I'm In With The Out Crowd

[koganbot]

Haven't listened yet to the whole Farrah Abraham album or followed much of the discussion. But Phil Freeman calls it "pure outsider art — fucking brilliant. Makes Peaches and Le Tigre sound like Taylor Swift." And Dave seems to be endorsing this characterization, "outsider art," in his Atlantic piece. Not sure whether or not I'd use it on her, or how often I'd use it on anyone. But to poke around further, let's ask the following questions:

(1) What is Farrah Abraham outside of?

(2) What might she be inside of? Who might her models and sources be?

I'm thinking of people like Teena Marie, Sophie B. Hawkins, Stevie Nicks — not as Farrah's sources or models, but as people who had sources and models themselves for their ideas of song lyrics and liner-note poetry; they were drawing on ideas of poetry that were probably as abundant as "real" poets' ideas, if not more abundant.*

EDIT (June 2019): Farrah seems to have deleted all the vids from My Teenage Dream Ended, but here, at least, is what she sounded like ("On My Own"):

Watch on YouTube

END EDIT

*As far as I know, Teena, Sophie, and Stevie were never called outsider art (nor were Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, for that matter, whom I wouldn't say were themselves altogether "inside," and who probably helped to make Teena et al. possible, though were hardly their main sources). But this might be just because no mainstream critics ever made much of a case for Teena et al. as poets (unlike Dylan and Morrison, whom I'm keeping inside parentheses — Dylan was sometimes slotted as "folk poetry," a term that hardly explains anything, but does point to people not being merely outside).

By the way, I don't think Farrah presents her stuff as poetry, but that doesn't mean she doesn't draw on poetry. Actually, I've never seen the Teen Mom shows, nor do I know much about her, nor have I read her book; so I don't know if she's claimed any poetic ambition. I'm guessing not, from the way she embeds her words in home-made pop tracks.

Comments

[koganbot]

Sam The Sham and the Pharaoh's "I'm In With The Out Crowd"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VhuhdggrhE

Outside Looking In

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

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.