This is a community for discussing outsider music, song poems, offbeat composers, novelty tunes, obscure musical oddities, enigmatic and iconoclastic musical artists. The music we discuss here most often defies easy genre categorization.

Musicologist and deejay Irwin Chusid defines Outsider Music in his book Songs in the Key of Z:

"Autonomy is often the prevailing modus, the process intensely solipsistic. Outsider efforts thus reflect greater individual control over the final creative contour. This is partly attributable to the low-budget operations of many Outsiders, and in some cases to their inability or unwillingness to cooperate with or trust anyone but themselves. It's ironic that the less corporate money at an artist's disposal, the more singular the vision.

In this, the Outsider represents greater creative purity, something closer to a natural state. Equally ironic, because many Outsiders sound perfectly 'unnatural.' Perhaps 'visceral' would be a better adjective to describe the enigmatic Outsider process.

This inscrutability -- our inability to fully comprehend the internal calculus of Outsider art -- partly explains its charisma. Art under the microscope, art denuded, is art demystified.

We can listen to Outsider Music. We can analyze, appreciate and extol it. But we can never fully understand the odd compulsions and stupefying inner visions of those who create it."

http://outsidermusic.tribe.net