The genre of out­sider music is prob­lem­atic in many respects. Unlike its art brut or naïve art cousins in the visual realm, it is dif­fi­cult to come up with a spe­cific cat­e­go­riza­tion of out­sider­ness in music. Once we begin an attempt at such a def­i­n­i­tion, philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions about con­scious­ness and the nature of art com­pli­cate the issue. There­fore, I address the ques­tion of whether or not out­sider music should be con­sid­ered a genre at all, or if more spe­cific descrip­tors for this music might be more useful.

I begin with an explo­ration of Irwin Chusid’s def­i­n­i­tion of out­sider­ness, as out­lined in his book on the sub­ject, Songs in the Key of Z. From there, I extrap­o­late sev­eral impor­tant ele­ments of his def­i­n­i­tion: out­sider musi­cians must be sin­cere in their work, they must not have self-awareness of their out­sider­ness, and so forth. These are then pre­sented with prob­lem­atic exam­ples, both from the artists Chusid con­sid­ers and from other sources. After deal­ing with Chusid’s def­i­n­i­tion, I sug­ges­tion that the term out­sider music be aban­doned in favour of more spe­cific cat­e­gories. The paper ends by con­sid­er­ing two musi­cians that have some out­sider sen­si­bil­i­ties but that do not fall within Chusid’s def­i­n­i­tion, com­poser Richard Ayres and singer-songwriter Parker Paul.