In past years, I’ve made lists of drone and xenharmonic music. This year, I’d like to review examples of “outsider” music. Also called “naïve” or “incorrect” music, it’s frequently defined as music made by people who lack formal training, or who come from outside the musical establishment. I think the definition is a bit bogus though, because many of the most famous examples don’t actually fit. I would describe it as music with unconventional appeal, often standing diametrically opposite to what is considered “good” in music. And usually there’s a narrative (true or not) about how the artist is leveraging their lack of skill or experience in order to produce something especially unique or authentic.
This is not the sort of article where I praise each and every artist, or advocate for the value of the outsider genre. Rather, my goal is simply to listen to outsider music and give my honest opinion. This list was compiled by looking through other people’s lists (such as this list on RateYourMusic) and selecting those who were most frequently cited. I also threw in a personal favorite.
I think it’s easy to form a self image of being Not Like Other Music Fans, where your favorite music is the weird stuff, and the weirder the better. And that’s me, I have been that guy. But this is hardly a coherent preference, because there are just so many different ways to be weird. And one thing I have learned from writing this article, is that the outsider genre spans quite a large range. What I personally find valuable about the outsider genre is its ability to reveal where one’s preferences actually lie.
1. Florence Foster Jenkins
Example: “Queen of the Night”
Florence Foster Jenkins (1968-1944) was something of a sensation during her time, renowned as the “world’s worst opera singer”. Jenkins had musical training, as a pianist, but switched to voice because an injury prevented her from playing the piano. Judging from Wikipedia, her contemporaries were not kind to her, but history has been much kinder. Her story has been told in many forms, including a film where she’s played by Meryl Streep.
To my ear, Jenkins has a tendency to be very flat, especially in the upper register. You can hear when she repeats a high note that it takes a few tries before the tuning lines up. It’s like she can tell she’s off, but can’t quite hit the right note.
Would it be strange to say that I find the genre of music to be more grating than Florence Foster Jenkins’ voice? Not that I hate opera, but I think to truly appreciate Jenkins, I would need to be more familiar with the style that she’s subverting. I can hear flatness, but sources also claim that her rhythm, diction, and timbre are poor, and I just can’t appreciate that.
2. Mrs. Miller
Example: “Downtown”
Mrs. Miller (1907-1997) was a singer known for her amateurish covers of popular songs. Judging from Wikipedia article, the amateurishness was explicitly part of her marketing pitch, and it was all done with a sense of humor. I must say, it was very convenient of her to gather all her greatest hits into her debut, Mrs. Miller’s Greatest Hits (1966).
Mrs. Miller certainly lays it on thick with the vibrato. And though we given to believe she is bad at singing, I think it shows a great deal of skill, however excessively it’s applied. (And is it really so excessive? It’s eminently listenable.) She also occasionally gets off beat and makes minor mistakes, but this just added a bit of flavor and wasn’t that significant. Her voice brings new life to old songs that I probably wouldn’t otherwise enjoy.
3. The Shaggs
The Shaggs are three sisters, whose father believed were destined for musical greatness, based on a palm reading prophecy. I suppose he wasn’t wrong. While they didn’t get much attention while active, their album Philosophy of the World (1969) was later praised by Frank Zappa and others, and it became one of the most famous outsider classics.
One thing The Shaggs absolutely nail, is their fluid sense of rhythm. While each member of the band is roughly in time with herself, they seem totally out of sync with each other, like they had practiced separately and didn’t know how to listen. I also appreciate the melody, which rambles like a run-on sentence, and has an indecipherable harmonic structure (aided in no small part by the unconventional guitar chords).
My biggest complaint is the vocals. The singer is mostly in tune–rigidly so, in fact. It sounds like the singer was taught to sing correct notes at the expense of any vocal expressiveness, and this is the opposite of what I want in so-called “incorrect” music. I will also say that the album as a whole is a smidge more orderly and less interesting than “My Pal Foot Foot”.
4. Tiny Tim
Example: “Living in the Sunlight”
Tiny Tim (1932-1996) was a ukulele player and singer renowned for his falsetto. As I read about him, I wondered, does he really belong on this list? What’s wrong with having a good falsetto? See what I’m saying about the definitions of “outsider” music being bogus? But he was on other people’s lists, so here we go.
Tiny Tim is a good singer, a good musician, and an excellent showman on top. His falsetto is higher than you’d expect–if you’re inclined to prejudice about people’s voices based on their appearance–but this is plainly a man who knows his voice is great, and knows that you know it too.
