A closer look
While Mr. Rogers was singing acoustic neighborhood songs, outsider electronic genius Bruce Haack was dropping acid and building synthesizers out of surplus military junk to teach kids about robots. In the 1960s, he recorded unhinged, heavily vocodered children's albums that sounded less like nursery rhymes and more like a hostile alien takeover. He genuinely believed that exposing toddlers to weird, dissonant, homemade electronic beats would expand their consciousness, accidentally cementing himself as a pioneer of electronic music while terrifying a generation of suburban parents.
