strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Jan 11 04: (mala musica)
So the other day at work I was struck dumb with horror by the song stylings of Wing. She is apparently this nice lady of a certain age who emigrated to New Zealand from Hong Kong and started making records. She sings to karaoke tapes, near as we can tell. You can listen to a number of tracks on her site: particularly choice are her Broadway selections (“Memory,” “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina,” “My Favorite Things”), her Mariah Carey cover (woo), and her turn at “O Mio Babbino Caro.” She quite helpfully notes that the latter is the ‘Italian version.’
However, while playing this stuff for Pablo this evening I had a bit of a change of heart. I mean, sure, it’s bad, don’t get me wrong. But you can also tell that you’re listening to somebody who is coming from a grounding in Chinese musical forms. She hasn’t gotten the idiom down yet.
With that in mind, then IMHO the number one source of true musical horror is still the Shaggs. The Shaggs were three sisters whose father decided that his little girls really, really needed to form a rock band. It was 1968, after all. This sort of thing was happening all over the place. So why shouldn’t it happen to the Wiggin sisters of Freemont, New Hampshire?
Yeah, okay, sure, why not. There was just one teensy problem: the Wiggin sisters of Freemont, New Hampshire couldn’t play their way out of a paper bag. Despite hours of daily practice upstairs in the attic, they pretty much sucked eggs. They played a few local gigs, and recorded a pair of albums. But in the end, they were legendary for all the wrong reasons. Frank Zappa is said to have declared them “better than the Beatles,” but you know Frank. Listen to “My Pal Foot Foot” and judge for yourself. If you dare. (It’s about a cat.) Honestly, this stuff just beggars description.
Finally, just FYI: Much of the world, including me, first found out about the Shaggs and the saga of their strange and/or brilliant career in a fabulous New Yorker article by Susan Orlean (who also wrote The Orchid Thief, which was turned into the movie Adaptation). If you still have any brain cells left after “Foot Foot,” it’s worth reading.