Is this man Jandek?

AG is pleased to present our regular column, AG Essentials, in which we list what, in our opinion, are ten essential albums from a given subgenre. These are albums whose influence can still be heard on music today, or, alternately, albums that still retain the power to amaze as a stylistic path not taken.

Here's a personal anecdote: On my first day working for Audiogalaxy, they put me to work approving Hosted Bands - musicians, mostly amateur, who had sent their stuff in to us to be rated, summed up in a 75-word description, and placed on the site in their appropriate genre. "Cool," I thought naively, "a chance to discover, all by myself, a real diamond in the rough!" What I discovered, after only about five or so hours of plowing through unapproved bands, is that there's a depressing amount of "rough" out there.

What depressed me the most, though, wasn't that a lot of the bands sending in their work were bad, but just the opposite - many of the bands were fine, but fine in this safe, innocuous, sort of bloodless way. Their main goal - to get on MTV - was plain, their influences - bands on MTV - were easily discernable, and a good many of them were just as good and better than the MTV bands they obviously admired. These bands were plenty smart and industrious, but after awhile their single-mindedness started to bug me. "Is industriousness and ambition all there is to music these days?" I wondered. "What about deeper concerns?"

And then, late in the day, I discovered Lee Lester, a mysterious user who had uploaded his music with only one sentence of information attached: "Since 1970 writing and recording songs." With its casio drones, bleakly tranquil lyrics, and k-hole-of-death vocals, Lester's "Field of Flowers" was everything the songs of these wanna-be MTV bands weren't: personal, mysterious - and, to some ears, flatly terrible. Still, it felt like music that had organically grown - like mold, perhaps - instead of being manufactured with a cookie-cutter. It felt connected to the past, too: in Lester's grotesque articulation there were definite, if perhaps unintentional, echoes of old-time Appalachian croakers Dock Boggs, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, and Dick Justice. I realized that if, among all these pedestrian clones of Weezer, Korn, and Creed, I could discover music like this - music that sounded like it slipped out from a slit between this world and a lost one - approving bands wasn't going to be so bad.

I mention Lester mainly because he's the only artist in this article on whose discovery I haven't been beaten to the punch by Irwin Chusid, DJ for New Jersey's radio station WFMU and author of Songs In The Key Of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music. Chusid is an encyclopedic cataloguer and eloquent champion of "outsider music," a term he coined to describes music - usually made by ordinary people (many of them eccentric, some of them just plain insane) - whose rough edges, raw emotion, and zany inventiveness sets it a world apart from the slick, prefabricated pop on MTV or commercial radio. In the years since the publication of Chusid's book, the notoriety of outsider music has been growing; articles on outsider musicians have been featured in the pages of the New York Times, outsider icon Daniel Johnston had a song featured in a Target commercial, and Bar/None's re-release of The Langley Schools Music Project - a beautiful collection of 70s pop songs sung by Canadian elementary school students - has sold a surprising 30,000 copies. For popular music, this represents a trend almost as heartening as the O Brother, Where Art Thou?-led rediscovery of old-time folk songs. If your interest in this genre is merely piqued, and not sated, by my modest internet overview, I recommend you buy Chusid's book. He goes into more detail about many of these artists than my limited space affords [that said, I must confess I haven't actually read it].

In this supplementary list of my ten favorite outsider works (some albums and some songs, all listed alphabetically), I've applied two major restrictions that Chusid didn't, though. First, I didn't include any actual "insiders" - like Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd and Alexander "Skip" Spence of Moby Grape - whose unsteady mental states appear to lend their music an "outsider" roughness. To do so, I feel, would represent a condescending grounding of the "outsider" designation in mental factors rather than social. Similarly, I didn't include artists whose renown stems less from a genuine appreciation of their art than from their unintentionally being a figure of mean-spirited fun. (i.e.: If you're looking for Wesley Willis, the homeless, overweight black schizophrenic whose periodic appearances for crowds of jeering white fratboys evoke an uncomfortable combination of minstrel act and traveling freakshow, give up now.) I tried, instead, to stick to the genuine outsiders whose music, for all its accidental and humorous bizarreness, has a genuine power and tells compelling, mysterious, sometime unsettling fables about who we really might be:

