The MTDE Awards (MaHaWaM and Farrah Abraham)

[koganbot]

Dave posted this on Tumblr:

I seem to be subconsciously looking for the closest thing I can find to the vibe of “My Teenage Dream Ended” each year (last year it was Jenny Wilson's EXORCISM).

This year it appears to be Mahawam: Is an Island, which is very brief and very good.

I replied:

Dave, I just checked YouTube to find that Farrah Abraham has taken down all her vids from My Teenage Dream Ended. Still has "Blowin'," a more conventionally song-like track from a couple of years later, and she continues to put vlogs and the like on her YouTube channel (some contributed by her daughter, she says on her "About" page). Haven't explored them yet. [EDIT: It's possible that there's some other explanation for the absence of the videos than "Farrah Abraham has taken down all the vids." But I can't think of what another explanation would be, since I don't know who else would or could take them down or if someone else could claim some authority or ownership over them. Publisher? MTV?]

My guess is that, unfortunately, she must have internalized all the criticism and hatred that was thrown at her for her absolutely odd and original music. The music's still up in bits and pieces, posted by one fan here, another there, sometimes creating their own videos. In the meantime, no one's made music like it, before or since.

"On My Own - Farrah Abraham" (Watch on YouTube)

(I realize that it's hard to explain or justify that last sentence, since any description I'd give — "singing, but not melodically, the words being scraps of images, confession, events, feelings, some rhythm but no attempt at meter or rhyme" — could describe at least some, for instance, spoken word, improv, jazz poetry, hip-hop (the latter probably something of an inspiration; she may be an outsider but that doesn't mean she's from Mars*). So the conception isn't radical. She's not going rhythmically against meter and line, it's just that her rhythms and repetition don't come from there, come from speech instead, but with dancebeat music backing her she's not constrained by the coherence of normal conversation either; nor by poetry. So it's the result that's radically different.)

(Dave and I once talked about some related Farrah issues on LiveJournal ("I'm In With The Out Crowd"), and Dave and lots of others talked about her all over the place at the time, Dave even getting a piece into The Atlantic.)

*And it wouldn't hurt modern Soundcloud rappers to give her a listen. I bet you some would get ideas.

Comments

Album video comment thread (skyecaptain)

[koganbot]

skyecaptain reports:

The comment thread on the most prominent unsanctioned album-length YouTube video really steers into "MTDE" as avant-garde masterpiece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyYA4byQXNk

Although one of the things I like about MTDE is that it doesn't really code as "avant garde" any more than it codes as anything else.

(Wow, I took a VERY long time to actually address your questions in that thread! I am a master filibusterer.)

Re: Album video comment thread

[koganbot]

I'm curious if you're the one who recommended 100 gecs' "money machine" to the Singles Jukebox. I suspect 100 gecs' now-and-then resemblance to Farrah Abraham is deliberate; in any event, it's when they're at their best; though they don't achieve Farrah's vocal-repetitive sense of trying to figure out her experience on the fly. Online commenters tend to cite pc music, but there are occasional mentions of Farrah.

Hand Crushed By A Mallet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJhb43oLbDs

Follow-up question

[koganbot]

Dave, I've got a follow-up question:

Please say more about how MaHaWaM's "Is an Island" is a spiritual heir to "My Teenage Dream Ended."

I guess that's a request, not a question.

Skyecaptain replies to follow-up question

[koganbot]

Skyecaptain replies:

MaHaWam and 100 gecs -- I didn't recommend the latter to Jukebox though I did hear them in my Spotify playlists and immediately checked out the whole album. I like it, though it's at too much of a remove, too mannered (relatively speaking, anyway, that would be a weird word to use without Farrah Abraham as the comparison point) to get at what I mean by the spirit of MTDE. MaHaWam has some of the more important signposts even though musically he's working within a more obvious weirdo house genre -- his weirdnesses, though weird, are within the normal range of weirdness of other music. Some of it reminds me a little of a midpoint between Shamir's two albums, one a slick club-pop album produced by Nick Sylvester(!) and the other a lo-fi set of demos he recorded mostly on four-track in his bedroom, something like that.

What it does have is, to use your word, a restlessness to it, an aura of anxiety tempered by playfulness, and a certain daring to it, the ability to go to odd corners for meaning. Where Farrah has the Autotuning, MaHaWam has his natural voice, occasionally processed a little but pretty striking on its own, unpolished, lisping, sometimes struggling to keep up with the pace he sets for himself. It sounds like the whole album is happening inside his head -- maybe that's the best way I can describe it? Albums can be introspective and poetic and affecting without actually sounding like they're being dreamt up on the spot -- that's closer to what the MaHaWam album does.

