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One of the curious effects of YouTube–and, indeed, of the World Wide Web in general–is that the faint, vaporous memories of one’s cultural youth need no longer be so faint; type in a few search words, and you can empirically refute or verify some bonkers notion that’s been rattling ’round your brain. Such as: Did Richard Branson really appear in the video for the 1980 XTC single “Generals and Majors,” a video viewed just once, in one’s early teens? On the evidence of the video posted above: Yes indeed, that really was Branson. At 2:40 in the clip, the Virgin chief’s trousers fall down, Benny Hill-style. Not until the heyday of Sean Combs’s Bad Boy label would a label boss again make such an oafish appearance in one of his artists’s videos. May 15, 2006 More Rock Snobbery »
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Outsider music. Broad term for any music played or recorded by nonprofessional musicians or, in some cases, by professional musicians who ought to consider another line of work. Among outsider music’s causes célèbres are the Shaggs, the laughably incompetent trio of working-class New Hampshire sisters whose deluded father corraled them into recording an album in 1969 (which Frank Zappa pronounced “better than the Beatles”), and the 1970s Canadian schoolchildren heard on the exuberantly received Langley Schools Music Project album, whose hippie teacher coaxed oddly affecting renditions of then contemporary soft-rock hits from them. Outsider music’s Dr. Demento–ish doyen, Irwin Chusid (who also happens to be the man who repopularized the Mexican easy-listening godhead Esquivel), hosts a weekly radio program, entitled Incorrect Music, that straddles a difficult line between affection and amused contempt for its showcased performers, not a few of whom are mentally ill. Read more from the Rock Snob's Dictionary » 
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