Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Philosophy of the World!

Lady, I think the pertinent question is what is Foot Foot?

Austin Wiggin may be the Tommy Wiseau of music: an eccentric visionary whose obsessed dream shaped an oft-lampooned yet widely beloved project with all the authentic quirkiness lo-fi hipsters strain with zero self-awareness to attain. The legend goes that Wiggin forged his family of four daughters (Dorothy, Betty, Helen and Rachel) into an inept, amateurish, but extremely compelling and charming band, whose elliptical compositions defied all known music theory but work as unintended comedy and warm the listener's heart with their earnest, innocent and searching Philosophy of the World (1969).

Because we live in an age when authenticity is largely suppressed by the cringe-compilation panopticon effect of knowing everything you do is scrutinised by millions of strangers with untreated personality pathologies, and today the Wiggins would be cruelly derided as lolcows, 21st Century NPCs have devised countless alternative explanations for the Shaggs phenomenon: is the record an intentional joke? Was Austin an evil paytriarchy against whose overbearing designs the daughters subtly rebelled by playing poorly on purpose? Are the sweet sentiments of "Who Are Parents" and "We Have A Saviour" really le ironic social satire? All these fevered inkblot readings can be dismissed with a curt "go back to reddit", because even if there were any truth to them, you'd still be a boring douche for reducing the actual record to such trite crap, like the sort of autofellatio maestro who wants you to know that ackshually Holden Caulfield is Just a Whiny Privileged Kid or that you're Not Supposed to Root for the Joker.

But even to acknowledge the revisionism is to grant it more consideration than it merits: the original liner notes are clear: "Their music is different, it is theirs alone. They believe in it, live it [...] perhaps only the Shaggs do what others would like to do, and that is perform only what they believe in, what they feel, not what others think the Shaggs should feel". As music, it's unorthodox, but I'm still jamming it in my head rn (right now). As philosophy, it reaffirms Confucian notions of filial piety, faith in Jesus Christ, and a cheerful fatalism about human nature: "You can never please/Anybo-ody/In this world". That's actually much deeper than anything evil slime like Lennon or Cobain ever wrote. On the first listen you might have a condescending laugh that mellows to affection. Subsequently, though, you're going to find that there's a lot of wisdom and real humour in these songs. The strange whimsicality of "My Pal Foot Foot" and twist ending of "My Companion" are perennially fresh and beguiling. Pretty soon you'll find you're laughing with them.