Outsider music
| Outsider music | |
|---|---|
| Cultural origins | 1950s (principally) |
| Other topics | |
Outsider music is created by musicians who are not part of the commercial music industry and who write music that ignores standard musical or lyrical conventions, either because they have no formal training or because they disagree with conventional rules. This type of music, which often lacks typical structure and may incorporate bizarre lyrics and/or melodies, has few outlets; performers or recordings are often promoted by word of mouth or through fan chat sites, usually among communities of music collectors and music connoisseurs. Outsider musicians usually have much "greater individual control over the final creative" product either because of a low budget or because of their "inability or unwillingness to cooperate" with modifications by a record label or producer.
Very few outsider musicians ever attain anything resembling mainstream popularity; the few that do generally are considered novelty acts. This notwithstanding, there is a niche market for outsider music, and such musicians often maintain a cult following.
Though Irwin Chusid claims to have coined the term in the mid-1990s, the sociological descriptor "outsider" had been used in connection with music cultures prior to Chusid's writings (with jazz as early as 1959, with rock as early as 1979, and in the late 1970s it was a "favorite epithet" in contemporary music in Europe).
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."
Although an outsider musician, by definition of the word, typically operates outside the realm of the music industry, pop critic Gina Vivinetto includes a number of musicians who in fact operated from within the mainstream music industry and had significant success, even scoring hits on national charts. Among her list of “outsider” musicians is Brian Wilson, who not only was responsible for most of the successes of the mainstream rock band the Beach Boys but also charted a top 40 hit of his own with “Caroline, No;” and Syd Barrett, the original lead singer and songwriter for Pink Floyd, a band that had several hits in Barrett's tenure. Irwin Chusid, in his book and companion album Songs in the Key of Z, includes Joe Meek, an English record producer with a number of hits to his credit, including the international hit “Telstar”.
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