In 1969, a band of sisters put forth a new philosophy. The rest is history.

The Shaggs were an infamous group of teenage performers from Fremont, New Hampshire. The story goes that the girls’ father, Austin Wiggin Jr., had his fortune read by his mother when he was young, and she predicted his daughters would one day form a successful band. He took this to heart, and when Dot, Betty, and Helen Wiggin were teens, he pulled them out of school and forced them to practice music everyday for five years.

The Wiggin sisters performed numerous live shows to much ridicule, but their father still paid to have them record an album in a studio in Revere, Massachusetts. That album was 1969’s Philosophy of the World, a dissonant mess of a project that effectively dropped off the face of the earth upon release. It wasn’t until years later that the record would circulate among musician circles and gain a cult following, leading to a renewed appreciation for the strange experience of hearing music from a group of non-musicians.

I’m something of a non-musician myself. I also love rock and roll, almost as much as I love weird, off-putting stuff. I listened to Philosophy of the World (specifically the 2016 reissue version) for the first time, and class has officially begun.

One thing that any account of The Shaggs’ story will inevitably bring up is that this album would eventually find some very famous fans, most notably Frank Zappa and Kurt Cobain. While this is an interesting fact to throw around, I don’t think it’s a very useful or complete way to engage with the music in question. When Zappa said The Shaggs were “better than The Beatles,” that didn’t make it true; presumably, it just pissed off a lot of Beatles fans (which could have been Zappa’s intention).

Instead, I’m compelled to talk genre. Philosophy has been described as an accidental example of garage rock and/or proto-punk. While I understand the application of these as descriptive labels in hindsight, it’s clear to me that The Shaggs were coming from a very different place, far more inspired by the straight-and-narrow blues rock popularized by the British Invasion.

The spattered failings in keeping time, spontaneous syncopation, and overall much-ness of the band’s sound puts them much more in line with the progressive rock of the 1970s, despite the fact I would expect that crowd to be much quicker to reject such an outing than the scrappier punk cohort. I could even hear an argument for Philosophy approaching noise rock (which is admittedly a good couple steps out of my wheelhouse).

These songs are painful in a way that’s shallow and stinging, and the closest point of comparison I can really draw to them falls far outside of music. Certainly, with the story behind the band, there’s a reminiscence of the tragic poet Sylvia Plath, who in many ways has been drawn into a similar cultural role of victimhood in her works’ afterlife. The abstraction of the medium at hand could also bring to mind the painter Jackson Pollock, who worked with color in ways thought improper by many.

What I really think the album reminds me of is homework. That’s what it was, in a sense. Austin Wiggin essentially homeschooled his girls in music despite a complete (and, some might say, characteristic) lack of qualification in the subject, and creating this album was their senior project. It reeks of all the frustration and restless boredom that I associate with Algebra II.

And yet, despite that, there isn’t much in the way of rebellion to be found. Instead, I hear a lazy conformity, especially from bandleader Dot Wiggin’s singing. In that way, I could compare it to the distinctly Gen X slacker rock of the 1990s, indeed equally inspired by punk and garage rock.

All this said, I didn’t hate my time with The Shaggs, not at all. I just think the story behind the band, while fascinating, possibly distorts the popular perception of this album.

I think the first song, the title track, is a delightful bit of contrarianism that works very nicely as a slogan for the band’s long-term impact. “You can never please anybody in this world/It doesn’t matter what you do/It doesn’t matter what you say,” the Wiggins sang, and likely received a response of heckles and thrown objects at their local town hall performances.

On “Halloween,” a holiday tune reminiscent of the “Monster Mash,” Dot sings about various monsters and ghouls as if they were all standing in line at the store together. Meanwhile, the weak guitar tone bends downward into something resembling a post-punk groove. Maybe The Shaggs could be a proto-goth band, too.

The album is so hollow and simple in its incompetence that there’s no limit to what could be imposed on these songs with some imagination.I’m not rushing to listen through Philosophy of the World again anytime this week, or this month, or this year. But I am glad beyond words that it didn’t disappear in 1969, that the right people found it to explore what amounts to a deeply unethical and unbalanced science experiment by a madman chasing fate. If it was going to happen anyway, why not tell the story, and tell it again and again? That’s my philosophy.