5. Lucia Pamela – Into Outer Space With Lucia Pamela
Example: “Walking on the Moon”
Lucia Pamela (1904-2002) was a singer best known for a 1969 album about going into outer space. The appeal of this one went straight over my head. She sings in an old style that I immediately recognize but don’t know the name of, and it feels so trite. I have to guess that the appeal is in the sci-fi premise, and the apparent joy with which she executes it. But I’m not feeling it, so let’s move on.
6. Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band – Trout Mask Replica
Most of the music made by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band sounds to me like normal-ass rock music (with apologies to fans). Trout Mask Replica (1969), however, is different. Supposedly they gave creative control to Captain Beefheart, who had no formal musical training, while the rest of the band painstakingly transcribed, arranged, and performed his ideas. This album is probably the most famous item in this list, and yes I had already heard it before and yes I already have opinions.
The opening track, “Frownland”, is a masterpiece. It consists of many layers of jagged phrases and wild rhythms, giving an impression of complete chaos. Eventually your brain twists into a pretzel, and the chaos transforms into richness and depth. Your smile is stuck; you cannot go back to your frownland.
The rest of the album is a mixed bag though. It’s overly long and tedious, and never again reaches the heights of the opener. I feel the weak point is Captain Beefheart himself, whose gravelly voice must surely hold some novelty for some people, but which I find uninteresting compared to the guitars. His voice is mixed poorly and perpetually dominates the rest of the band so it’s kind of make or break.
7. Wesley Willis
Wesley Willis (1963-2003) was an artist who would sing and speak over the preset accompaniment tracks in his keyboard. His singing is often out of tune, but not in an incorrect way, more like a deliberate punk style. But I think most of the appeal is in his off-the-wall lyrics, often political, often humorous. And from what I can tell, the lyrics are fairly formulaic as well, with every chorus just repeating the title of the song.
I admit, I could not stand to listen to much of Wesley Willis. I appreciated the first song, but after a few I was already sick of it. I tried a later album just to check that his style didn’t drastically shift, and shall we say crisis averted? The accompaniment tracks, intolerable as they are to begin with, only get worse when you realize that he reuses them, quite frequently. I don’t like it.
8. Daniel Johnston
Daniel Johnston (1961-2019) is another one where I just don’t understand the logic of why he’s on these lists. He just sounds like a decent indie singer to me, with a child-like voice, minimalist instrumentation, and a good sense for songwriting.
Although, I’m not sure I care for his most famous album, Hi, How Are You (1983). I think the lo-fi quality is an aesthetic, and I guess that’s alright. But I also sampled some of Johnston’s other music, and I prefer the higher quality recordings (such as the example above).
9. Wing
Example: “Dancing Queen”
Wing Han Tsang (1960-) is a cover singer who apparently guest starred in an episode of South Park in 2005. This left me wondering if that’s her primary source of fame—I can’t say I like the idea of South Park of all things dictating which outsider music rises to fame.
Wing gives a strong impression of bad karaoke. That’s a bad association to have, because bad karaoke is not at all hard to come by, and isn’t especially interesting to me. I think a lot of that isn’t Wing’s fault actually, but the fault of her accompaniment, which is so completely lifeless. Otherwise, Wing’s voice most reminds me of Florence Foster Jenkins, in that she has trouble hitting the right notes at the right times. I think the appeal must come from the humorous mismatch between her tiny voice and the music she’s trying to cover.
10. Jandek
Jandek is a blues/folk art project that has been active from 1978 to today. The artist behind the project (referred to as “the rep” by fans) is notoriously reclusive and mysterious. You’d think this would force us to focus on the music rather than the artist, but I’ve found most sources focus on the artist anyway, in order to talk about how we don’t know anything about him. Yeah, so personally, I also don’t know anything about Ed Sheeran, but who cares? Let’s talk about the music already.
Jandek has over a hundred albums in its discography, and many artistic phases. Most people seem to talk about their first phase, especially their 1978 debut, Ready for the House. The album features open string strumming on a guitar that has been precisely but unconventionally tuned, and microtonal to boot. Many people have described Jandek as “atonal”, although I think that’s inaccurate, as the chords often do suggest a tonal center. The rep’s vocals, on the other hand, sometimes “atonal” seems like the right description after all.
