Types
Pop music critic/popular culture writer Gina Vivinetto points out that outsider musicians include Wesley Willis, a "schizophrenic former street person from Chicago with dozens of records and a cult of loyal fans to his credit." She calls the clan of outsider musicians "an elite group," even "a group of geniuses," and she lists Syd Barrett (Pink Floyd), Brian Wilson (Beach Boys) and Skip Spence (Moby Grape).
There are some links between outsider music and anti-folk: the emotional starkness, the lack of formal training and the humour. Jeffrey Lewis names Daniel Johnston as a major influence, Syd Barrett influenced antifolk's British strain, and there are similarities between the tuneless singing styles of Wesley Willis and Paul Hawkins.
The book Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music (2000), by music journalist and radio personality Irwin Chusid, is a comprehensive guide to outsider music. The book profiles several relatively well known outsider musicians and gives a definition to the term. The book inspired two companion compilation CDs, sold separately. The guide claims that fans of outsider music are "fairly unusual," "inquisitive" types who have an "adventurous taste in music." While the guide does not "contend that Outsiders are "better" than their commercial counterparts", it does suggest that they may be more genuine, depending on how cynical a person is "about packaging and marketing as practiced by the music business", given that a "gangsta rapper... is considered an authentic 'voice of the street'" even though they sell millions of albums.
The guide argues that music that is "exploited through conventional music channels" has "been revised, remodeled, and re-coifed; touched-up and tweaked; Photoshopped and focus-grouped" by the time it reaches the listener, to the point that it is "Music by Committee" that is "second-guessed" by a large team of record company staff. On the other hand, since outsider music has little target audience, so they are autonomous, and able to go through an "intensely solipsistic" process and create a singular artistic vision. Outsider artists have much "greater individual control over the final creative contour", either because of a low budget or because of their "inability or unwillingness to cooperate with or trust anyone but themselves." The guide notes that "our inability to fully comprehend the internal calculus of Outsider art... partly explains its charisma."
Outsider music includes various styles that cannot neatly be classified into other genres, the Allmusic guide describing it as "a nebulous category that encompasses the weird, the puzzling, the ill-conceived, the unclassifiable, the musical territory you never dreamed existed."
Read more about this topic: Outsider Music
Famous quotes containing the word types:
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—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
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