Welcome back to a brand new entry into the catalogue of Broken Records, where Steve and Remfry search for the very worst album of all time. This week we come to you with a warning, this episode is not the usual laugh-a-thon that we pride ourselves on being. It’s a heavier and often upsetting episode as we look at the debut album from reality TV star Farrah Abraham, My Teenage Dream Ended, released on 1st of August 2012. 

Abraham made her name as a 17 year old, on the MTV show 16 and Pregnant in 2008. The title of the show should make it pretty clear what that entails, and it set in motion a set of events that led to Abraham becoming a big star, but at a significantly high cost. Four years later, her story was chronicled in her first book, My Teenage Dream Ended, which also included a companion 27-minute album inspired by the events detailed in said autobiography.

Essentially, Abraham took a few lines from each chapter of the book and turned them into lyrics, which she gave to album producer FRDRK, who made her record her vocals to a click track and then put music (which Abraham never got to hear) over the top of it. The result was 27 minutes of utterly bizarre, pre-Hyper Pop, auto-tuned, electro, weirdness. The response was initially one of derision, but MTDE soon picked up a cult following from members of the indie press, who decided to anoint Abraham as some kind of avant-garde musical queen, much to the bemusement of many (including Abraham herself). It’s a fascinating, it often traumatising, story but the question is, who got this one right? Is it a forward thinking, deconstruction of pop in true outsider art fashion? Or is it a grubby, tuneless, cash grab from an industry determined to milk and exploit every last drop from another young, out of their depth, reality star?

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