You Can’t Never Please Anybody in this World: The Shaggs’ Philosophy of the World

If you simulated reality an infinite number of times through an infinite number of iterations, you’d still never wind up with a single reality in which the Shaggs’ Philosophy of the World was reproduced. The album is a work of weirdness so profound, so beautiful, so irreplaceably unique, that it could only ever have come about one single time, in one single space, throughout the whole of the space-time continuum.

Luckily for us, dear friends, we inhabit that strange, once-in-an-infinity reality in which the Shaggs were, and are.

Forever.

Premonitions

The seed of the Shaggs was planted when the mother of Austin Wiggins predicted that her son would marry a strawberry blonde, have two sons after she died, and see his daughters form a successful band. Stunningly, all three of those things came true….sort of.

After the strawberry blonde and the two sons happened on their own, Austin became convinced that his duty was to make the third premonition happen. With this quest in mind, he pulled his three daughters Helen, Betty, and Dorothy, out of school in 1968. He gave the girls guitars and drums and unleashed them on some microphones.