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Originally Posted by Queen Boo
I find The Shaggs really fascinating both for their backstory and their music, I do find their music really charming in it's strangeness, the abusive childhood that led to it's creation not so much.
BTW their father didn't compose the songs, Dot did.
Here's an interview Rolling Stone did with Dot back in 2016 that's worth a read.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/m...-album-115348/ |
Thanks for that link! I had always assumed the father wrote the music, but I guess not.
But now that I know Dot wrote the music instead, deepens the mystery. She said she liked Herman's Hermits and the Beatles when she was young, so clearly she didn't have Musical Anhedonia. So the question would be - Why did she write such bizarre stuff? Unfortunately the Rolling Stone interviewer didn't ask her that, which to me, would seem to be the most obvious and important question!
She also said she still doesn't know much about music, so that strikes me as someone who wouldn't be the kind of person who would be doing avant-garde stuff, especially in her younger years when she knew even less. Though I guess you never know. So was she writing goofy stuff just for the sake of writing goofy stuff? Or did she write deliberately bad stuff to thwart her father's ambitions of the band becoming big and famous?
Stuff like Captain Beefheart you can tell the songwriters knew a lot about music but were deliberately being weird and avant-garde. But that's certainly not the case with this band.