What do you think of MTV Teen Mom Farrah Abraham's first single?

I've just finished listening to this entire album, and you've really got to hear it. It's pure outsider art - fucking brilliant. Makes Peaches and Le Tigre sound like Taylor Swift. Seriously, here's the Spotify link, judge for yourself. I haven't heard anything this alienating in years - the Autotune abuse is so over the top and jarring, the lyrics are so disconnected and seemingly random, there's no way this happened by accident. This girl (because I think she produced this herself, I can't find credits anywhere) is some kind of insane genius.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8xm3mQeK61qgf5wso1_500.png

Debra_Bags

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZy9lTQbghQ

i gotta admit just when i thought i'd heard everything...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XemtXy7aAWA

I'm telling you, she's some kind of genius outsider artist. I want to review this album for The Wire.

i do like that its so short.

i'm always hoping people go back to the 2 minute single. and definitely in her case. it makes the dementia more concise and easier to focus on.

wow this is genuinely incredible

Did she just leave autotune on its default setting or something?

the autotune is really the least weird thing about it, lots of people have made more raw/amateurish use of it the last of people. the words and the random meter are just bizarre.

er "the last few years"

i pretty much wrote a farrah lyric by accident for a second there

super interesting thing about it is that it really is an audible lesson in what autotune can't fix. compare this to the flavor flav single from a few years back. flav can't sing for shit, but he has the basic idea down - he just has bad pitch. he sings the song, they autotune the shit out of it, now when he sings "deeeeep" it sounds like a robot hitting the note. on this, her leaps are so far from the actual melody that AT or melodyne just corrects to something near it, and it's still audibly wrong. then they build the track around that, it sounds like. this is less outsider than...like those sound-library discs collectors get obsessed with?

it gets uh better too...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_291277&feature=iv&src_vid=XemtXy7aAWA&v=ey3clrDUhGk

oops here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey3clrDUhGk&feature=channel&list=UL

You guys haven't even seen the video! She and her daughter visit the father's grave (if you're not a Teen Mom viewer, you should know that Farrah's kid's father is dead):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJuu_4SR8-Y

The whole song repeats twice - it's like the Residents' "Commercial Album" principle applied without a wink.

that one almost sounds like xiu xiu xp

a friend's girlfriend works as a producer on Teen Mom, really need to talk to them about this next time i see them

love how that song ends with the phrase "this is the best i can do," delivered with an autotuned shrug

not having seen the show & having only these to go on I gotta say there's something in the earnestness of her delivery and the unrevised bluntness of the lines that's kind of moving in the way some GUYS I JUST REALIZED SOMETHING ABOUT THE WORLD hardcore used to be, these lyrics that'd be like THERE HAS TO BE! A BETTER WAY!

at any rate enjoy it while you can, by this time next week you will be as sick of this as you got of Rebecca Black

the header of her official website is "Your go to public figure..."

at any rate enjoy it while you can, by this time next week you will be as sick of this as you got of Rebecca Black

I'll have moved on to something else for sure, but this is a completely different kind of kick for me. Rebecca Black (who I never got even momentarily interested in) was a girl trying to make pop music and mostly failing; this is something else. I'm genuinely unsure whether this girl thinks she's making pop records which could be hits, or whether she's making some kind of bizarro confessional art-song. To tie it into something Scott said on Facebook, I feel like Editions Mego should license this album and put it out with cover art designed by Stephen O'Malley and see what happens.

yeah i mean the album is a soundtrack to her book right? i kinda wonder if she has any misguided pop ambitions or just threw it together as part of her media platform

yeah it's different & more fun for sure but online it will play out the same way, with 10 million people saying THIS SUCKS in as many "clever" ways as they can xp

wow she's like the lucia pamela of the autotune generation. tracks need more cowbell tho

This is fucking wild. I am in awe.

I would probably have believed it if someone told me 'Finally Getting Up...' was the new Crystal Castles single tbh.