I immediately liked what I was hearing. It’s like a distillation of the harshest aspects of blues. However, I was disappointed that he continues to strum that one chord for almost the entire album, 38 minutes straight. On the other hand, this is just the first of over a hundred albums, so it’s not like Jandek only has this one sound. I sampled some of his recent music, and it was pretty good ambient music. Some of his other music had blues chord progressions. And then I was dying to hear the artistic journey tying all these things together.
Jandek was the big winner of this list! I toured their entire discography, and bought some CDs too. Obviously there’s a lot more I could say about it, but let’s just say that if you’re interested in the daunting task of navigating Jandek, ask me for tips in the comments!
11. Sarah Brand
Example: “Red Dress”
So this is the personal favorite that I’m throwing in. “Red Dress” was a music meme in mid-2021, which is so recent I don’t expect her to be on many lists. Well she’s on my list.
Sarah Brand’s voice is… fine, just fine. Which is to say, she sings worse than a professional, but surely better than me. The fault in her voice isn’t her voice per se, but in her pitch, which fluctuates so wildly that it makes Florence Foster Jenkins sound like The Shaggs. Her songwriting borrows a lot from Taylor Swift, a juxtaposition that is practically laser-targeted at me, a person known to unironically love pop songs sung out of key. Also, honestly, I find her pitch fluctuations to be expressive and flavorful, although it’s a bit more obvious when the backing is tuned to her.
Sarah Brand recently had a followup, where she applies that robotic vocoder effect that most people think of as excessive autotune (although it technically isn’t). At this point we can say that she’s fully self-aware. I think this song qualifies as hyperpop, a genre defined by exaggerating the characteristics of pop to parodic and avant-garde extremes. Personally I’m not as into it, but I am pleased to see some diversification, something that some other outsider artists seem to have trouble with.
Concluding remarks
What do these reviews say about my personal taste in music? I gravitate towards detune singing and misaligned rhythms (although we kind of already knew that). It also became clear that the core value of outsider music–sheer passion that overcomes technical limitations–is a value that I don’t really care about. For one thing, I don’t even believe that’s what’s going on in half these cases! For example, it’s explicitly part of the Shaggs backstory that they were not passionate about the project, and just did it for their father.
Perhaps the biggest failure mode for outsider artists was when I heard one song and found it fascinating, but then heard a second song and thought, “oh it’s just the same as the first”. That is to say, I appreciated the surface-level characteristics that distinguished the artist from the mainstream, but had a harder time appreciating the subtleties that distinguished one song from another. Or perhaps it’s only my own prejudicial belief that each song ought to bring something new to the table.
There were some artists on this list who I didn’t find strange at all, such as Tiny Tim and Daniel Johnston. That might say something about how today, we are used to a wider spectrum of vocal styles. Or perhaps what it says is more particular to me, and my own experience with music. Another interpretation is that there’s just no underlying logic to the “outsider” category, beyond whatever taste-makers like Frank Zappa or Irwin Chusid happened to like. I do wonder if today the “outsider” category even makes sense anymore, when absolutely nobody needs to be connected to the musical establishment to release something on Bandcamp.
What do you think? Was there any music you liked? Did you learn anything about yourself?
of these my bf’s fave is wesley willis, heh. by coincidence i was just asking somebody wtf hyperpop is last night.
When you said “outsiders”, I was expecting those who learnt to play by ear and were self taught, who couldn’t read music (e.g. Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Costello, Elizabeth Cotten). I always thought I was open minded, listening to the likes of Negativland, John Zorn, Noise scene music, etc. I didn’t know I was such a snob. ^_^ Maybe Willis doesn’t stand up to repeat listening, but “Rock And Roll McDonalds” was bloody hilarious as a one-off.
In November, Stuart Brown of the youtube channel Ahoy released a video on Trackers, a way of programming 16bit MIDI music with numbers, rather than notes on a scale. Trackers require less computing power than creating sheet music UIs, so they work much faster and can use more sample types. In response, a fan made a playlist of music featured in the Ahoy video. A person who lacks musical talent but has patience could still produce a highly polished instrumental piece using a tracker program. If they were or had been more mainstream, there could have been more musical “outsiders” in the past.
If it ever does line up…. The higher notes (very prominent in that aria) are just especially difficult to reach, even for many good singers who’ve trained for it for a long time.
