It's That “BIlly Corgan Rides a Roller Coaster” Meme

If you haven’t seen this, it’s a thing:



Created by Nikki Emery: https://twitter.com/stellamelos

Head-Banging in Russia

Call it Flirting-with-Death Metal: One fast stop and it’s borscht everywhere.

The Shaggs: The Complete Story Told in 5 Minutes that You Need to Hear

“Depending on whom you ask, the Shaggs were either the best band of all time or the worst... Such a divergence of opinion confuses the mind. Listening to the Shaggs’ album Philosophy of the World will further confound.”

Susan Orlean, The New Yorker

They may be the ultimate expression of outsider art. Their story has been subject to some embroidery but the vid below seems credibly straightforward. Plus, most of them are still alive for verification. As far as the font of all this legend, their canon consists of but one album released in 1969, Philosophy of the World. A mere one thousand copies were pressed and of those 900 may’ve been lost or stolen. In the end, their considerable legend was built on a platform of 100 albums.

Red Rooster/Rounder reissued the album in 1980; RCA Victor re-re-released the album in 1999; a short-lived, off-Broadway musical about their life was produced in 2011.

The Shaggs were sisters Dorothy “Dot” Wiggin (vocals/lead guitar), Betty Wiggin (vocals/rhythm guitar), Helen Wiggin (drums) and, later, Rachel Wiggin (bass) – and most of all, fascist Osmond Family-wannabe patriarch Austin Wiggin.

Frank Zappa would claim they were better than The Beatles (this may be apocryphal though it doesn’t seem beyond Zappa’s tongue-in-cheekiness); Kurt Cobain said their album was his fifth all-time favorite. No less than Lester Bangs wrote:

“They recorded an album up in New England that can stand, I think, easily with Beatles ’65, Life with the Lions, Blonde on Blonde, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks as one of the landmarks of roll’n’roll history... They can't play a lick! But mainly they got the right attitude, which is all roll’n’roll’s ever been about from day one.”

Rolling Stone described The Shaggs as “sounding like lobotomized Trapp Family singers.” Terry Adams of NRBQ – a big fan – compared the group's melodic lines and structures to the free jazz compositions of Ornette Coleman.

The fact that their obsessively controlling father insisted they not listen to music will be immediately apparent. It may also be their greatest font of treasure. They likely didn’t read much poetry either. Their “tunings,” or lack thereof, are inspired. The rhythms can only be described as in a state of constant of phasing and retardment. They are to music they are Tommy Wiseau was to film, if Tommy shot on Pixelvision. Music described to extraterrestrials based on writing from a restroom wall. On the bright side, it’s very organic.

Here’s a nice encapsulation of their story.



And the legendary album:



Dot Wiggin released the solo album Ready! Set! Go! in 2013. A fan describes Dot as “...being forced to play rock and roll music like your dad... would force you to take piano lessons. And the difference is we have it on tape.”

An official promo vid for Dot’s album:

Creep Serving a Higher Purpose, Truly

Netherlands television includes a kids version of the very popular television franchise The Voice. No doubt that much of what they present is middling at best – not unlike our stateside version. All of that only makes what happened on this night all the more spectacular.

Teen sisters Mimi (15) and Josefin (13) bring something telepathic between them in their rendition of Radiohead’s Creep as maybe only two gifted people who share 50% of their DNA can. And as good as their performance is – and it’s flawless – the stunned, gaped-mouth reactions of the judges, and the audience, only push it further into the stratosphere.

Rewatch it and note how the sisters look to one another nervously before they begin. What you’re watching is them each seeing the other in that way for the last time. Because in less than two minutes they’ll be forever changed as they step out of what may prove to be the greatest moment of their lives.

Mimi starts strong but it’s Josefin that gets the judges to slam the button. As it is with great talent, it only takes a fraction of a moment to realize what she’s bringing. Then, when those two voices come together and climb up into the first creep, everyone in the room feels the magic including the last holdout judges who slam in. Also, that lengthening of the creeps from the original was a touch of genius. It was their sucker punch and secret weapon. The judges agreed. Mimi comes in soon after with a screech that overdrives the drama. Their trick bag is loaded.

I’ve watched this many times now. Clearly, there are moments here that are untamable, unfakeable, and certainly unrepeatable. Their fresh-eyed joy as teenagers is completely infectious. There’s no denying that they’ve created something brilliantly incandescent here. I hope the hype that follows doesn’t crush them. The expectations will be brutal.

Happy Death Men?

According to an Australian study, death metal fans aren’t desensitized to violent imagery, even by listening to songs saturated with it. In fact, they’re made happier than most if you can believe that. However ironic, this happens “through feelings of joy and empowerment” delivered through those brutal, screaming, thundering bursts AKA songs by way of the music they love – somehow.

