hspace="6" alt="Outsider Music"/>

What you’re drawn to is a kind of ghost in the music-something strange and lovely between the notes

Illustration: Nick White

There is no such thing as a guilty pleasure. Do not trust bad art.
The term ‘outsider music’ was coined in 1996 by the WFMU DJ Irwin Chusid.
He appropriated the ‘outsider’ label from the ‘outsider art’ movement , a genre
which prided naïvety over precision, and applied it to an atomised troupe of
miscreants and outcasts whose unique voices had, somehow, found their
way onto magnetic tape.

It was always an umbrella term.
The cornerstones of this outsider music were Daniel Johnston, The Shaggs,
Jandek and Wesley Willis. Outsiderdom was crudely signified by wilful obscurity
(Jandek’s serial killer-like reclusiveness), mental illness (Willis’s ‘hilarious’
expression of schizophrenia, as performed by an overweight, homeless
black man with a Casio, and Johnston’s own seismic, personality-splintering
bipolar depression) and an indie-friendly childishness typified most explicitly
by professional amateurs The Shaggs.
Since Chusid compiled these acts on his Songs In The Key Of Z CD and book
in 2000, ‘outsider music’ has become a term as diffuse and nebulous as ‘avantgarde’
– something that can and has been applied to infinite curios. Everett True
even hijacked the label as a politically correct byword for the dreaded ‘indie’ in
Careless Talk Costs Lives.

Perhaps most aggravatingly, outsider music is increasingly a status of
credibility conferred to artefacts of kitsch. The records most often classified
as outsider music these days are: awful pop records made by actors (William
Shatner’s ‘real life’ UFO-encounter-inspired Transformed Man, or Robert
Mitchum’s almost-Pakistani patois on his calypso album); public information
or personal improvement records; anti-drugs songs; Christian preaching in the
pop song; corporate jingles; music written or performed by children.

Otis Fodder’s excellent 365 Days Project – where he blogged an mp3
and explanation every day for a year – is one of the better examples of this
classification. Here, ‘outsider music’ becomes a giant scrapbook, copied and
pasted bits of found sound dug out of boot fairs and bins, found in dusty homerecorded
cassettes stuffed down the back of sofas – an audio equivalent of the
wonderful Found magazine.

Nevertheless, outsider music’s badge of credibility is one that hinges on
notions of ‘purity’, so we need to siphon off the self-consciously ‘eccentric’
novelties, and return the focus to genuine artists – people with integrity,
depth and conviction, whose art sounds like nothing else and seems to come
from nowhere.

The outsider musicians I love the most have a very limited interpretation of
what pop music is. They are people who aren’t particularly immersed in modern
music, or even the structure and instrumentation of most popular music. This
engenders a kind of ‘rootless music’ – one that is not entrenched in the codes
and conventions of any one genre, and that doesn’t appeal to any predicated
criteria of ‘authenticity’. These artists generally work alone – in many instances
they are not people who are competent at integrating into society, so selfreliance
is a necessity.

They are people who aren’t as concerned with learning how to play
instruments, as expressing an idea or a feeling. The art is not necessarily made
beautiful by the music itself, but it resonates because the transmission of the
idea is so powerful. What you’re drawn to ultimately is a kind of ghost in the
music – something strange and lovely between the notes. Thoughts.

To do this requires an epic suspension of self-awareness. Something that
most normal people are completely incapable of. Perhaps the most obvious
signifier of outsider musicians is the reason why most of them are shunned:
their voices. Some of them, like BJ Snowden, aren’t that great at hitting the
right notes in the right order. Others, like Tiny Tim, are incredible singers, but
their voices are so unusual that they are unlistenable to most ears.

art brut

Nevertheless, Tiny Tim was one of the few outsider musicians who became
huge. In the late Sixties, his migraine-inducing falsetto made him a household
name – there was even a Tiny Tim board game. His popularity dwindled rapidly
after the release of his first couple of albums – a sure sign that his appreciation
was grounded in novelty – but he became a kind of tragic cult icon over time.

“Tiny was very aware of how people interpreted his music,” says Ernie Clark,
curator of tinytim.org. “Tiny never thought of himself as a novelty act, nor was
he upset if fans thought of him as one. He was thrilled by the attention.”

As Tiny passed away some years before the term ‘outsider music’ was even
coined, he was unaware of its tricksy associations. Connotations that ‘outsiders’
working today – particularly those showcased in Songs In The Key Of Z – are
almost painfully aware of.

