It’s the Rocky Horror Picture Show question. How self-aware were the people who made Rebecca Black’s video for her song Friday
This is, of course, horribly off-topic, but being aware as I am that the Solomonia audience may not be as aware as they should be of trending pop-culture topics, I consider this a public service announcement. (And if you were aware, no, there is no place to hide.) Here’s the video, now topping 22,000,000 views on YouTube in, what? less than two weeks since people started noticing it? Holy crap!
At first listen you might wonder what the big deal is. Pretty typical teen pop-song, right? But listen a little closer and what you find are some pretty lame lyrics (like we might do as a rough-draft, free-associating some lyrics on the fly just to get something on the track to get the melody and beat down before we go back and write something a little deeper later). They also happen to be exactly the type of lyrics a normal young person might come up with (though an adult wrote them), and that’s part of the song’s charm, as we’ll see later.
So it’s been popular, but for all the wrong reasons, and you might wonder what 13 year old Black has been going through.
First, the best backgrounder on the people behind the video, an outfit called “Ark Music Factory,” is here: Who the Hell Made Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’ Video?
Basically, you’ve heard of vanity publishers? The people you pay to publish your book when no publisher will sink their own money into it? Well meet vanity music producers. Black’s parents paid, according to reports, $2000 to these guys to produce the song and video. Sound like a lot? Not really. Consider how much people pay for their kids’ hobbies and activities and you’ll find out it’s not that much.
Check out the link above for some of Ark’s other “talent” — many of whom are getting a huge splash in traffic just by being listed near “Friday” on YouTube, but this video of Ark’s web site launch party will give you a good taste of where all that parental cash is going (and it has to be more than $2000 in some cases):
I think part of the shock is that many of us are stuck in the days when seeing slickly produced videos and engineered studio songs meant the investment of 10′s of thousands of dollars. That simply isn’t the case anymore. Technology has changed all that.
Daily Beast tracked her down fairly early, and I liked her answers:
…Acing a casting-call audition, Black was invited to record one of two songs label heads had written for her. And, as part of a $2,000 package her mother paid for, they offered to produce an accompanying video in a bid to make a splash on YouTube. The song she picked: “Friday.”
“I didn’t write it at all,” Black said, clearing up a major misconception. “The other song was about adult love–I haven’t experienced that yet. ‘Friday’ is about hanging out with friends, having fun. I felt like it was my personality in that song.”…
Good for her. Another good thing about the video and song is that there’s nothing adult or sexualized about it. Zombie, in his post praising Black makes the point well:
…I think “Friday” is popular with the 10-to-14-year-old crowd specifically because its lyrics are completely innocent and unsophisticated. Kids are sick of being barraged with sexuality and violence and cynicism. At last, for the first time in a long time, a pop song for kids is not about humping or angst. Kids just want to be kids! And Rebecca Black is their new guide….
…That simple decision by Rebecca to reject the sexy song in favor of the childish song could be a landmark moment in modern history. We as a culture have been essentially abusing pre-adolescents by expecting them to embrace sexuality before the kids themselves even want to. For the first time, the abuse victims are standing up for themselves.
The postmodern nihilistic hipsters think that “Friday’s” popularity is a joke they’re pulling on American culture; but in fact the joke is on them. Mocking innocence has until now been the most effective way to intentionally destroy it. But this Friday — and every “Friday” — innocence is striking back…
Indeed. Personally, I gave up needing every song to have deeper inner meaning some time after High School and the death of punk rock.
A low point for mainstream media coverage came with Good Morning America’s Andrea Canning doing a Jim Gray/mean girl impersonation as she basically laid all the crap on Black in person that others had been laying on the internet and tried to gauge her reaction:
In the interview, Canning asks Black to sing a little of the National Anthem just to prove that she can in fact sing without autotune. She does a surprisingly (and relievingly) decent job of it.
Whatever the haters may say, young Rebecca Black has likely learned a new idiom: “Laughing all the way to the bank.” As I type, the song “Friday
