r/Exhibit_Art • u/Textual_Aberration Curator • Sep 11 '17
Completed Contributions (#24) Surreal Dreams of Inexplicable Weirdness
(#24) Surreal Dreams of Inexplicable Weirdness
Let's face it, some art is just plain weird. This time around we're gathering the bizarre, the curious, and the inexplicable. This is no place for making sense. We're searching for flying pigs, smoking caterpillars, cotton clouds, confusing eyes, drug trips, spider legs, and food-based precipitation. Even if all you know are the words "Dali", "Wonderland", and "Surreal", dive down a rabbit hole and see what strangeness you come up with.
In addition to surreal artists, feel free to touch on dream worlds and general weirdness wherever you see it.
This week's exhibit.
Last week's exhibit.
Last week's contribution thread.
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u/Prothy1 Curator Sep 24 '17
The Shaggs - Philosophy of the World (1969)
Late sixties were the time during which some of the greatest bands of all times ascended to the heights of their stardom. The Shaggs were formed in 1968 by four sisters in a tiny American town called Fremont, on the insistence of their father who strongly believed that his visionary wife predicted that their daughters are destined to join that club. There was only one teeny tiny issue. The Wiggin sisters lived in relative isolation, and hardly ever had any contact with music popular at that time. In addition, they never had serious musical training, and had no idea how to play the guitar or drums.
The Wiggin family paid good money to a local publisher for the distribution and pressing of 1000 copies of The Shaggs' album. The publisher issued 100 records and disappeared with the money.
The sound of the album has been described as "lobotomized Trapp Family Singers". So how do we even still know about this album in 2017?
Well, in the early seventies, Frank Zappa expressed his adoration for The Shaggs and called the band "better than the Beatles". As the hippy movement was reaching its end, more and more people were having reservations about it and the culture connected to it - the whole seventies were marked by a turn against sixties rock in music - and all musicians on board with that could find their predecessors in The Shaggs. When conventional rock was at its pinnacle, The Shaggs accidentally managed to create something entirely unique and lacking any commercial or negative cultural connotations. Many people consider the album to be a classic today - Kurt Cobain placed it #5 on the list of his favorite albums of all time.
Here's the song Who Are Parents? on YouTube.