There are many great things to love about music. There are the amazing, jaw-on-the-floor WTF moments that send your head spinning into space and your heart bursting up into your mouth. You know, like “wow, Axl Rose just played a guitar solo that lasts for 42 years and tastes like Dr Pepper”, or “Daft Punk just made robots cry electric tears of pure MDMA”, or “OMG, Britney just did a gambol”. Each is brilliant in its own way. Then there’s this other side of experience: the side of music that is so stupidly funny that you spend all your time at your girlfriend’s house using her broadband to watch shitty quality Youtube videos and snorting bubbles out of laughter out of your nose. Attractive. Remember when Lee Ryan said that elephants dying was worse than 9/11? And when Marilyn ‘Mickey Mouse’ Manson accidentally kicked his guitarist in the face? And when The Enemy released an entire album that sounded just like a re-recording of the most famous songs ever, but made on Pro-Tools by the missing link of evolution? Actually wait, that last one is just depressing…

WORDS: STEPHEN PIETRYZOWSKI

But anyway, even better, is when these two things combine so that pure unfettered amazingness smashes full-blown into MAJOR LOLZ to create this weird amalgamation of genius and stupidity. And it’s not ironic or kitsch, because I’ve already called bullshit on that. This is actually good. Such a hybrid is a rare beast indeed though. You get one or the other, but it’s seldom you get both.  There are stadium-crushing, bonafide megastars that are completely westward (erm, Michael Jackson, anyone?), but that’s a madness prompted because of fame, not anonymity. And it’s pretty hard to make a case for “Scream” being the product of a warped mindset. It just sounds like warm funk.

To find the true bad brilliance, you have to venture out of the middle to the outskirts, where the outsiders live in their own private universe, even when the world is fish bowling in on them.

Here is part four of our brief checklist of maverick outsiders, who embrace the grotesque, the funny and the beautiful like they’re all the same baby Gummo.

Gary Wilson

A self-taught child prodigy able to play numerous instruments, Gary Wilson was no regular kid. He even did really normal things like chill with John Cage when he was fourteen, discussing music theory and composition and his favourite member of The Beatles. Not exactly summer camp. Too outré for the other kids at school, he started to ride solo. Then, after releasing a few records in the late 70s recorded in his parent’s basement, Wilson disappeared. Years later, following the efforts of a private investigator hired by Motel Records, he was found working in an adult cinema and everyone (including ATP, at which he played a few years ago) started going a bit crazy for the freaky little scientist who sings cute love songs about stalking Linda and being crushed out on Karen. Totally standard career trajectory for the outsider.

And even today, Wilson’s music sounds alien, like the plot line to an unmade episode of Eerie Indiana. Listening to album You Think You Really Know Me, it’s as if someone took a vacuum cleaner to a soul record, sucking out all of the air and replacing it with dry ice. He’s basically a robot James Brown with so much white boy freak suburban slacker chic Beck is made obsolete. That’s pretty fucking slack.