No Halloween playlist is complete without “It’s Halloween” by The Shaggs, which appears near the end of their legendarily-terrible and only album, 1969’s Philosophy of the World.

The lore is that this strict old conservative farmer from New Hampshire once got his palm read by his mother during the Great Depression, wherein she predicted that he’d marry a strawberry-blond woman, that his wife would bear him two sons before dying herself, and that their surviving daughters would form a famous music group. The first two prophecies came true to a T, so when his teenaged daughters came of age in the 1960s, he ordered them to start one of ’em new-fangled Rock bands.

Here it must be emphasized that his three daughters were painfully shy, awkward, and homely; they had no beat, no pitch, no rhythm, and no desire to even be in a band in the first place; they formed The Shaggs solely because they were too meek to disobey their stubborn father (they were emphatically not Rock ‘n Roll rebels). The double-entendre of their name was more sad than provocative. Yet despite the fact that his daughters were regularly booed off the stage wherever they played in small-town New Hampshire, he still paid hard-earned money out of his own pocket to produce their one and only album. 

The results are roughly what you would expect: the drummer drums like she is constantly trying and failing to figure out what song they’re on; the two guitarists (they had no bassist–not that they would’ve kept time any better if they had) strum as though in a fever dream where they have to fake their way through the final exam of a music class they never once attended or even knew they were enrolled in; the nasally singer sings as though she lost her diaphragm in a horrific car accident; their songs sound like they once read a newspaper article about the general concept of melody that was wrapped around a fish they bought at market in a strict religious community where all forms of popular music were forbidden; and their lyrics read as though they had only recently been taught English after being subjected to a failed, unethical experiment to determine what language children would naturally develop in total silence. Their music serves as a direct rebuttal to all those who claim that Quality in the Arts is merely subjective opinion, by offering up a record that is objectively terrible by every conceivable metric.

Their lone album was of course completely ignored at the time of its 1969 release (their unscrupulous manager apparently pocketed the father’s money and skipped town without ever promoting it—and who could blame him!), but has in the decades since developed a bona fide cult following for being so-bad-it’s-good, a glorious train wreck that is impossible to look away from (the Chilean poet Vincente Huidobro once claimed that a car crash is more mesmerizing than a painting), an almost-inspiring monument to one band’s drive to succeed despite a total lack of talent, knowledge, or skill. The Internet is now replete with music journalists seeking superlatives to describe their transcendentally terrible music, each more hilarious than the last, and has even been praised by actual recording artists: Frank Zappa once said they were better than the Beatles, and it is difficult to tell if Kurt Cobain was being sarcastic at all when he listed The Shaggs as one of his all-time favorite bands. The third prophecy from that palm-reading was ironically fulfilled after all.

I catch myself thinking about The Shaggs every so often, specifically on the subject of unfulfilled prophecies that end up coming to pass in unexpected ways. There’s that old urban legend, for example, of the teenager who got a patriarchal blessing saying he’d get called on his mission to the islands—which he naturally assumed meant somewhere in Polynesia or the Caribbean—only to get called to New York City instead. (Cue Futurama: “You are technically correct; the best kind of correct!”) More seriously, there’s D&C 87, the 1832 prophecy of the Civil War that Joseph Smith dictated in response to the South Carolina secession crisis of that same year–which then promptly became a dead prophecy when the crisis was resolved in 1833–right up until it was fulfilled almost down to the letter 29 years later (South Carolina again is who fired the first shot, slaves were indeed “marshaled for war” in the Buffalo Soldier regiment, and the South did indeed call for help from “Great Britain, as it is called”, though in another case of a prophecy not being fulfilled quite the way one might expect, Britain did not end up entering the war, largely thanks to the Emancipation Proclamation).

Then of course from that same time period, there’s Zions Camp, organized and assembled by Joseph Smith to liberate Zion in Missouri by prophetic promise, but which instead becoming a test of faithfulness that helped determine the membership of the original Quorum of the Twelve after the expedition definitely failed. Or there’s Nephi, not sure why he feels prompted to start a second record but does anyways, cause he has no idea what a certain New York farmer’s wife would do with the translation manuscript some 2,500 years later.

And in perhaps the most famous strangely fulfilled prophecy of all: Abraham, promised by God Himself through sacred covenant that he would have posterity like the stars in the sky, yet only bearing two children in his entire centenary life—and then asked by that self-same God to sacrifice one of them, in what seemed a direct contradiction of everything he’d ever been taught, promised, or believed. Yet between the Arab and Jewish worlds and everyone they’ve intermarried and intermixed with over the past few thousand years when the human race was only a fraction of its current size, it is not an exaggeration to estimate that at least 90% of the human race may in fact be, not just adopted, but literally by direct lineage, children of Abraham; and moreover, given that the clearest night you’ve ever seen with the naked eye still only revealed to you stars in the low thousands, then the 8 billion human beings currently inhabiting the face of the earth do indeed outnumber the visible stars in the sky, as God promised Abraham.

All of which is only a reminder that sometimes prophecies are fulfilled in the most unexpected ways, so to be humble and faithful, for none but God knows the end from the beginning.

And also that God may in fact have a sense of humor after all. I mean, He still made The Shaggs famous, didn’t He?