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Frame from My Pal Foot Foot - The Shaggs Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

My Pal Foot Foot - The Shaggs

Hoglegvid
Music
YouTube
Cited on HN 3 times, 2015–2022, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN links it as the canonical example of music considered terrible, usually with affection or as a joke.

A clip of "My Pal Foot Foot" by The Shaggs, the 1960s sisters band famous for their off-kilter amateur sound. The uploader credits a Frank Zappa quote claiming they are better than the Beatles.

2 citations · 1 jokes · Music

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@InclinedPlane Sep 2015 Cites it
on HN thread List of music considered the worst
If you want to listen to The Shaggs: [this video] Also, someone figured out all of the least generally desirable aspects of songs and made a song featuring those, calling it The Most Unwanted Song: [link]
@jancsika Nov 2022 Cites it
on HN thread Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
Read more
It's a strange balance. On the one hand, if you don't start with guidance from a mentor, you'll likely hit a bunch of obstacles because you don't have the knowledge to avoid them. And it's orders of magnitude more difficult to adjust a bad habit than to not form it in the first place (at least for physical habits). So before doing the "chores" one ought to do a sanity check with a trusted mentor. On the other hand, the only mentoring the Shaggs needed was about how to tune a guitar: [this video] If they had started with a music teacher, there is a 99.9999% chance they would have all ended up playing a tune in 4/4 in the same tempo instead of the asynchronous rhythmic cycles that they came up with. Edit: clarification
@daeken Dec 2018 Makes a joke
on HN thread Chandra, the pre-teen who released a post-punk record in 1980
On this one, I gotta disagree with Zappa. It's great in the same way that Captain Beefheart is; which is to say, it's amazing how much awful can be packed into such a small space. "My Pal Foot Foot" never ceases to amaze me, with the depths of fail it accomplishes. For those who have not yet had the pleasure: [this video]

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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