Anyway, her intonation is all over the place, no matter how high the notes may be. But I know it’s pretty common for some to use “flat” to mean something vaguely like imprecision with respect to pitch. Occasionally, I’ve noticed some also characterize sloppy rhythms as being “behind,” even though being ahead is just as much of a problem. But the “flat” business happens much more often.
No, that’s not tonality. There’s definitely an emphasis on B-flat (also E) or various notes in close proximity to it. I’m guessing you’re hearing B-flat as “the center.”
However, putting a lot of weight on a particular note isn’t enough to establish tonality in the usual sense of tonal music which is rooted in what’s often called “the common practice period” of 18th and 19th century Europe. (Roughly: baroque, classical and romantic music, but obviously there are all kinds of music made around the world today which also fits the description.) Simply put, the numerous compositional practices commonly used by such people were not merely to put a lot of weight on a particular note, so that does not nearly suffice even if we were going to treat that as one of the important criteria.
In that piece, there’s no discernible key, no diatonic (major/minor) scales, no harmonic structures built primarily out of major/minor triads (or extensions of those) which have some or all of the traditional functional relationships with one another. If you had things like that, there could be some kind of pattern of harmonic progressions (often circle progressions or similar/related) made of out of them, which may take you on some kind of a journey from the tonic chord in the key to the dominant chord and then back to the tonic. All of that generally happens on both larger and smaller scales in tonal music.
What I just said above isn’t especially precise (just for the sake of brevity), and you can find lots of interesting edge cases where it’s sort of debatable or ambiguous whether we should consider something “tonal.” Sometimes, many of the typical harmonic/melodic ingredients may even be present in some form, but it could still fail to be tonal because other aspects of the music (like rhythm, meter, etc.) are not working together with them in the right ways.
Anyway, in that piece, there just aren’t any of those features that I mentioned. You could of course describe it in many other ways too (like “outsider” or whatever), but it definitely passes my test for being atonal.
Like Rhiannon, I immediately thought of Elizabeth Cotten. I’m no authority, but I’d bet that there were several early country blues performers who would have fit that description. Also, many of the so-called “hillbilly” musicians from the Appalachian Mountains who are now known as the originators of country music. Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family come easily to mind.
Intransitive:
That’s all very outdated technology now. No offense intended … purely a statement of fact.
These days, most people (such as myself) who are interested in computer music (i.e., audio produced with them) use a DAW or something similar for sampling and sequencing and whatnot. They can do all that and a whole lot more. There are even some free ones out there which are not too bad. In fact, I’ve seen some plugins to use within a DAW that will give you the same type of interface. (Never used them, but they’re out there and probably somebody is using them.)
Although there can still be a steep learning curve with some of the newer software, it tends to be much more user-friendly too, at least for people who already have some amount of experience with music notation. (I’d say it used to be that recording engineers had a much easier time in general, which is still kind of true, but things are getting better for regular musicians.) In any case, the bit of extra learning that you may need to do, in order to translate (what you call) “numbers” into ordinary music-speak (in terms of note names or whatever) is relatively small compared to everything else.
@CR #3,
I appreciate the perspective, though I feel like if we were going to define “tonality” in reference to the common practice period, we’d have to define “atonality” in reference to the same tradition, or else music outside that tradition would be called atonal by default. I’m kind of used to thinking of “atonal” in relation to 20th century classical.
In any case, I think the people describing Jandek as atonal usually aren’t being so technical about it. The only technical analysis I saw was by Samuel Andreyev, which was interesting.
I’m not using it that way, actually. My perception was that she had a particular bias towards being flat, rather than sharp (in contrast to Sarah Brand, who seemed to go both ways). But that could just be a consequence of my ear training not being great. I’d trust your ear training over mine, tbh.
@Intransitive #2,
lol, is that your way of saying you didn’t like most of it? I mean, me neither, really. Some of it was good for at least a little bit but I can’t see myself casually listening to most of it.
After hearing a bunch of outsider music, I don’t think it’s a very coherent genre. It seems to be defined by whoever Irwin Chusid put into his “Songs in the Key of Z” compilation. There’s a narrative that these artists come from outside the music establishment, but it’s just a narrative. Like, Florence Foster Jenkins isn’t a very good singer, so we imagine that she came from outside–but in fact she had a lot of formal training, and the narrative is just false. Whereas some of the artists you mentioned might not have had formal training, but would you know it if you didn’t read about it?
I love Jandek (in small doses). Perfect mid-winter sunset music. “Nancy Sings” is haunting.