“I know for a fact that I do not fit the category of an ‘outsider’ because
I am a college-educated musician,” protests Bertha Jeanne (BJ) Snowden, the
New York music teacher whose off-key odes to Canada made her famous. “I
can play my instrument because I have a degree in performance. I majored in
classical and jazz piano. The people who make negative comments about me
know nothing about music. A lot of college-educated musicians like my music.
“When people come to my shows, they think that they are coming to
laugh,” she continues, “but then when I finish they end up telling me that
my show was great and it also put them in a good mood if they were in a bad
mood before.”
BJ has been writing songs since the age of three and she’s awfully serious
about her art. BJ is an outsider because her songs don’t fit any real musical
template, except that they all sound like mini-national anthems. Her voice
may not always be the easiest on the ear but her happy songs are joyous and
unrestrained, and her sad songs – even her hymn for 9/11 – are heartfelt and
touching. Most recently, BJ has tested a new rap direction.

naïve art

The gorgeous lack of self-awareness inherent in outsiders can occur for many
reasons, and yes, in some instances it may be because of some form of learning
difficulty which estranges one’s sense of empathy with the majority of people.
Outsider musicologists like Chusid are quick to emphasise that the defining
characteristic of outsider music should be earnestness. I agree, of course, that
irony is the ugliest and most base form of humour – it is Bad Art. Problematically
for many of the artists Chusid surrounds himself with, though, is that their
burning earnestness provides a convenient platform for people to laugh at them.
The pantheon of Wesley Willises and Jack Mudurians that outsider fans revel in
sometimes scan as little more than musical Joey Deacons – blissfully unwitting
objects of a particularly distasteful kind of ridicule.
One group of musicians who emphatically challenge this notion of retardas-
spectacle are The Kids Of Widney High. A musical project run at a Los Angeles
school for severely disabled kids, their first album, 1989’s Special Music From
Special Kids is life-affirming stuff. Over almost Jan Hammer-ish arrangements,
the kids sing stridently about stuff they think is cool: cars, teddy bears, insects.
‘Mirror Mirror’ uses the Snow White rhyme as a chorus, but the lyrics “Do I look
cute?/Am I ugly?/Does someone think I’m pretty?/What colour make up should
I/Put on my face?” , written and sung by a girl with gigantism – shortly before she
died from a grand mal seizure – make the sentiment almost brutal.
The next generation of Widney kids made an album for Mike Patton’s Ipecac
label. Let’s Get Busy both normalised their illnesses – the title track is a fantastic
wonky party jam about eating pizza and making out – and aggressively
demanded acceptance from a society that had them marginalised. ‘Respect’
sees Aretha’s hit recontextualised into a thrilling pro-’mongoloid’ rallying call.
Children, generally, are valued in outsiderdom. The championship of Langley
Schools Music Project’ Innocence & Despair – the cult Seventies recording of
Canadian primary schoolers belting out Beach Boys and Carpenters hits – is
evidence of the twee hallmarks of outsider music. Innocence & Despair planted
the ravaged words of Brian Wilson and Karen Carpenter – emotionally crippled
adults whose very bodies screamed out to return to childhood – in the mouths
of kids too young to comprehend their desolate nursery rhymes. The clapping,
stomping enthusiasm is heartbreaking. But there’s still something both creepy
and obvious about Innocence & Despair’s adulation. You’re not applauding
either the children or the songwriters – but the concept, which occasionally
feels a bit cold.

