Kid Cudi’s Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is a mark of how badness has changed in the post-internet age. And the Rebecca Black fiasco is nothing without the controversial, arguably exploitative tactics of the ARK Music Factory, which takes money from the rich parents of girls and gives them utter dreck with the promise it will help their pop career-only, in the case of Black (and to varying degrees, everyone else who has given their money to ARK), they made her a meme.Įach of these cases reflect an ugly side to the American Dream of superstardom that leads people to desperate, deal-with-the-devil measures that produce horrible results. Abraham, one of the more notorious cast members of MTV's high school pregnancy reality drama Teen Mom, wrote a book chronicling her life following the death of her daughter’s father, and while she is generally not well thought of, the pain of that experience seeped its way into her totally bonkers album, whether she admits it or not. The Shaggs were an all-girl group forced to perform by their father, who believed his mother had predicted his daughters’ rise to stardom.
There will always be Fridays followed by Saturdays, with Sundays coming afterwards, and Rebecca Black will be relevant every weekend until you die.Īll of these atrocities share a tragic narrative that makes them canonically terrible-yet-wonderful works of art. And then there’s something like Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” whose staying power hinges on the maddening catchiness of the tune and the relatable inanity of its lyrics. That record features Abraham making dark dubstep while shrieking lyrics so heavily autotuned they’re rendered incomprehensible gibberish, but damned if it isn’t fun trying to adjust your ear to Abraham’s wildly-untrained musical sensibility. It’s so arhythmic, so bafflingly incompetent at every level, it made fans out of the likes of Kurt Cobain and Frank Zappa, the latter of whom joked it was “better than the Beatles.” ( Sound familiar?) Another, more recent addition to the “awful/great” canon is Farrah Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended, the audio companion to her autobiography of the same name. The Shaggs’ Philosophy of the World is such a record. Following the most basic laws of composition will render even an amateur a song at least adequate enough to just be “boring.” Truly “awful/great” records need to be so far outside the box, you might be tempted to think of them as works of genius. The second part is that it’s really hard to fuck up music. Put another way, Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven almost instantly becomes a thing to be looked at rather than enjoyed-we’re not in the universe of the album, but rather outside it, wondering how it came to be. Nevertheless, here it is for us to consume in abject confusion, and occasionally, in uproarious laughter while we consider questions of Kid Cudi’s mental health, his artistic ambition, his satisfaction with the album, what makes music bad or good, etc. Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is an auteur’s folly as well, laden with ideas that never should’ve made it past the brain-to-mouth filter, let alone onto a record. The film’s entire legacy is dependent on Wiseau’s staunch defense that the film is misunderstood and not an uproarious comedy of filmmaking errors. At the center of it is the auteur, Wiseau, a man from planets unknown producing, directing, and starring in what he believes is a masterpiece.
It’s supposed to be a tragedy, but its endless parade of non-sequiturs, inhuman dialogue, mid-film casting switches, and establishing shots of San Francisco turn the film into a legendary farce. It reminds me of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, one of the all-time great films to blur the line between terrible and sublime.