The Shaggs. Photo by Geoffrey Weiss
What makes music quote-unquote “good”? As someone who spends an awful lot of time reviewing the stuff, it’s a question I’ve grappled with a lot over the 22 years and counting that I’ve been doing it. It feels like it should have an empirical answer, that you should be able to listen to a piece of music, apply criteria, and objectively declare what it does right and what it does wrong, what works and what doesn’t. But you quickly learn that art can never be so neatly put in a box: sometimes following the “rules” can lead to brilliance and sometimes it can bore you to tears; breaking the rules can make music even more thrilling or it can make it unlistenable. But does it interest you, does it move you, does it hit you in the gut, does it drive you to want to listen to it again and again? Then it’s good, formal structure and technical proficiency be damned.
That idea is really put to the test when you listen to a Shaggs song. In any art, there’s an old saw that you have to learn the rules in order to know how and when to break them. But the Shaggs? They never bothered to learn them in the first place, broke every rule, and crafted some of the most provocative, controversial, hated, and beloved music ever recorded.
The Shaggs were three sisters from rural New Hampshire—lead guitarist and singer Dorothy “Dot” Wiggin, rhythm guitarist and singer Betty Wiggin, and drummer Helen Wiggin—who recorded one album, Philosophy of the World, in 1969. Their grandmother had a vision that her son would have three daughters and they would be in a famous rock band, and when he later had three daughters, he did everything in his power to make it a reality, homeschooling the girls so they could spend most of their day learning their instruments instead, Dot writing songs inspired by her love of Herman’s Hermits. But without any kind of formal training whatsoever, the songs came out all wrong. The Wiggin sisters never learned how to tune their instruments, so all of the chords sound jarringly off. The vocals have a weird, almost Nico-like flat affect. The three sisters all play at different tempos, and all three of their time signatures constantly change and shift. It almost feels like they’re making it up as they go along, except for the fact that Dot and Betty are often singing in lockstep unison. The result is music in a language that only the Shaggs speak. It’s truly unlike anything else you’ve ever heard, the most outside of outsider art. It also frequently tops lists as the worst album ever made.
We Are the Shaggs is the first documentary from director (and Belleville, IL native) Ken Kwapis, though not his first foray in the form, having directed a baker’s dozen’s worth of episodes of the beloved mockumentary The Office (including the first and last episodes). He does a great job of drawing an audience into the Shaggs’ story by meeting us where we are, opening with a montage of people hearing the Shaggs for the first time and struggling to describe it, hitting the nail on the head as you nod along and think, “Yes, it literally does sound like you’re hearing three different songs played at the same time. What the hell is this?” Then the talking head interviews come in, musicologists and musicians and producers expounding on the brilliance of what you’ve just heard, which sounds delusional until Kwapis and his experts start connecting the dots, from the Shaggs’ innocently strange attempts at garage rock to the inspired simplicity of the Ramones through the fractured pop side of Nirvana to the lo-fi indie sound of Guided by Voices and Pavement and the in-your-face fury of riot grrl.
The light bulb finally going off over your head, he introduces the two surviving sisters—sincere, earnest Dot and gregarious Betty, always quick to laugh to cover up when she feels like maybe she’s revealed too much. Their life story is a fascinating tour through vanity record labels, shady producers, records lost and found and delivered into just the right hands, be it an influential radio DJ or a rock star like Frank Zappa, Patti Smith, or especially the band NRBQ, who rescued the Shaggs’ lone record from obscurity and reissued it for a whole new generation to discover. Their story is primarily told in the sisters’ own words with some of the record executives they worked with filling in the blanks, the visuals punctuated with vintage photographs and the occasional animated reenactment. Modern musicians are engaged too, including a Shaggs tribute band and a pair of violinists attempting a classical arrangement of a Shaggs song, whose presence proves that as deceptively simple as they sound, actually performing a Shaggs song correctly is hard, and doing so while capturing the joy and naivete of the originals is nearly impossible.
We Are the Shaggs is captivating from its very first moments, a fascinating exploration of the way even the strangest of art can worm its way into your heart. | Jason Green
We Are the Shaggs will screen at the Chase Park Plaza Cinema (212 Kingshighway Blvd.) on Saturday, November 7 at 4:30 pm as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival 2026. After the film will be a Q&A with director Ken Kwapis hosted by film critic Cliff Froehlich. Single film tickets are $15 for general admission, $12 for Cinema St. Louis members, seniors, military, and students with valid current photo IDs. Multi-film and all-access passes are also available. Further information is available here, and more information about the film can be found on the official website. View the trailer below.