incorrect music

Although the innocence factor, whether it comes from age or just a lack of selfawareness,
is a key component in outsiderdom, equally surprising music can
come out of weird ‘happy accidents’ in otherwise lucid individuals.
Robert Zaprian Tchomoneff Vidoloff lived and died alone in Hollywood. He
claimed to be a close personal friend of Mickey Rourke and Liz Taylor and that
he’d received a Nobel citation. Perhaps weirdly, he was less forthcoming about
his real accomplishment: Bob Vido – One-Man Band. The album that Vidoloff
self-released as Bob Vido in 1974 was only really discovered after his death
in 1995, aged 80. Side A, ‘Songs’, is a wheezing, gibbering swirl of surrealist
accordion pop, full of awful Fifties slanguage and stream-of-consciousness
ramble about “mathotometers”, “astrometometers” and “musatometers”.
Side B, ‘Horns’, is a frantic scramble of droning organ, chanted vocals, drums,
sax, clarinet and trumpet – all squeezed and teased by Bob himself. This frantic
space jazz has been compared by some listeners to Sun Ra, although Vido seems
to come from a planet farther out even than Ra.
Someone operating on a similar cosmic tangent to Vido, albeit more lucidly,
was Boston street musician The Space Lady. A former hippy, ‘Suzy Soundz’
and her draft-dodger boyfriend were in hiding from the authorities in the early
Eighties, so she brought home by the bacon by concocting an elaborate busker
alter-ego: The Space Lady. Feeding an early battery-powered Casiotone through
a phase-shifter as she performed in the passages of Boston’s tube system, she
found that her soft, delicate voice echoed unnaturally around the phasing tones
of the Casio, creating a beautiful, if hallucinatory effect. Performing in a winged
helmet with blinking lights, she regaled commuters with detached, dreamy
renditions of space-themed radio hits vaguely recalled from her tripping days
– and radically reinterpreted in the distorted remembering.
Suzy hung up her winged helmet in 2000, to return home and care for her
elderly parents. She keeps the legacy of The Space Lady alive via the medium
of MySpace, where she enjoys a small and loyal coterie of fans. Uniquely, she is
not offended by association with the other crazy people (she terms it ‘incorrect
music’) of Songs In The Key Of Z, and claims to enjoy much of the music.
outsider music
What you’re drawn to is a kind of ghost in the music –
something strange and lovely between the notes
falsetto memories: tiny tim
Ernie Clarke, of tinytim.org:
“I don’t think he really thought
of himself as a cult ‘outsider’ icon. He
really believed in what he was doing
and I think his fans understood that
Tiny was the real deal. They admired
him for his dedication. Tiny was a very
humble soul.
“Tiny was a very serious musicologist
and spent many hours studying and
learning everything he could about
the history of the music era that he
loved most.
“He could sing hundreds of songs
off the top of his head and tell you
the date a song was recorded, who
recorded it and even the matrix number
of the recording.
“Tiny’s greatest motivation for
singing was his desire to share the great
old songs and artists of the past with
the public at large.
“The main thing he wanted was to
be accepted as a serious artist. He really
believed in himself and never gave up
or backed down.
“He stood his ground and won
over his biggest critics by the time
he was into his first or second song of
the show. The people that came to laugh
were cheering the loudest.
“That’s what made Tiny so special.
He really believed in what he was
doing and had the talent to back up
his determination.”
sensory overload: bob vido
It is entirely possible there is some dense,
indecipherable concept uniting Bob Vido
– One-Man Band. Only two copies of the
album have ever been found. Its finder,
Jonathan Ward, curator of bobvido.com,
also discovered a self-published book by
Vido, Rhizology – a jumbled, handwritten
scrawl of pseudo-philosophy conjured
from non sequiturs, complicated tables,
diagrams and astrological references.
“I think Bob truly believed that he
was destined for fame,” says Ward. “Not
a fame that brought money or celebrity,
but fame for being a renowned ‘man of
ideas’. He claims he’d spent seven years
working out how to trisect an angle, a
classically difficult problem that stumped
the ancient Greeks. One of my favourite
parts of the book is a rejection letter from
the Navy for his proposed ‘space craft
that utilises magnetic currents and
cosmic rays for propulsion’.
“The overall impression one gets
when hearing his music is one that’s part
zany neighbour, part guileless weirdo,
and part frenetic, possibly deluded
personality disorder. Once you read his
writing and see his artwork, you can tell
that this was someone who had the
capacity to understand complicated
mathematical concepts, as well as feel
the need to lecture about diet and ulcers,
paint portraits to make a living, write
dense screeds about cosmic rays, and
above all, believe in himself.”

folk art

Plan B, as part of the original brief for this feature, asked me to identify who the
“up-and-coming outsider musicians of tomorrow” are. It’s not answerable.
The means of production, distribution and classification have changed so
much in the periods since the artists discussed here began making music – going
back to the Fifties and Sixties – that the goalposts of an ‘outsider’ have shifted
considerably. In this musical climate, a musician operating reclusively, with their
own self-scripted pop shorthand and sketchy compositional structure, is much
more likely to be accepted and covered in magazines like this. Think of people
like Thomas Truax and Dame Darcy, who, however studied we may perceive
them as being now, could just as easily have been Harry Partch or Lucia Pamela,
had they been born 50 years earlier.

