Incredibly Strange Music

V.Vale and Andrea Juno

Re/Search No. 14

Re/Search

Distributed in Australia by Tower Books

Incredibly Strange Music was originally published in 1993 and still remains to this day one of the better introductions to outsider music. What is outsider music ? It is a relatively new term used to denote music performed either by social outsiders, who have little contract with the mainstream music business, or by musicians who choose to live and work in seclusion. It is also usually “outside” the normal constraints of accepted musical forms and covers variations to a wide variety of styles from folk to punk, to some genres which are hard to define. Incredibly Strange Music was really the book that began it all ! In 1993 it was the first title to begin to explore this phenomenon and is still a remarkable book today.

Incredibly Strange Music is composed on a series of interviews with a range of musicians and discusses their strange musical tastes and collections. While some may not be considered outsiders (Eartha Kitt, for example), when you read her life story and interview you may come away thinking otherwise !

The use of musicians talking about music means you get the “inside track” on the strange world of outsider music and come to not only understand these musicians better (interesting enough) but gain for their experience at exploring and collecting in their respective genres.

While you may believe that this volume would be out of date, most of the recordings mentioned are still considered classic titles and many are now available on CD. Many of the companies mentioned, such as Norton Records whose founders are interviewed, are still going strong.

This exciting volume introduces us to all sorts of strange and wonderful musicians. In the Norton Records interview we learn about Esquerita, an outrageous Gay musician from to whom, it seems, Little Richard owed more than a small amount of inspiration. Many of his recordings are still available today, though little known.

In the Eartha Kitt interview we read how she was invited to visit the White House with fifty other woman to discuss current “youth” problems and when she said that the major problem for youth was the Vietnam war she was literally black-banned in the US and harassed by the FBI and has to rely on international tours to survive.

The interviews on Gershon Kingsley (who created the ever popular popcorn song) and Jean-Jacques Perrey introduce us to the world of early electronic music and in the fascinating chapter on Martin Denny we learn about Exotica, Primitiva and the Tiki craze. Many of the titles by Martin Denny and Les Baxter are now readily available remastered on CD for the avid collector.

In the interview with Lypsinka we gain insight from a popular drag performer on the role of film and music in her show and classic rare movies and soundtracks worth collecting.

This is a superb volume, illustrated with rare, strange and quirky album covers. Most of the interviews include discussions of a wide range of rare and unusual albums as well as quotes from obscure songs and tracks. Just some of the genres discussed include: easy listening, exotica and Tiki, celebrity performers as well as animal albums, beatnik and hippie records, and gospel and spoken word albums, every possible boundary of musical good taste is crossed !!

There is so much to this book to keep you entertained and if you get bitten by the collecting bug, this will be the beginning of a long and exciting journey.