Frank Kogan

I'm usually pretty ambivalent about the term "outsider," and I kind of wish I'd problematized it more in the review, except really I just wanted to disrupt the "reality TV star makes shitty pop album" narrative. Here's what I wrote on Tumblr:

I’m always super uncomfortable with conversations about “outsider” or “naive” art, so I tried to buffer my references to it with the ILM board and the Phil Freeman article. I’m not ready to call this “outsider” — the most comfortable thing I settle on, barring more information, is something like a “youth media experiment,” which often resembles “outsider” art by adults but usually (honestly) aspires to mainstream and professional conventions, succeeding in many but not all. (Right now I’m also developing theory on “how to watch ‘unwatchable’ youth media,” a pet concern in my professional field.)

I hesitate to buy into these distinctions, but Comolli & Narboni developed a kind of taxonomy for "outside/inside" in *Cahiers du Cinema* -- their categories describe something like the intentionality or unintentionality of "dominant ideology" (hmm) and "subversiveness" (hmm), with one category for straight-up dominant ideology (e.g. propaganda), one for straight-up resistance, and then others for things that are not "straight-up."

I actually don't find these categories that useful, but the idea that there are lots of different ways to do "what's expected" and "what's unexpected" -- to pander to the expected and to genuinely or accidentally defy convention (and, further, that these ways of conforming and defying cluster) might have some value somehow, outside of the reductive ideological lens.

I'd put Ashlee in with Stevie, Sophie, and Teena, at least in terms of "impact according to what's there (according to me/critics I know)" versus "impact according to (other) critics." They create their own "inside," which sometimes connects with a real "inside" (all were legitimately popular in some kind of mainstream) but also connects with an "outside" through critical conversations about the artists. (Maybe not unlike what the auteur critics were doing with Howard Hawks et al?)

The complaint about Ariel Pink and Jandek on ILM was that there's no "outside" left for them -- ditto Daniel Johnston, who recently had a show at the Whitney Biennial and is pretty widely regarded as an "inside" (art world) artist. "Outsider" usually just means "person who can't say the same of their own work that most people looking at their work can say of it; isn't invited to the same conversations or come from the same world." That would probably be a connection for Teena or Ashlee (neither of whom I'd call "outsider artists," though...), not so much for Bob Dylan or Stevie Nicks. Outsider is a bit of a shell game, where sometimes it's the backstory that counts and sometimes it's the recorded output. Even the "definitive" outsider compilations confuse the terms -- Chuswid's Songs in the Key of Z has stuff from American Song-Poems and alien cults but also demos from Joe Meek and Captain Beefheart.

Interesting how little is still known about the production of the Farrah Abraham album. If I had to guess, I would think that she collaborated with a semi-professional DJ or music producer, got some demos, listened to the music as inspiration, and recorded vocal tracks that either she or the producer then fit to the demos. No idea who Farrah might have taken as a model for that writing, or if this is even what happened (for all I know she could have improvised in the studio or something). But that's a total guess -- wouldn't be impossible for Farrah to have produced the music herself, obviously, but somehow I doubt it, just like I doubt the "Hot Cheetos and Takis" kids had anything to do with the beat that was produced for that song.