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| The Shaggs Marking time their way. Pictured in 1972. |
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| I had longed to hear 'Philosophy Of The World' For years. Frank Zappa, Jad Fair and Jonathan Richman loved it But couldn't really describe it And there is no way to describe The Shaggs I expected something childlike, maybe something distressed I never expected the interior logic to be quite so hard to fathom Their inner logic might be an inner clock The downstrokes on the guitar and snare are insistent but never accent anything directly Things appear to speed up and slow down but not necessarily in unison Rasheed Ali could not replicate the drumming if he tried for a million years There are moments of intense precision The singing on Who Are Parents? is extraordinary in its exactness Dad and brother Shagg's banter on Shagg's Own Thing is the polar opposite The Shaggs-syntax is at once mannered and natural There is a definite purpose to everything But it remains discrete There is something very difficult about 'Philosophy Of The World' There are three stages people, especially musicians, go through when they first hear The Shaggs Stage one: silence - mouth and eyes open in a frieze of shock Stage two: laughter - disparate parts register and fall in and out of place Stage three: silence - brows furrow, listening fails to reep any understanding. The record does become containable in time They are similar, in the grand scheme of classification, but they are not the same I can't think of the 1960s or folk music or The Byrds in relation to The Shaggs I have to tell myself "This is The Shaggs" This is The Shaggs They don't fit |