People have said a LOT about some of the really cool, admirable things about the movie CODA, but I want to give a shout-out to one of my favorite random things they included: the infamously terrible yet uniquely intriguing song, "My Pal Foot Foot" by The Shaggs.
If you've never heard of The Shaggs, that's because... well, they kind of got famous by accident. Their story is kind of sad and mortifying, but also darkly funny. Basically, The Shaggs' music is what music would sound like if it was made by people who had never heard music in their lives (which maybe is why it appeals to Ruby in the movie CODA?) They're famous for being so inept that it's almost skillful and so strange in their approach to music that it almost expands the concept of what music could be.
The Shaggs were a bunch of sisters whose strict dad, Austin Wiggin, kind of forced them into becoming a band. When he was young, his mother had read his palm and predicted he'd marry a strawberry blonde woman, have two kids after she died, and and that his daughters would form a popular music group. Because the first two predictions came true, he dedicated his life to making the third happen. He forced the girls to practice instruments constantly and write and perform music, but they had very little actual training or education in music, resulting in a truly bizarre sound. (Imagine handing a kid a guitar and saying, "Now play with this for several hours a day" unsupervised.)
Wiggin made the girls perform Saturday night gigs at the town hall (the locals did NOT enjoy them) and spent his life savings on getting an album of the girls' music recorded. The album became a weird cult favorite over the decades because it just sounds so ALIEN. The music is somehow both really bad and yet fascinating in its originality. I found out about the Shaggs from a compilation of outsider music called "Songs in the Key of Z," which seems an apt title.In a strange way, Austin Wiggin's mom's prediction came true, it just took several decades. How many amateur teen groups have their music featured in an Oscar-winning movie?