Frank Kogan

(1) What are she/they outside of?

They seem to be outside of a coherent community or audience that might "receive" this work, meaning listen to it for what it is. One reason "outsider" is a strange term is that it's usually the word for performers who have brought "inside" something -- the formal art community, the indie musicsphere, whatever -- despite having characteristics (of upbringing, developmental ability, cultural context, whatever) that seem superficially to put them outside of this community. And not just superficially, since often outsider/naive art is literally incapable of participating in the conversation around the art. Now, I would guess that in music this is a little different, and already I'm thinking of a million of exceptions. There are plenty of artists whose work critics talk about that couldn't participate in the conversation meaningfully, and why shouldn't the art itself be how the artist "speaks" to the conversation, and what about when the artist is openly challenging those assumptions intellectually/self-consciously (Bob Dylan) or by just doing what they do whether the conversation cares or not (Teena Marie, maybe?).

There's long been an effective (academic) separation between fine arts and pop art in academic music, much like there is in the fine arts/museum community. The kinds of people who theorize about experimental or new classical music often don't have much meaningful to say within pop communities, even when they "use" them. And pop communities often don't really know what to do with experimental music.

I think Farrah falls somewhere between these two, and there's something strange about it. I bring a kind of focus to the album (mostly through the vocals) that I would bring to a Lygeti concert or something, but I also listen to it "as pop," because it recalls enough pop structures -- especially through electronic music ("After Prom" is close enough to a minimal techno artist like Pantha du Prince) -- that I can walk to it.

So I would posit, even if there are exceptions, that for the most part, "people who hear pop singles that debuted in InTouch magazine" have very very little overlap with "people who go to experimental music concerts in major cities or at universities or at museums, etc." But to "get" Farrah, you kind of need to understand both worlds, even when these worlds can often self-consciously define each against the other. One reason people go to experimental music concerts is to opt out of the culture typified by watching Teen Mom, etc., and there's no end of run-of-the-mill anti-intellectualism in entertainment/reality/gossip communities.

(2) So what they might be inside of would be something like "unironic straddling of entertainment culture and fine arts culture and criticism." Or: collapse of "high and low" in more than just lip service, since "high" and "low" are more social characteristics determined by "who listens and how" than some aesthetic component of the work. You can reclaim pop and listen to it with erudition, but that doesn't follow that you actually engage with the music as a target audience member or care about the natural discomfort that comes in the social chasm separating you from some other fan.

Pockets of the music crit community do this sort of, but I think it's a pretty small subset of an already small group. These are critics who are both intellectuals and fans in all of the connotations that that word holds -- shrill hordes of teenybopper intellectuals. Something like that. I think Teena Marie lives here; in their own way I get flashes of this straddling -- the "right in the middle"-ness of that straddling, not just gestures to one side or the other -- in Michael Jackson, Andrew WK, t.A.T.u., Shakira. All of them seem unstable somehow in their "preferred sphere" -- Teena Marie and MJ and Shakira in mass appeal pop, Andrew WK in an indie subset of mass appeal pop, t.A.T.u. in a chic club subset.