. Or as they put it in a lyric that hints at a sinister untertone, "Parents are the ones who are always there".