1001 Albums Bonus Round: 1090. The Shaggs – The Philosophy Of The World (1969) / The Warning - Queen of the Murder Scene (2018)

As a Christmas present, here's the first of my "Bonus" entries to the 1001 (1089) Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Or rather, first two.

By necessity, the 1001 Albums book(s) omit many albums, and over time some albums from the older editions have been excised to make way for new material. And, of course, a lot of the inclusions and exclusions are based on personal taste, as much as they've tried to base them around agglomerated critical reception. Everybody could read the book(s) and wonder why a personal favourite has not been included, but some albums miss the list even if you look at them purely in dispassionate terms of their importance in history, representation of a particular genre, highlights of particular artist, or other attributes such as presentation or cohesion. 

To that end, I’ve compiled an addendum series that I’m going to scatter throughout the main series, mostly chronologically, that I’m going to use to highlight some of my own suggestions, and the reasons for inclusion, and although the fact that (for the most part) I personally like them is a factor, I've tried for it to not be the only factor.

Mostly these will be a single album per entry, but to begin with, I’m doing two, as a compare and contrast exercise. And also both out of chronological order. [Edit: to clarify, I will usually add 6-7 (ha!) "Bonus" albums at the end of each decade, starting with the Seventies].

Consider the scenario: three sisters, shut in a room, with a bunch of musical instruments.

If the sisters are the Villarreal sisters – Daniella (Dani), Paulina (Pau) and Alejandra (Ale) - and they have a passion for music and bags of talent, what you get are The Warning. These went viral with a video from around 2013 with a cover of Metallica’s Enter Sandman where Dani was aged 14, Pau 12 and little Ale at 9 years old playing a bass guitar that was as big as her. Since then they’ve gone on to fill stadiums with their power trio rock, and are only getting better with age. 

On the other hand, if the sisters are the Wiggin sisters – Dot, Betty, and Helen, and they’re being forced to play instruments that they know nothing about because their father believed a fortune-telling by their grandmother that they’d form a band (but weren’t allowed to listen to music), then you get The Shaggs (named after the hairstyle).  

The Philosophy Of The World by The Shaggs is basically a vanity recording paid for by their father, and is often regarded as the worst album ever. Because they completely lack any knowledge of musical theory, the songs are wandering, the instruments aren’t tuned, the tempo all over the place, and the lyrics are pretty trite too – My Pal Foot-Foot about a lost cat, for example. Sometimes there’s enough there to make you wonder if they couldn’t be turned into “proper” music, and indeed there is a YouTube channel where somebody has made a valiant stab at rescuing it. (Andrew Thoreen - YouTube)

And actually, returning to Foot-Foot, the final verse has a certain profundity to it. Perhaps another name than "Foot Foot" and it could be a general song about loss.

"Foot Foot, please come to me
Foot Foot, now that you're here
Won't you come home
Foot Foot, promise me this
That you will never again roam"

Some have argued (including Frank Zappa) that as a piece of outsider art, it doesn’t need rescuing – have the Wiggin sisters achieved a kind of naive masterpiece of freeform jazz?

No. Not really.

It sounds like something some children might write. Compared to this, you can see how the weird experimentalism of Trout Mask Replica or the disturbia of Throbbing Gristle (come back on Feb 26th 2026 to get that reference) are still founded in musical theory – these albums sounds atonal because they're meant to, not by accident. Philosophy Of The World, however, is just the work of people who don’t know what they’re doing. 

It’s hard to blame the Wiggin sisters, however. Had this been the work of someone who believed that they were wonderful, then perhaps we could enjoy the schadenfreude of the abject failure of the music. But the Wiggins didn’t want to be doing this, and were embarrassed to be playing. I’d challenge anyone to work out the EADGBE tuning of a guitar by themselves, because it’s not intuitive, let alone discovering chord shapes from first principles without knowing about intervals (which rather exposes the character teaching himself guitar in Rush’s 2112 as being quite unlikely). And their lack of exposure to popular music counts against them as well – they don’t even seem to know what they ought to be aiming for in terms of the sound. 

So, listen to a track or two (I recommend, or rather “recommend”, The Philosophy Of The World and My Pal Foot-Foot) but if you can last the entire album, more power to you. Or try out Andrew Thoreen's de-shittified version. 

Or, better still, don’t bother and instead listen to my second recommendation, Queen Of The Murder Scene from The Warning. 

This is their second album, and I include this one because it’s a full-blown concept album about an obsessive stalker who descends into madness and murder. It’s probably the darkest thing written by a young woman (Pau was 13 when she first wrote much it) since Emily Bronte, by turns hard rocking and theatrical, or both. For example, from the track P.S.Y.C.H.O.T.I.C. (owing a debt to Toni Basil):

"Your hands are tied up, what are you gonna choose?
Will you jump from the window or hang from the noose?
Will you rip off your face or just further debase
The things you couldn't do?"

The influence of Muse is strong, but you’ll get bits of Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden (especially the headbanger Dull Knives), I even felt a bit of Rice/Lloyd-Weber’s Phantom of the Opera, especially the atmospheric Stalker. It’s well worth checking out their live versions of the album opener Dust To Dust, from Ale’s sinister bassline, Pau’s powerful singing/drumming combo and some wailing guitar from Dany. As with a lot of Dimery’s suggestions, there’s nary a wasted track on the album. This may not even be their best album, but I include it by employing Dimery's criteria. Unusually for the 21st Century, it is an album that is meant to be enjoyed from start to finish, in the order of the track listing.

I feel a bit bad that I've written more about the dreadful Shaggs rather than the excellent Warning. But perhaps that's because they're to be experienced rather than talked about. Try their Pinkpop 2025 performance for example. The power trio baton has passed from The Jimi Hendrix Experience to Cream to ZZ Top to Motorhead to Muse and now the The Warning, a huge stadium-ready sound.

If there’s a moral here, it’s to encourage your children to do what they want to do, not to try to force them to fulfil your own thwarted ambitions. The Warning, wanting to form a band since playing Rock Band together, exude passion, talent, and enjoyment on stage. The Shaggs were awkward and miserable. Be a Luis Villarreal, not an Austin Wiggin. 

You have been Warned.