Frank Kogan

The Wikip article on "outsider art" is mostly about drawing and painting and stuff. Applying the term to music is much harder because not only are there so many loci and nexuses to begin with but because little kids and people in insane asylums (from whom Dubuffet got inspiration for the concept art brut) all understand the basics of music — singing and clapping and dancing — even if they don't all sing in tune or clap and dance in time.

Nonetheless, it would be useful for you to try to answer my questions, if only speculatively. Even if they'd not gotten any recognition, Jandek, Ariel Pink,* and Daniel Johnston never would have counted as outsider art in the way that Phil is applying the term to Farrah Abraham. I've got an intuitive sense to what's on Phil's mind (even if my intuition is wrong, and even if he's wrong), and presumably he's not taking her to be drawing on indie cassette culture or a tradition of avant garde, experimental music. So those are two things she's outside of. (And of course we can always ask Phil, though I'm too busy today.)

The question, "What is she drawing on?," is the more interesting question, even if it's hard to know without asking her. (And she may not immediately have in mind whom she's drawing on anyway, just as you and I aren't always conscious of where our tropes and inspirations are coming from.) But we can ask ourselves whom she resembles. E.g., Monday, the day I posted my Farrah questions, I happened to be listening to Lianne La Havas; at the end of "Lost & Found," La Havas goes back to her refrain, "You broke me and taught me how to truly hate myself/Unfold me and teach me how to be like somebody else," and then sings it again (with a slight variation), "You broke me and taught me how to truly hate myself/Unfold me and teach me to be like somebody else," all this taking almost a full minute. Now there's a family resemblance here to Abraham, both the message and the repetition. Of course, La Havas has a lot of jazz and pop mastery in her singing. And jazz combining with pop allows for such repetition.

I don't assume she's one of Farrah's inspirations (among other things, Lianne's album is too recent). But we can guess a common source in teen girl confessional poetry and diary writing, and perhaps also in all the charting quirk girls drawing on "folk" and soul and jazz the last few years (with predecessors on and off since the mid fifties). And there are long-standing practices of telling stories to music, rapping to music, reading poetry to music, etc. Add to this the recent trend among rappers to use Autotune for both electro-sound and for melody (Kanye would be especially relevant here for how this took him to confessional content too). Put these together, and you've got the materials that Farrah put to use — including her decision not to force her lyrics and singing into song form or into rap and rhyme.

This doesn't necessarily put her inside a particular cultural practice. But it does put her inside contemporary culture as it's unfolding. Also, it makes her less of an isolate** than are the art bruttists or outsiders whom (I gather from Wikip) Jean Dubuffet and Roger Cardinal have in mind.