On February 10th, 2011, a YouTube user with the moniker, “trizzy66” uploaded a music video for a song called “Friday” by a teenage girl named Rebecca Black. Produced by ARK Music Factory, a Los Angeles-based independent record label and entertainment channel, “Friday” managed to attract 30 million views in just over a month; conversely the video for Lady Gaga’s single, “Born This Way” only boasts 22 million. On iTunes, “Friday” cracked the top 100 within a month of its release and currently stands at number 43. As of this article’s publication, the song has been downloaded over two million times. Apple’s standard contract stipulates that iTunes artists receive .70 cents per download, making Rebecca Black a millionaire based off of the song’s iTunes sales alone. In addition to a photo shoot for People Magazine, and an interview on “Good Morning America,” Black appeared this past Tuesday on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.” Last Sunday night at the Concert of Hope in Los Angeles, with just a grand piano as accompaniment, Nick Jonas covered “Friday” to the delight of thousands of screaming fans.
So who is Rebecca Black anyway? Born in Orange County, the 13-year old diagnosed herself with “Bieber fever” on the “Good Morning America” interview, which explains her fame-via-YouTube aspirations. Black’s parents shelled out only $2,000 to produce “Friday,” the success of which legitimately surprised the eighth grader.
My curiosity towards “Friday” knows no bounds. Primarily, I want to know what about the song and music video produced such an overnight success. So far, my discussion of Black’s fame has danced circles around a very obvious, blaring fact: “Friday,” as a song and music video, may very well be the single worst piece of pop entertainment ever released. So, once again, I ask: what made “Friday” famous? Why, of all the Disney-dazzled American princesses begging their mommies and daddies to feed dollars into dreams did Rebecca Black make the cut? Let’s find out.
The video opens on a cheaply-animated calendar flipping through the days of the week as a synthesized beat taken from the dregs of High School Musical 9 builds into Black’s verse. “7am, waking up in the morning / gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs / gotta make my bowl, gotta have cereal,” she sings, staring into the camera with the forced smile and emotional capacity of a Stepford wife. Black’s voice, auto-tuned to a grinding monotone, only heightens the song’s lifeless quality. Add to that the fact that “Friday” correctly posits its audience as the type that struggles to understand “iCarly” and purchases each successive KidzBop album to keep up with the “hits.” The video patronizes that audience appropriately: Black sings about going to the “bus stop,” so naturally we see her standing next to one of those yellow “Bus Stop” signs you see all over Orange County. In addition to assuming the audience’s limited mental capacity, she peppers her lyrics with such grammatically correct phrases as: “we gonna have a ball today,” “seein’ everythin’ the time goin’,” and “we we we so excited.”
Of course, in the off chance that any viewer takes offense to Black’s perpetual rides in convertibles filled with pre-pubescent white people, “Friday” legitimizes its diverse sensibilities with a brief rap verse. An undoubtedly 35 year-old MC known as “Patrice,” sporting just the type of bling and computer-generated backdrop to mark him as “urban,” spits about such inner city struggles as “switching lanes” and “passing by is a school bus.” Patrice’s appearance and fresh rhymes infuse the song with a multi-cultural approach, in case any listener got the bizarre sense that Black only sings to anglicized teenyboppers.
However, all sterile markers of worldly awareness aside, Black still makes a valiant effort to give her lyrics a necessary edge. Whether discussing the typical dilemma of choosing whether or not to “kick it” in the front seat or “sit” in the back seat, to explaining the intricacies of how Saturday follows Friday, Thursday comes before, and Sunday also exists as a day of the week, Black pulls no punches in cultivating her cool. “7:45, we’re drivin’ on the highway / Cruisin’ so fast, I want time to fly,” she shouts into the night sky while standing up on the back seat of the convertible. “Fun, fun, think about fun / You know what it is,” she sings, pointing knowingly into the camera. Black assumes we know “what it is,” but leaves “it” vague enough to allow our imaginations to run wild. “Think about fun,” she asks, giving us free range to picture her in any number of activities that night too risqué to mention. So not only is Black fearless enough to stand up in a moving vehicle with the top down on the highway at a time as dicey as 7:45PM, but—depending on the viewer’s proclivities—her conception of “fun” might range from grabbing a milkshake at the mall, to taking bodyshots of Bacardi 151 off a Chippendale’s dancer. Well, it turns out “fun” means paying for her entire school to attend an awkward fist-pumping, braces-bumping gathering of privileged preteens who just discovered Urban Outfitters.
Unfortunately, no matter how many snide remarks I make about “Friday” I am no closer to discovering why, in this of all worlds, the song remains so popular. The most obvious explanation is that 34 million YouTube viewers, 2 million iTunes users and Nick Jonas love “Friday” for its cheap, gratingly catchy, excessively awful quality. “I watch ‘Friday’ because it’s so bad and it’s so funny to throw on when I’m with my friends,” claims one girl from CMC. “It’s hilarious because it’s such a piece of shit,” explains Jack Knauer PO’12. “She sounds like a middle school version of Ke$ha.”
Since “Friday”’s release, the video has inevitably received merciless backlash from the Internet. The comments range from one user stating “[they] feel hurt… at the ears,” another user naming Black “the unholy bastard child of Satan and auto-tune,” to a third user suggesting that “maybe ending her life would be good [because] she looks like a pretty useless mammal and the earth is a bit overcrowded.”
So, millions across America watch and listen to “Friday” for the pleasure of laughing and ridiculing such a piss-poor piece of pop culture? What does that say about us? “Thirty-three million people have absolutely no taste,” stated one YouTube user—are they right? We watch Rebecca Black and glorify Charlie Sheen for their unintentional ability to amuse us at their expense, but what happens when such spectacles replace any genuine forms of entertainment? What does it mean when we’re not laughing at the Rebecca Blacks of the future, but with them?
In many ways, the “Friday” phenomenon spells trouble for our media-muddled culture. My recommendation? Take a tip from Black: sit back and enjoy the ride. Just don’t gripe about which seat you take.