Beefheart is great. I agree with you on Trout Mask Replica being a little too long and a little too samey though. I prefer Lick My Decals Off, Baby, as it’s shorter and a little more structured, while still being angular and wild.
And Stereolab did a great song about Lucia Pamela called “International Colouring Contest” on their Mars Audiac Quintet album (one of my all-time favorites).
@UnknownEric #7,
Yeah, Chair Beside a Window is the first Jandek album I’d recommend, because it is a bit more diverse than the other early ones, and also it has “Nancy Sings”.
Thanks for the recs for other works by Beefheart & Lucia Pamela. I’ll take a look at those later. (ETA: Okay I just realized “International Colouring Contest” is about Lucia Pamela not by her.)
I meant that tonality was “rooted” (just as a matter of historical fact) in those practices, not that such music must be in that tradition, from that place or time, or something much more limited like that. And of course, none of this rules out considering other musical traditions (from, say, India or Japan or wherever) and noting whatever features they may share with European ones. Just think of those sorts of features like the evolution of flight or something along those lines: it happened independently in different species, because it’s not like all flight must have had a single origin as a matter of necessity or “by default” or what have you.
Well, atonal music from the 20th century is a sort of cultural descendant of the tonal music that had been made in prior centuries. I don’t think it would be very enlightening to try to describe something like that in relation to itself…. So, it makes sense to talk about how it’s musicologically and socially similar/related/etc. in some ways and how it’s different in other ways.
That said, hopefully it’s clear that atonal music and what you’re calling “20th century classical” aren’t synonymous, because there’s a lot of other atonal music out there (not from that tradition) and there’s also a lot of other 20th century “classical” music (which happens to be tonal).
Siggy (#6) –
No, that was self-deprecation. I have a wider range of listening than most, and I can be as closed minded as anyone.
Microtonal was mentioned, which reminded me of a “This Exists” episode:
Well, this is interesting. I was not aware of “outsider” music as a class, or that anybody else in the world would group any of these performers together, but this list starts out with some of my favorite performers from childhood/youth. Well, Florence Foster Jenkins wasn’t one of them, but I knew the name–I think my father had an old 10-inch EP of her stuff or something of that sort. But I was so taken with Mrs. Miller’s style that I paid actual money for two of her albums back when they first came out, and I had a tape of the Shaggs’ “My Pal Foot Foot” (and some other stuff, but that’s the one that stood out for me). My best friend, who was a fan of Napoleon XIV, liked Tiny Tim, and I remember hearing Lucia Pamela, though I don’t think I had the album. Lick My Decals Off, Baby was the Captain Beefheart album I preferred; this was when I was listening to Frank Zappa, Wild Man Fischer, and Harlin Howard. (And Wendy Carlos and Morton Subotnick for that matter.)
And then it quits, like running into a brick wall, and I don’t know any of the following performers. (And that gives me something to look forward to.) I will admit that my “favorite music” does tend to be “the weird stuff, and the weirder the better”, but there’s a lot of “weird stuff” out there that leaves me cold. After looking at the link given above I have some doubts about the validity of the “outsider” category–no novelties (Mrs. Miller and Tiny Tim were both marketed as novelties), no avant-garde (okay, but what about Captain Beefheart and Harry Partch?), no trying to be weird (the Legendary Stardust Cowboy?). It all seems, well, arbitrary.
After I’m done with this list I guess I’m going to have to check out drone and xenharmonic music.
@sbh #11,
Glad you like the list. I’d guess that if you were a Frank Zappa fan, that might have been where you heard a lot of these from. Zappa seems to be pretty influential in defining the outsider genre. I didn’t trace Zappa’s influence everywhere, but he produced Trout Mask Replica and single-handedly brought the Shaggs into fame. The other person with outsized influence was Irwin Chusid, as mentioned in the OP. Beyond that, hard to say how people decide who fits or not. I don’t know what KeepPunchin’s deal is (the person who made the RYM list), but I agree that the definitions they put forth don’t actually describe who is on the list.
For me, this article was a foray into unknown territory, but the drone/xenharmonic lists better represent what I’m actually into. The xenharmonic genre emphasizes microtonality, which goes to show why I’m keen on outsider music that makes use of it (although it’s clear that none of these artists are actually from the modern xenharmonic tradition). Xen fans often look up to Wendy Carlos (specifically Beauty in the Beast) and Harry Partch as early examples. The Red Dress retuning I linked is a xen work using a scale invented by Wendy Carlos.