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.