Re: Album video comment thread

[koganbot]

Thinking more about 100 gecs and Farrah Abraham: 100 gecs don't come close to the restlessness of Farrah's vocals, the way she sings in swift little darts, this brush stroke, then the next stroke, that one almost the same but a slight jolt away from the first — each thought a little scratch, leaving a mark, a counter mark, pushing as much against the rhythm as with it. Dart, another dart, breathe. Btw, this is absolutely written into her lyrics. I'm assuming her sources are teengirl poetry more than whatever people are teaching in college or acting out at slams these days*; in any event, I just spent half an hour at genius.com running through her songs, and her lyric strategies are plenty sophisticated: a line, then the next line running counter to it, or a quick modification, or a thought intruding into another thought. "My purest hell. My war starts with one... What? One / My words are few. Just don't cry — or laughter... laughter, laughter, laughter." (This about hearing her boyfriend was killed; I'm not sure that you can render sudden disequilibrium any better.) "Trying to find the truth, crumbles, you will too." "Hope and hate equals hard." "This bump doesn't go away / If it does appear all on my face / It feels like I'm going in on this alone" (song title: "Unplanned Parenthood"). "My self out of my own frame."

You should check out this interview with her producer Fredrick M. Cuevas. "She wanted something that sounded kind of edgy," so the music's abrasiveness was no accident, though some of the — effective — disjunction between voice and track is: apparently, when he was playing the tracks for her she froze, so he turned off the music and had her sing to a click track. "Like, she'd heard it before and approved it for that song, but as she was recording we never had it on." Then the two of them worked together (how much isn't clear; he seems to be saying two opposite things in the interview) in the sound editing, with him making adjustments to put her into rhythm and letting Autotune choose the tones, basically. Studio time is expensive, so he couldn't match all the notes he would have if time had been unlimited. I'm glad he didn't, naturally.

I haven't done much research on Farrah herself, mainly because the little I see seems too depressing; of course, that may all be in my mind and according to my prejudices: I wouldn't know, but maybe she's getting a kick out of it all, the porn films and the motivational shtick she's pushing, and getting on and thrown off of Teen Mom sequels. I visited dailymotion.com in the hope of finding music fans uploading MTDE tracks that are no longer on YouTube, and what I was seeing was "Farrah Abraham settles lawsuit against MTV," "Farrah Abraham promotes new implants with 3rd breast augmentation," "Farrah Abraham hits beach during rehab," "Farrah Abraham drops boxing match," "Mob Wives' Drita D’Avanzo gets ugly with Farrah Abraham," "Farrah Abraham says she was almost raped, takes it back," and on and on.

*Not that I'd know, but those three may not be all that distant anyway.

Re: Album video comment thread (skyecaptain)

[koganbot]

Skyecaptain says:

I appreciated that interview; I think I came across it when it came out and might have even wandered back to ILM to post about it? (Can't remember.) At the time (in 2012), I figured the engineer/producer was a *student* -- I think I even Google Mapped the studio to see its proximity to the local university -- who really was putting their all into the beats and making spoken poetry fit by hook or by crook. If anything, the interview suggests *more* genuine collaboration, back and forth spitballing and matching of visions, than I had assumed, which is probably a good thing since I like to believe that all the music I like happens more or less that way, with at least some level of meaningful interaction between the different players.

I haven't really done the lyrics-qua-poetry read yet, not least because I never really trusted the transcriptions of the album when it came out (there were some widely disseminated lyrics that I was positive the transcribers got wrong), but I was always struck by how perfect and how strange so many moments on the album are at describing feelings that don't get a ton of treatment in ANY form in music, like those spasms of laughter, laughter, laughter in the face of a death. I mean, I hate referring to things as "raw," but...the lyrics are pretty raw! Even now off the top of my head I can remember some of them: "our bodies will hold us together," "I got dressed up on the way down," "I don't want to make more mistakes...I still need to make more mistakes."

Re: Album video comment thread

[koganbot]

The part in "Hand Crushed By A Mallet" that pleases me in a Farrah way runs from 0:57 to 1:24, though the scratchy Farrah-like restlessness isn't provided by the singing per se but by the beats and bass intruding into the vocal stream and by the Autotune being manipulated into ripping up the vocals.

Whereas the piercing Autotune before and aft of that segment pleases me in a Jvcki Wai manner — though Jvcki's much more the rhythm virtuoso.

Availability

[koganbot]

You can download the tracks from My Teenage Dream Ended from Amazon at 99 cents a pop, or you can stream for free if you pay for Music Unlimited or Amazon Prime.

You can download My Teenage Dream Ended from iTunes for $9.90 or the songs individually for 99 cents.

You can stream for free on Spotify.

You can stream for free on Google Play if you pay for Google Play or YouTube Premium.

Or you can stream the whole album on the YouTube link Dave provided.

I can't find the original videos anywhere. Someone posted "The Phone Call That Changed My Life Official Video" with clips that are lifted from Enigma's awful and mawkish "Return To Innocence" (the clips don't look so bad with Farrah's tattered voice scraping the sheen off her own track's actual sadness).