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My Teenage Dream Ended

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My Teenage Dream Ended
Studio album by
Farrah Abraham
ReleasedAugust 31, 2012 (2012-08-31)
Genre
Length27:28
ProducerFredrick M. Cuevas
Singles from My Teenage Dream Ended
  1. "Finally Getting Up from Rock Bottom"
    Released: August 3, 2012
My Teenage Dream Ended
AuthorFarrah Abraham
LanguageEnglish
SubjectAutobiography
PublisherMTV Press
Publication date
August 14, 2012
Publication placeUnited States
Media typeHardcover
E-book
Pages240
ISBN978-1576875988

My Teenage Dream Ended is the title of both the debut autobiographical book and the accompanying album by American reality television personality, singer, and writer Farrah Abraham. The book was published in August 14, 2012, while the album was released on August 31 of the same year. The former was commercially successful, landing on number 11 at the New York Times Best Seller list; the latter was met with strongly negative response from audiences, as well as both bewilderment and acclaim from contemporary music critics, who considered it to be a bizarre example of outsider art. The album was placed on year-end lists from The Guardian and Tiny Mix Tapes.

Background

Abraham made her debut appearance on television in the 2009 MTV reality television show 16 and Pregnant, and came to prominence due to her role in the spin-off series Teen Mom, also by MTV.

Production

In August 14, 2012, Abraham released the autobiography My Teenage Dream Ended, published by MTV Press.[1] The book chronicles her teenage pregnancy and the problems she faced during the time, including her drug use, the arrest of her father, and the death of her daughter's father, Derek Underwood.[1] The musical album, produced by FRDRK (Fredrick M. Cuevas), is a companion work to her autobiography; each of the ten songs shares a title with a chapter of her book.[2] The book was a relative commercial success, making number 11 on the New York Times Best Seller list.[1]

Abraham recorded her vocals for the album to a click track, while the production of the music was handled separately.[3] In an interview with The Fader, Cuevas stated: "Like, she'd heard it before and approved it for that song, but as she was recording we never had the music on."[3] Abraham also wanted the Auto-Tune effects on her vocals to sound "edgy", so worked with Cuevas to make them more aggressive.[3] The album's first single, "Finally Getting Up from Rock Bottom", was released on August 3, 2012, through In Touch Weekly magazine.[4]

Critical response

Upon release, the accompanying album received an overwhelmingly negative response from audiences.[5] It has been widely criticized for its extensively Auto-Tuned vocals and bland production. Her single "On My Own" was derided as one of the worst works of pop music ever made, eclipsing Rebecca Black's "Friday".[6] Feminist website Jezebel called the lead and sole single, "Finally Getting up from Rock Bottom", "the most horrible combination of sounds to ever be assembled in the history of audio recording."[7]

Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Tiny Mix Tapes[8]

Despite garnering mockery in the popular media, the arrhythmic and cheaply digitized presentation of deeply confessional lyrics was bewildering enough to be viewed as a contemporary example of outsider art.[5][9][10][11] My Teenage Dream Ended was met with general acclaim from critics,[12] who considered it to be among the weirdest albums of the year.[9][12] Most critics didn't assign a score to the album; an editor note on Alex Macpherson's review of the album for Fact states that "we decided to run this review without a rating. It's such an anomaly ... that trying to fit it into any kind of scale seems pointless – there are no comparison points. Consider it either a 0/5 or a 5/5, depending on your perspective, tolerance and general sanity."[9]

[My Teenage Dream Ended] is the sound of a postmodern nervous breakdown. In being so, paradoxically, it creates its own weird authenticity. Sonically, we encounter the fresh, shard-like ruins of contemporary dance-pop, each beat or fragment teasing but failing to resolve into regularity. Over this, Abraham intones in a voice masked by Auto-Tune so consistently and heavily applied that it speaks to the alienation of the recorded voice — the impossible struggle to hear oneself truly, and the typical recoil — as well as the fact that emotions recorded can never be commensurate with phenomenological experience, particularly given that all language available for such expression is now stereotype.