Jandek - Blue Corpse:
Only a few people really, definitely know who the Houston man who calls himself "Jandek" actually is, and they aren't talking. All the rest of us have to go on is the records: 31 since 1978, all (presumably) self-released on the mysterious "Corwood Industries" label - with the same layout: the front cover consisting of blurry or grainy photos of the inside of a house with the shades pulled down, or a blond man (the man himself?) at various and non-chronological levels of age, the back cover merely a list of the titles and some minimal information - by an artist who has never held a concert, granted an interview, or come clean with his real name. The music contained within every album follows an equally stark formula: it's always frightening, primitive folk whose primary emotional tone is best described as "existential horror." Jandek's death-moan vocals and hideously detuned guitars render his music unlistenable to many and sadly tend to distract critics from his real strength - dire, potently poetic lyrics that are some of the strongest in contemporary song. These dark, existential lyrics, and the man's confrontationally mysterious aesthetic, are a clear influence on such avant-folk misanthropes as Palace's Will Oldham and Smog's Bill Callahan, and a Jandek "tribute record" issued by the Summersteps label featured covers by Low, Bright Eyes, and Retsin. Choosing a "best" record of these 31 is a difficult task. Someday, someone will make a winning Jandek "greatest hits" compilation. Until then, the man's most cohesive, unified album is arguably 1987's Blue Corpse. More info about Jandek can be found at http://tisue.net/jandek/.

Daniel Johnston - Hi, How Are You?:
The friendly face of outsider music and the personal favorite of many people including myself. I am, in fact, of the outspoken opinion that this top-heavy manic-depressive is one of America's greatest living songwriters (and you can read my in-depth review of Hi, How Are You here). He was a favorite of Kurt Cobain and has been covered by Yo La Tengo, Wilco, Mary Lou Lord, Pearl Jam, Sparklehorse, fIREHOSE, and the Dead Milkmen among others. He could easily also be covered by Pink or by U2, as so many of his songs are pop smashes waiting to happen. Hi, How Are You? is one of Johnston's self-released cassettes, which he used to record on a crappy boombox to piano and chord-organ accompaniment and hand out like calling cards on the streets of Austin, TX and at the McDonald's where he once worked.

The Langley Schools Music Project - Innocence and Despair:
A recent and quite popular release by the friendly folks at Bar/None, the Langley Schools Music Project documents the efforts of mid-70s rural schoolteacher Hans Fenger to teach elementary students music by leading them on recordings of Fenger's stripped-down, Carl Orff-influenced arrangements of the day's pop trifles. A charming, funny, and surreal record - with exuberant kids belting out Bowie's "Space Oddity" and Paul McCartney's "Band on the Run" accompanied by spooky xylophones and timpani - Innocence and Despair (a bizarre choice of title by the Bar/None people) is, in my book, most notable for containing the best performance of the Eagles' treacly "Desperado" ever: a guileless, direct, and totally straight reading by nine-year old Sheila Behman.

The Legendary Stardust Cowboy - "Paralyzed":
First off: my main reason for including Norman Carl Odam, aka The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, on this list - rather than his arguably superior psychobilly kindred spirit Hasil Adkins - is that I already featured Adkins on our list of Proto-Punk "essentials." Odam is notable for several reasons, though. One is that, as a performer, he's frequently wilder and more unhinged than Adkins. Another is that, unlike totally obscure Adkins, Odam had a bizarre and coincidental brush with fame, even though it never got him anywhere: an unlikely string of events led to Odam recording his debut single with then-fledgling engineer T-Bone Burnett, which was subsequently released on Mercury and even made it onto the Billboard singles charts - amazing considering how thoroughly, frighteningly nuts the single - "Paralyzed" - actually is. Even more amazing: "Paralyzed"'s success led to Odam's being booked on "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" and - get this - serving as the inspiration for David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" character. Unfortunately, after his brief spate of quasi-fame Odam disappeared from the spotlight, even though he continues to toil industriously in the shadows of the outside to this day.

Harry Partch - "Barstow":
Harry Partch is one of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century: a train-hopping hobo and a self-taught avant-garde composer who repudiated Western Classical tradition and composed dynamic, performance-intensive pieces built on microtonal tunings and played with beautifully strange self-made musical instruments like the Zymo-Zyl, Harmonic Canon, Spoils of War, and Blue Rainbow. "Barstow" is probably his best-known piece and an excellent starting place for Partch: simultaneously out-there and accessible, it sets to music various graffitoes Partch saw scrawled by fellow hoboes and hitchhikers in the California desert.

The Shaggs - Philosophy of the World :
As a foundational and much-revered 60s combo, the Shaggs could be called the Beatles of outsider music. Hell, Frank Zappa, in a typically iconoclastic square-baiting moment, even called the work of these three New Hampshire sisters "better than the Beatles." Forcibly assembled by their dad, Austin Wiggin, who ushered young Dot, Helen, and Betty Wiggin into a recording studio before they could even properly play their instruments so as to "get them while they're hot!", the Shaggs had no choice but to make music unlike any made before: sloppy and rudimentary pop that unselfconsciously eschewed any discernable sense of conventional melody, rhythm, or chordal structure, featuring lyrics that touched upon topics the sisters could relate to - like their parents, their pets, and halloween - which were in turn delivered in what may be the thickest New Hampshire accents ever featured on a pop record. That record, entitled Philosophy of the World, gained a phenomenal level of cult status not only for its sheer weirdness but for the hothouse inventiveness and charming innocence it accidentally radiates. At my last count, there were two movies about the band in pre-production, one from Artisan Entertainment and the other from Tom Cruise's (!) C/W Productions.

