My Teenage Dream Ended

In August 2012, Abraham released the autobiography My Teenage Dream Ended, published by MTV Press. 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 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 success making number 11 on the New York Times bestseller 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]

Upon release, the accompanying album received an overwhelmingly negative response. 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".[5] 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."[6]

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.[7][8][9] In The Wire, Andrew Nosnitsky called it a "haunting and fascinating mess of outsider pop music".[10] 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.'"[7] The Village Voice compared it to critically acclaimed witch house band Salem.[11] The Guardian's David Renshaw considered it the weirdest record of the year, describing its sound 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] The publication later ranked it 32 on their list of best albums of the year.[13]

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.'"[14] In late 2017, Duncan Cooper of The Fader wrote that "Farrah Abraham's pop music should make her an avant-garde icon."[3]