Wesley Willis (1963-2003)

In the late 90s all of us wannabe hipster types were crazy about a 6'5" 300 pound musician named Wesley Willis. It's hard to explain exactly what his music was like. Imagine Biz Markie as a homeless person shouting about public transit (or the "joybus", as Willis dubbed it) and you have some idea. You have to experience it for yourself, and there is plenty to experience as he released some fifty albums during his relatively short musical career. Many of his songs were inspired by popular culture, but the cultural elements were wrenched from their original contexts and recycled in incomprehensible ways. His songs usually ended with the couplet "Rock over London/Rock on, Chicago," followed by a random advertising slogan, like "Polaroid. See what develops."

Willis was the son of a Chicago street hustler. He was a paranoid schizophrenic and heard voices ever since a night in 1989 when he was robbed at gunpoint by his mother's girlfriend. With cheap keyboards, he started his musical career, which took off when Jello Biafra's label Alternative Tentacles released a couple of his albums, and toured frequently, sometimes fronting a punk band. He seemed to hit all the buttons: punk, outsider art, dadaist anti-art, ironic pop culture. However, his popularity made some think the crowds were there for the wrong reasons. Okkervil River frontman Will Sheff wrote that the "Periodic appearances for crowds of jeering white fratboys evoke an uncomfortable combination of minstrel act and traveling freak show."

In late 2002, he was diagnosed with leukemia. He died on August 21, 2003.

Louis Wain (1860-1939)

Louis Wain was the man who drew cats. Thousands upon thousands of them, usually anthropomorphized and engaged in human activities. He was over a century ahead of his time, as he would have been right at home in this age of lolcats. Initially he stared drawing them to amuse his wife when she was dying of cancer. He turned this into a career, and his cats appeared in hundreds of magazines, on greeting cards and postcards, in comic strips and children's books.

After a few decades of this, his popularity waned. He began to develop behavior that is typically described as schizophrenia: delusions, paranoia, violence. (Some theorize that his schizophrenia was a result of toxoplasmosis, a cat disease.) He rearranged the furniture, wandered the nighttime streets, and claimed that watching movies stole the electricity from his sisters' brains. He was institutionalized in 1924. Celebrity admirers like H.G. Wells ("English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.") insured that he was placed in a better hospital, where he could live and draw and paint the next decade and a half in comfort, surrounded by gardens and cats. His increasingly bizarre work during these years is often cited as an example of artistic evidence of a schizophrenic decline. Dissenters point out that there's no solid evidence that Wain didn't suffer from something other than schizophrenia and that his later work, whose chronological order isn't definitively established, may be artistic exploration or simply show the influence of fancy wallpaper patters. Wain died on July 4, 1939.