Frank Kogan

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.