Outsider Music

Outsider music is music made by self-taught or marginalised creators working outside professional training, industry access and conventional notions of competence: erratic timing, untrained voices, private lyrical mythologies and home or vanity-press recording. The category was named and canonised by the broadcaster and collector *Irwin Chusid*, whose book and compilation "Songs in the Key of Z" (2000) gathered its central figures — *The Shaggs*, whose 1969 album "Philosophy of the World" is its founding document, *Daniel Johnston*, *Wesley Willis* and *Jandek*. Sincerity, not irony, is its criterion.