Wednesday 12 December 2012

My Teenage Dream Ended - Farrah Abraham

It has been a mere twenty minutes since My Teenage Dream Ended came to a close, yet I feel like my teenage dream ended too. I'm shocked, appalled, disgusted and stunned by this polarising debut. Farrah Abraham is someone who had unprotected intercourse as a teenager and thus ended up on an MTV show about being a pregnant teen or whatever. She released a biography about how adulthood came prematurely and she released this album as an accompaniment.

She has said it's just her musical explorations combined with telling her story of becoming such a young mother but it's so much more than that. Take the opening track. It begins with grand, atmospheric synths that gain momentum in a pop fashion, before the artist auto-tunes, "I can only put so much in a song", and then a very cosmetic snare picks up pace. A couple of gimmicks later you have the most horrible sounding auto-tuned screeches over a genuinely 'filthy' dubstep beat. She can definitely only put so much in a song as listeners are able to tell - the entire album is the audible equivalent of an 8-year-old's bowl at Pizza Hut after taking a trip to the Ice-Cream Factory section and throwing everything edible and sugary into it, and some.

People may claim this album is not to be taken seriously. They may be right, to an extent. But I believe there's so much more to this; Over the past couple of years the world has had to withstand the barrage of tween stars on YouTube á la Rebecca Black, and the meme-culture stemming from certain online communities allows abominations to thrive under the pretense of success - up to the point where they do actually become successful in a world where hits make money.

Hyper-information and communication means genres such as dubstep can spread worldwide seemingly effortlessly. Sometimes, people on the other side of the globe may then adapt to this music without understanding the place it stems from, without getting to grips with it's roots. On the one hand, new genres may grow and thrive and develop their own personality - UK hip-hop, and even 'brostep' - on the other hand, the pop world engulfs is as the latest trend (see: Muse - The 2nd Law) and it turns out horribly. This album falls into the latter, developing a bland normality despite it's piercing soundscape.

I think the artist I'd say Farrah Abraham most draws parallels with is Death Grips. Yeah, I'm aware it sounds ridiculous. But I feel that to an extent they are both a result of the internet. With Death Grips second and third albums, you can see their fascination with the dark aspects of the World Wide Web, and you can see through their marketing, live visuals and album covers that are up for taking advantage of it and accelerating cultural change. Farrah Abraham feels like the other end of the same stick. A victim of the online culture, the modern MTV generation and our TMZ/News Corp. way of life. The result of these influences seems to have combined to create this insane, nonsensical yet wholly-intriguing post-modern record where pop does eat itself.

My Teenage Dream Ended is one of the worst albums I've ever heard, although I deem it essentially listening for 2012, if not for all time. Perceiving it in the meta-sense, you might find it to be one of the most accurate, and therefore terrifying, portrayals of our life in the 21st century Western world. Our Damien. Perhaps it may even be an omen of something even more monstrous yet to come.



If you have no idea what I just wrote - I'm not fully sure either - then here are some terms that may help explain it better:
Post-modern, outsider art, zeitgeist, reality

[Edit: I've listened to it a few times now and the melting of my brain is coinciding with the album being better on repeat listens]


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