Rowan Savage, writing for Tiny Mix Tapes[8]

In The Wire, Andrew Nosnitsky called it a "haunting and fascinating mess of outsider pop music".[13] Writing for The Atlantic, David Cooper Moore suggested that the album "is to teen angst what Eraserhead was to domestic angst", making it "a dark and compelling experiment in abstracting and compressing the vicissitudes of 'high school drama.'"[5] The Village Voice compared it to critically acclaimed witch house band Salem.[14] The Guardian's David Renshaw described the album as "an agonising, disconcerting clatter" and "as if someone is translating chart music into an alien language and back again." Discussing the album's positive reception among avant-garde circles, Renshaw concluded: "All in all, it's as if Joey Essex had ditched Towie to record an album with Autechre and Lars von Trier."[12] Conversely, The A.V. Club panned the album and labeled it "the least essential album of 2012", calling it "terrible" and "cringeworthy", and dismissed the album's avant-garde status as "giving Abraham way too much credit".[15]

In 2014, Mitchell Sunderland of Vice interviewed Abraham, and referred to My Teenage Dream Ended as a "critically acclaimed noise album", to which she replied "I just create therapeutic music."[16] In a 2017 review for Charli XCX's Pop 2 mixtape, Meaghan Garvey of Pitchfork retrospectively summarized: "Sweepingly ridiculed as one of 2012's worst albums, that judgment, five years later, feels wildly narrow-minded. It is a baffling work, to be sure: frantic layers of dubstep, EDM, witch-house, and breakbeats seem to run in the opposite direction as Abraham's absurdly AutoTuned narratives about surviving the death of her husband. [...] After my first full spin of Pop 2, I couldn't shake the thought: 'This sounds like Farrah, but good.'"[17] In late 2017, Duncan Cooper of The Fader wrote that "Farrah Abraham's pop music should make her an avant-garde icon."[3]

Year-end lists

Publication Accolade Rank Ref.
The Guardian Best Albums of 2012
32
[18]
Tiny Mix Tapes Favorite 50 Albums of 2012
33
[19]

Track listing

No.TitleLength
1."The Phone Call That Changed My Life"2:50
2."After Prom"2:59
3."Caught in the Act"1:44
4."With Out This Ring..."2:53
5."Liar Liar"3:37
6."Unplanned Parenthood"2:31
7."Searching for Closure"3:49
8."On My Own"2:55
9."The Sunshine State"1:44
10."Finally Getting Up from Rock Bottom"2:22

References

  1. ^ a b c Durham, Jessica (August 23, 2012). "'My Teenage Dream Ended:' Farrah Abraham Lands On New York Times Bestseller List; Reveals Drug Abuse and One-Night Stands". Books & Review. Retrieved March 5, 2013.
  2. ^ Bonner, Mehera (August 13, 2012). "Farrah Abraham Releases Her Debut Album". Wetpaint. Retrieved March 5, 2013.
  3. ^ a b c d Cooper, Duncan (November 21, 2017). "Farrah Abraham's pop music should make her an avant-garde icon". The Fader. Retrieved December 21, 2017.
  4. ^ http://starcasm.net/archives/169126
  5. ^ a b c Moore, David Cooper (September 12, 2012). "The Scary, Misunderstood Power of a 'Teen Mom' Star's Album". The Atlantic. Retrieved March 5, 2013.
  6. ^ "Farrah Abraham Made the Worst Song and Music Video of All Time?". The Trend Guys. August 30, 2012. Retrieved March 5, 2013.
  7. ^ Morrissey, Tracie Egan (April 6, 2012). "Teen Mom Farrah Abraham Releases the Worst Song You Will Ever Hear. Ever". Jezebel. Retrieved March 5, 2013.
  8. ^ a b Savage, Rowan. "Farrah Abraham - My Teenage Dream Ended". Tiny Mix Tapes. Retrieved November 2, 2020.
  9. ^ a b c Macpherson, Alex (September 27, 2012). "My Teenage Dream Ended: Album Review". Fact. Retrieved March 5, 2013.
  10. ^ Freeman, Phil (September 3, 2012). "The Secret Cyborg Genius of MTV Teen Mom's Farrah Abraham". io9. Retrieved March 5, 2013.
  11. ^ https://www.vice.com/en/article/65ydz6/farrah-abraham-teen-mom-turned-porn-star-made-an-album-and-its-amazing
  12. ^ a b c Renshaw, David (September 28, 2012). "Farrah Abraham: the reality TV Teen Mom behind the weirdest pop record of the year". The Guardian. Retrieved April 11, 2019.
  13. ^ The Wire 345, p. 56.
  14. ^ Johnston, Maura (August 7, 2012). "Farrah Abraham: The Salem Of Teen Mom?". Village Voice. Retrieved March 5, 2013.
  15. ^ https://music.avclub.com/the-least-essential-albums-of-2012-1798236685
  16. ^ Sunderland, Mitchell (July 4, 2014). "Is Farrah Abraham the Last Outsider Artist?". Vice. Retrieved November 2, 2020.
  17. ^ Garvey, Meaghan (December 20, 2017). "Charli XCX: Pop 2 Album Review". Pitchfork. Retrieved December 21, 2017.
  18. ^ "Best albums of 2012: 40-21". The Guardian. November 26, 2012. Retrieved January 21, 2018.
  19. ^ https://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/2012-favorite-50-albums-of-2012?page=1
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