Or better yet:

If fans of violent music were desensitized to violence, which is what a lot of parent groups, religious groups and censorship boards are worried about, then they wouldn't show this same bias. But the fans showed the very same bias towards processing these violent images as those who were not fans of this music.

For enthusiasts of Devil Music, this has got to be a disappointment of sinister proportions. Otherwise, here’s a dose. Get happy:

Arctic Remix: Brit Rock w/ a Cuban Override & Cold Blooded Results

Remember The Buena Vista Social Club? When Ry Cooder went to Cuba in the late 90’s, recorded some local music legends and many of us lost our collective minds? Well, in 2004 Rhythm del Mundo took some songs from various happening groups of the time, and remixed them with Cuban musicians including some Buena Vista Social Club alumni. Some of the results were damned ingenious, like this one:

Serge Gainsbourg & his Lollipop:

Entendre, please! And make it a double!

That waggish trickster Serge Gainsbourg: When he wrote Les Succettes (“Lollipops”) for the 18 year old France Gall in 1966, the girlish gal probably hadn’t much experience with succettes of the skin variety. She bought the lollipop concept, entendre-free.

I’m guessing her parents weren’t paying much attention to what she was doing either. Gall is said to have been very upset when she learned the truth about what those models meant by pulling the long succettes in and out of their mouths as well as the forest of dancing phalli she was made to cavort with. Oh. And singing verses like:

When the barley sugar 
Flavored with anise 
Sinks in Annie’s throat, 
She is in heaven.

Here’s the story according to website Dangerous Minds:

It wasn’t until she was on tour in Tokyo that someone let the cat out of the bag [about the entendre of the song]. Gall was infuriated and greatly embarrassed by what she’d unwittingly taken part in. She felt betrayed by the adults around her and mocked like a naive fool. She refused to leave her home for weeks afterwards and ultimately stopped singing Gainsbourg’s songs that had made her so famous. For years afterwards her career suffered from her association with this scandal, even if “Les Sucettes” had been a big hit.



Despite his legendary love affair with Jane Birkin, Gainsbourg made something of a career out of being a cad. In 1986 he would encounter a 22 year old Whitney Houston and just couldn’t help himself. Gainsbourg, a three pack-a-day smoker, was 58 at the time. He’d be dead four years later.

NY3 & Fripp: The Most Metal Song You’ll Ever Hear & It’s Not Metal

That riff drops with more atomic weight than the entire history of Nordic Death Metal and Slayer’s complete canon put together. The meter is probably pi and the violent drumming, by Narada Michael Walden, out Keith Moons Keith Moon. And the “lyrics?” What’s edgier and more metal and punk than a life-changing domestic squabble where the mother scales the depths of imagination for every pissy, bigoted, and heart-shatteringly poison-tipped arrow she can spew? (See the lyrics here.)

F--k all that devil worship crap – it’s kid’s stuff. For trauma, Satan can’t compete with an alcoholic step-mother.

This from a guy who claims guitar-based music bored him.

In 1974 he told Guitar Player that “virtually nothing interests me about the guitar.” He said most guitar music is boring. He also thought the guitar bored Jimi Hendrix and for both the guitar is only a medium used for transmitting into the universe, those metal strings being a medium that gives them a language for speaking. (Hear Fripp’s story of Hendrix going fanboy on him in 1969.)

Okay, back to that riff. He’s essentially walking down some scale based on extraterrestrial angularities and battered intervals the ear doesn’t often get exposed to. Part of his secret is the alternative tuning: Fripp invented his own tuning called the New Standard Tuning (NST). Strings are tuned to fifths, except for the top – G-C-G-D-A-E-G – and even if you know nothing and care even less about guitar technique, your ears will detect the differences instantly. It drops your lobes into another universe.

Add to this a picking style he calls perpetuum mobile (perpetual motion) which takes short melody figures and chains them together in brutally fast lines, a mashup of minimalist repeated figures, avant jazz runs, and atonal composers like Milton Babbitt and Anton Webern.

Fripp has played versions of this run over the years, going back. (See the Lark’s Tongue in Aspic III version below.) What he does on NY3 is give that sound its highest purpose. For me, it’s the culmination of what all those avant garde academy types were aiming at. Fripp gives us something we can use – utter agitated pleasure.



And more fripperies:

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog vs Bon Jovi: It's Not Even Close

Our mission here at Jelly Roll is uplift by raising the levels of moral, psychological, and aesthetic consciousness. We do this here by supporting music we believe deserves more of your attention. We’re not here to besmirch by launching snarky salvos at easy targets. And to that end we are (mostly) faithful. It’s a line we don’t cross.

However, it is one that Triumph has made a career of crossing and here he poops on Bon Jovi with ingenious deftness. And it is our mission is to support ingeniousness.