This is amazing. Reminds me a lot of the Russian Youtube-hit singer Anzhela London. Same blend of twisted-commercial-pop elements and outsider art.

The album is quite remarkable. As mentioned upthread, it really doesn't sound like it ended up being weird, abrasive and disjointed accidentally. Appalling music can certainly take on a strange avant-garde quality without meaning to but this sounds more deliberate and focused somehow.

that one almost sounds like xiu xiu xp

― half-worm inchworm tapeworm (donna rouge), Sunday, August 19, 2012 2:34 AM (19 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^

like by the law of averages there are probably gonna be ppl that look at this thread w/o listening to the songs and think that this is just a bunch of music nerds hi-fiving over fucking Residents references or whatever, but... this is really... something

haha pandemic OTM, this is super reminiscent of Crystal Castles to me

i'm really into it. the whole album. it's like if supposed former infatuation junkie era alanis made an edm record.

just otm-ing everyone at this point but the song is almost avant garde, pretend it came out of brooklyn with some blog buzz anda nice visual aesthetic and sky's the limit.

there's no musical throughline to her melodies, it's just diary entries sung at random pitches.

yeah, this stuff is pretty rad. one of her songs was making the rounds on my Facebook feed for the LOLZ a few days ago and i ended up listening to it probably 8 times in a row.

Damn,....

I cannot fucking believe I'm saying this but

Is this on itunes?

xiu xiu is a surprisingly apt comparison. mindfuck.

I seriously can't believe this is related to an MTV reality star, like I feel we're going to find out this is actually Har Mar Superstar with a pitchshifter

this girl's persona on the show is completely tragic btw. a lot of legitimately bad things have happened to her (boyfriend dying, her mom is abusive iirc) but she's also kind of awful. her speaking voice is one of the least appealing sounds.

oh I got the speaking voice thing from her Youtube cooking show, which was really the end of the world

this album is weirdly compelling though

like "Liar Liar" is genuinely amazing

I think Romney blasts this on his tour bus, since it's sadface android music

I wrote about her for the sci-fi website io9.

you guys

this may be my favorite release of 2012

like wtf is going on in "Caught In The Act"

a friend's girlfriend works as a producer on Teen Mom, really need to talk to them about this next time i see them

― some dude, Saturday, August 18, 2012 10:35 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark

lol i called him about this and he was like "oh yeah, we know. we heard early versions of it"

haha I can't imagine that blase of a reaction to this

no it was more of an "I KNOW, shit is crazy huh"

But yeah y'all have some good points to make and yeah my idea of 'outsider artist' does seem to clash w the regularly accepted parameters. Just seems like someone doing something really pedestrian and mainstream but utterly failing, rather than bringing anything unique to the table other than a complete lack of talent. But it doesn't really matter that much to me so I'll shut up about it.

I doubt it's THAT easy -- I imagine most jobbing producers would prefer not to work with reality stars, hence most reality stars getting fairly fifth-string producers

(I kind of like to think of "outsider artist" in terms of "will this shit still exist in 30 years or is it doomed to be ephemeral" but that's also a re-interpretation)

there's plenty of ultra-mainstream crap that is forgotten immediately tho

I like imagining that "the dude who runs the audio recording facility closest to Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale" is the Michael Bay of pop music! Would like to know if this guy actually produced the whole album, though.

there's definitely something in the term about slippage between intent and effect. i think what we mean an artist who has some aesthetic power but it's not what was intended. or the intent is really opaque.

one of my favorite local art exhibits of the past few years was a bunch of work done as part of art therapy for people with really profound mental illness or disability. there's almost no way to talk about it w/o terms that slide into condescension, i guess. but just on a formal level these artists happened upon (see? "happened upon") ways of working or repeating things that were really affecting. and maybe they wouldn't have been so powerful had i not known the story; there's no way of knowing.

