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My Pal Foot Foot - The Shaggs

Hoglegvid · 4M views · 2009-05-01 · 2:36

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Overview

A clip of "My Pal Foot Foot" by The Shaggs, the 1960s sisters band famous for their off-kilter amateur sound. The uploader credits a Frank Zappa quote claiming they are better than the Beatles.

On Hacker News

HN links it as the canonical example of music considered terrible, usually with affection or as a joke.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2015–2022

Topics

Music performance & songs
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the shaggsoutsider musicworst musicfrank zappa

What people said

jancsika · 2022-11 · Reference

It's a strange balance. On the one hand, if you don't start with guidance from a mentor, you'll likely hit a bunch of obstacles because you don't have the knowledge to avoid them. And it's orders of magnitude more difficult to adjust a bad habit than to not form it in the first place (at least for physical habits). So before doing the "chores" one ought to do a sanity check with a trusted mentor. On the other hand, the only mentoring the Shaggs needed was about how to tune a guitar: [VIDEO] If they had started with a music teacher, there is a 99.9999% chance they would have all ended up playing a tune in 4/4 in the same tempo instead of the asynchronous rhythmic cycles that they came up with. Edit: clarification

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daeken · 2018-12 · Joke / meme

On this one, I gotta disagree with Zappa. It's great in the same way that Captain Beefheart is; which is to say, it's amazing how much awful can be packed into such a small space. "My Pal Foot Foot" never ceases to amaze me, with the depths of fail it accomplishes. For those who have not yet had the pleasure: [VIDEO]

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InclinedPlane · 2015-09 · Reference

If you want to listen to The Shaggs: [VIDEO] Also, someone figured out all of the least generally desirable aspects of songs and made a song featuring those, calling it The Most Unwanted Song: [LINK]

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Sources

Video by Hoglegvid, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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