the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 64
months later, it was savaged by critics, including an Entertainment Weekly
reviewer who called his singing “pathetic” and suggested that the record
company was cruelly exploiting him. No matter. Hung’s record went on
to sell a respectable one hundred thousand copies, undoubtedly leaving
many more musically adept would-be stars bitterly envious.
But Hung is merely the latest in a long line of performers who have
developed enthusiastic followings despite their own painful lack of
ability—whose work, to borrow a phrase from author Susan Sontag, is
“good because it’s awful.” The genre of “outsider” or “incorrect” music,
as aficionados call it, includes overreaching luminaries in other fi elds, such
as TV actor turned lounge singer Telly Savalas and quarterback turned
country crooner Terry Bradshaw, as well as show-business naifs such as
the Shaggs, a trio of New Hampshire sisters whose discordant 1969 guitarrock
album, Philosophy of the World, became such a cult classic that the
New Yorker profiled them thirty years later.
Alas, the perverse appeal of appallingly bad music has never been
subjected to thorough scientific study, so it’s impossible to say what aberrant
neural pathways were stimulated by Elva Connes Miller, a muumuuclad
Kansas grandmother whose off-key covers of pop songs such as
“These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” earned her a spot on Bob Hope’s
Vietnam tour, or by the frenetic, atonal rants of Chicagoan Wesley Willis,
who reportedly kept in his apartment ten thousand CDs filled with compositions
with titles such as “Vultures Ate My Dead Ass Up.”
But it seems to take more than mere incompetence to capture an
audience’s heart. To become a cult favorite, a performer must be as unabashedly
passionate as he or she is woefully untalented. Irwin Chusid,
author of Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music,
put it aptly in describing an inept country singer: “He’s got an awful toupee.
He can’t sing worth a lick . . . the rhythm falters, he’s constantly off
key, his enunciation is terrible. . . . He’s thoroughly inept, and yet his ineptitude
is so sincere, the intent is so genuine.”
But in the annals of musical awfulness, one nonvirtuoso rises above