W/ Farrah Abraham "outsider" is an easy way to avoid using the phrase "experimental artist," which she (also?) is. It might hedge against agency/intentionality (probably not wrongly, but who knows?). It's a bit of a game of not quite this ("experimental musician") but definitely not that ("pop star"). I really don't understand how anyone could listen to "MTDE" and think, "oh man, listen to all these failed pop songs!"

I figure that "My Teenage Dream Ended" sounds very much like what she was intending it to sound like. I think she was messing around and through ambiguous means ended up with something great, and that any accidental greatness isn't any more or less accidental than anyone else's greatness.

CelebURty -CelebURty --CelebURty

is there some deep meaning behind her spelling it this way in the video description's lyrics? anyway i am really enjoying this

i figured it was just "U R a celebrity"?

I am singing this new song constantly.

xp oh of course! farrah is always operating a level ahead of me when it comes to wordplay and such (only just realized that fla, in addition to obv being her initials, refers to "the sunshine state" itself)

i've also been playing this song more than i thought i would initially

rubbing shoulders with fatman scoop in the latest series of celebrity big brother
praying for a collab

I particularly loved when it was her shot to fire the canon and she jumped up singing "I like balls, I like balls"

Off-topic but I am fully on-board with a Celebrity Big Brother starring Farrah, Scoop, Tile Tequila, Janice Dicking on and Jenny Jameson

*Dickinson, what an unfortunate autocorrect

man this album is really fucking something

yeah

I want her next album to be a straight cover of
http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/smurfs/images/d/dc/Father_Abraham_In_Smurfland.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110830210200

i don't want to tie eeeeeverything to trump but someone needs to theorize the creative power of stupidity

i can only put so much in a post

i still have a burned copy of this in my car

"After Prom" the parts where they have overdubs of her frantically whispering "don't tell don't tell don't tell don't tell don't tell don't let it get out" is crazy

With Out This Ring... still a jam

i miss that! ring

Well here's a deep cut come to life

http://www.thefader.com/2017/11/21/farrah-abraham-album-producer-interview

she sang it to a metronome!

fuck me, this album is already six years old???

She made another song two years after the album - it's slightly more normal, but she still has no idea what the words "rhythm" or "rhyme scheme" mean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h53AzPEdku0

Farrah Abraham HATES Joan Didion and thinks you should buy HER OWN book over Slouching Towards Bethlehem. She has suddenly become our most fearess critic. https://t.co/Y2BeQZnfs3 pic.twitter.com/ge6hzCme4t

— Who? Weekly (@whoweekly) March 6, 2019

looool

lol

i actually tried reading my teenage dream ended! couldn't finish it

new penthouse, where you can read alan dershowitz, toby young, and farrah abraham together. what did we as a culture do to deserve this

I finally found something with the same surreal "why was this made" vibe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBDAytqFrUk

new penthouse, where you can read alan dershowitz, toby young, and farrah abraham together. what did we as a culture do to deserve this

― maura, Thursday, March 7, 2019 1:30 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

edited by the singer from white lung, running copy from rightwing twitter trolls who haven't flamed out yet, it's a real smorgasbord

it was pretty funny watching them go after Nicole Cliffe and getting torched

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qRKBQU8j3E

Went to Farrah’s twitter inspired by this revive and it’s unsurprisingly filled with pro-Trump conspiracy bullshit. Also she apparently looks like a fish now.

oh weird i was only discussing and rediscovering the FA album today on Facebook

yeah it hasn't gotten any less weird over time that's for sure

seems even more striking now knowing that people like James Ferraro have dedicated their lives to finding a sound like this

this is AOTY

are the tracks only 10-15 seconds long?

come on kid, up your ante

aoty

merry xmas

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLwke9qe9t8k

Someone get those ladies a Quiznos commercial!

Holy shit, the Emily Montes album is great!! After you hear stuff like this and the Farrah album, regular pop music sounds so boring.

I like this Emily Montes album!
The disjointed Tik Tok format thing is a good addition to the My Teenage Dream Ended aesthetic.