Because the internet makes DIY global distribution a possibility – as well as
providing an almost everlasting record of one’s achievements – it means that
the crucial ‘lost artefact’ factor of the outsider is missing.
So people like Brent Simon – the proudly obese space nerd who videos
his Casio compositions for YouTube – has become a Jedi Boy-style internet
sensation instantly as links to his work are email-traded in lunch hours. He has
the signifiers of the slightly kitschier outsider icons, but none of the enigma.
Everyone can see right through the joke.

Maybe we need a new umbrella phrase. Something like The Space Lady’s
‘incorrect music’ to distance the avatars from the charlatans. Outsider music
is not just a label now, but a genre – something that people consciously align
with. In this, the classification loses half of its impetus; its artists become aware.
It stops becoming a natural mode. It becomes all artifice and exaggeration.
It becomes kitsch.

hspace="6" alt="spacelg"/>

casio comsos: the space lady

“I certainly was transformed by my
musical persona,” affirms Suzy Sounds.
“Not to sound too New Age and corny,
but I felt I was truly channelling an
intelligence and musicality that was far
beyond my own. My music touched
people in a very psychic and supernatural
way. I also seemed to be surrounded in
an ethereal bubble of protection.”

In 1990 a homemade Space Lady
cassette appeared, featuring among
other standards, Suzy’s shimmering alien
love secret: ‘I Had Too Much To Dream
(Last Night)’. Weirdly textured, even with
just keyboard and voice, her version of
the Electric Prunes’ song is a deep
dreaming in colour and sound that leaves
the listener drunk on mood. It’s an effect
that only outsider mathematicianmusician
Delia Derbyshire could rival, on
White Noise’s 1969 avant-pop
touchstone An Electric Storm.

The Space Lady became a popular
local attraction, but Suzy insisted she
didn’t want to compromise her art in the
record industry – despite the fact Suzy
and her three children were homeless
for much of this period.

“I loved my career as a street
musician and never wanted to go
mainstream,” she told me. “I was told
by so many of my fans that I represented
something important to them, a beacon
of how art can survive against all odds,
I guess.”

Yet, look
closer at the musical communities on the
edges of society – noise, jazz, improv, lo-fi
– and you’ll note that they actively pursue
and support outsider artists.
It’s probably fair to say that some of
the truest and most accessible practitioners
of outsider music today exist in cyberspace:-www.spinmasterplantpot.netfirms.com,
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Milonakis
– or check the Nerdcore Rising videos on
YouTube. But does their very accessibility
negate them from the status ‘outsider artist’?
This brings us, in roundabout fashion,
back to Music In The Margins – 25 tracks
(most definitely not always ‘songs’) of
enigmatic, challenging, individualistic and
obscure music (although not always ‘music’,
either). A meticulous Wesley Willis drawing
adorns the front of the inner booklet, and
Daniel Johnston also contributes two rather
draining early exorcisms (‘Premarital Sex’,
‘Fly Eye’) but mostly – and appropriately
– this compilation is far more obscure than
that. Latvian psychologists who claim to
have captured the voices of the dead (Dr
Konstantin Raudive), French dreamers
who build ‘Reality Filters’ in their garages,
aiming to pick up the entirety of the world’s
interference in their garage (Jacques
Brodier), pieces drawn from music therapy
and improvisational workshops in Belgium,
autistic accordion players, media surgeons,
human jukeboxes…The truth is, outsider
music is wherever you choose to look for it,
and can be vastly more entertaining and
inspirational than its bloated big brother,
the mainstream.
www.subrosa.net

promised land: bj snowden

“I am working about 75 per cent of
the time as a musician and 25 per cent
as a substitute teacher.

“I played the children my music and
they did enjoy it. They even brought to
my attention that one of the songs on
Comedy Central’s South Park have a
song called ‘Blame Canada’ which is
a spin off of my song ‘In Canada’ and
even though we are all aware that they
did this, I can’t sue them because they
changed the melody around a little,
but the rhythm is the same.

“They are making a lot of money
from this and I know they got the idea
from me.

“My happy songs are happy, but
there has been tragedy in my life. I don’t
find it harder to write sad music.

“I have a degree from Berklee
College Of Music so I know how to write
certain music at a certain time because I
know my music. I am so proud that I can
master most music styles which a lot of
famous rock stars can’t master. I am
also so proud that my music doesn’t
sound like anyone else, which means
that I am an individual and I don’t fit
the stereotype.

“All the above makes me feel
good, and I know that this is the reason
why a lot of major record labels don’t
accept me.

“I am working on some more
Canadian songs.”

Posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007by