B.J. Snowden - Life in the USA and Canada:
Bertha Jean Snowden is a former schoolteacher from Massachusetts who performs straightforward, sincere songs fixated on subjects as diverse as Santa Claus, her divorce, and the selling points of Canada ("folks treat you like a queen, they never will be mean," and so on), home-recorded on keyboard and drum machine. In recent years, Snowden's profile has been raised - the B-52s' Fred Schneider collaborated with her on her "Christmas Hop" holiday single, MTV featured Snowden on their program "Oddville," and Chusid featured her in his book and accompanying CD, a lucky break (though Snowden commented "everyone else on it is terrible!") which introduced her music to a whole variety of freaks, hipsters, outcasts, and weirdos for whom she's become a treasured figure.

Shooby Taylor - The Human Horn:
Shooby Taylor, aka "The Human Horn," is the undisputed master (and sole practitioner) of a kind of rapid-fire and apparently free-associative scat singing technique that, though it rarely sounds like an actual horn (despite the insistence of Taylor, who would reportedly hold an imaginary saxophone while scatting in the studio), is compelling in and of itself, with Taylor enthusiastically spitting out meaningless isolated phonemes with all the gusto of a Charlie Parker mid-"Night in Tunisia" alto break. The sheer hilarity of Taylor's invented technique is enough to distract you from the skill that actually went into it: Taylor is a dextrous vocalist with a total commitment to a technique that could - and frequently does - lead him god knows where, into frantic explosions of incongruous vowels, mad consonantal pile-ups, and chaotic vocal crushes from which it's amazing his tongue can even escape unscathed.

Yximalloo - Kitsch Shaman:
Yximalloo (a mysterious Japanese fellow named Naofumi Ishimaru, who has been working since 1973) is hardly a classic choice of outsider musician, but I chose him for this list because the nerdy po-mo grad student in me is fascinated by Yximalloo's bizarre claim (not intended seriously, but rather as a working technique) that he's documenting the tribal music of a remote (nonexistent) island. Yximalloo's made-up folk music, is fascinating in that, for American audiences, it plays on the alien quality of Japan already. What's more alien than the made-up society by a member of a society that you already don't understand, especially when it's such an unsteady but harmonious mix of convincing-sounding chants and whoops and baldly fake synths and drum machines? And what exactly is the reward for all this anyway? It's unclear, but for Yximalloo to sustain 29 years of obscurity and mass indifference it must be fabulous.

John Trubee/Ramsey Kearney - "Peace and Love" (aka "A Blind Man's Penis":
To my mind, the clearest antecedent to outsider music is folk music - music by workers in song whose names are now lost to time. It only makes sense, then, that scholars devoted to outsider music have long shown interest in the "Song Poem" form, a kind of sleazy hybrid of traditional folk culture, Andy Warhol's "factory" technique, and P.T. Barnum hucksterism. A "Song Poem" consisted of a cheap one-off recording, by the lowest tier of studio musicians, of any text sent to them by aspiring songwriters who answered ads in the back of tabloids ("We need new ideas FOR RECORDING!") and thought they might have what it takes to get famous. Some people who sent in song-poem submissions were actually savvy, though, and saw a cheap chance for a one-in-a-million oddity. The most famous example of these oddities is John Trubee's "Peace and Love," a perverted, nonsensical rant whose submitted chorus kicked off with "Stevie Wonder's penis is erect because he's blind" (changed to "a blind man's penis" by the song-poem people) written by teenage misanthrope Trubee while he was working in a New Jersey convenience store and subsequently given an incredulously straight and deeply creepy reading by middle-aged Nashville rent-a-singer Ramsey Kearney. As hilarious as this ode to vomit, nipples, and "bemis" being doused with "plastimia" is, though, there are countless song-poems like it, neglected artifacts that no sane person would want anymore. The American Song-Poem Music Archives lovingly catalogues them, even mentioning the tantalizing possibility that outsider art legend Henry Darger himself once authored a song-poem; among the artifacts found in Darger's one-room apartment after his death was a letter from NYC's Simplex Company: "Esteemed Friend," it reads in part, "You have been referred to us as having written a song which would appeal to the orchestras throughout the country, if presented to them…."