Rebecca Black: An ode to Friday

Rebecca Black loves Fridays and who can blame her; with the obvious exclusions of Jesus Christ, the Fishermen of the Eyemouth disaster, John F Kennedy, The Seven Bishops and The Black Watch of Canada. Now you will indubitably be aware of Rebecca Black and/or her song Friday, mostly due to the fact that they have both received a more vigorous lampooning than Libya's idea of Democracy. Obviously being a capitalist shill who routinely has his weekends stolen from him in order that some chief executive, whose position on the chain of command practically reaches Tian, can enjoy extended holidays in Venice I cannot fully appreciate why people treat Friday as anything other than just another day. So without further ado Rebecca Black will explain just how superlative the fifth day of the week (a week should start from Monday and not Sunday as many inerudite berks try to claim) actually is:

Now because I am a lifelong member of the Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu I am able to discern exactly what you are envisaging, is this video part of an elaborate marketing campaign to peddle a reissuing of Robert A. Heinlein's novel? Or could it be a parody suffering from over intellectualism brought on by its hubris? Or, actual conclusive proof of the relative state formulation, as a thing this abhorrent could only exist in a universe fallen into the trappings of Cosmicism. Everything in this entire package is simply rotten, as rotten a zombie trapped in a boiler room. The lyrics were clearly written by someone whose last social contact was when they savaged a yuppie with blunt force trauma in a motel circa 1987. The video itself was probably made during the murder of the aforementioned yuppie. This is evident in the fact that it is the most impertinently eighties style video I have ever bore witness to; the production costs must have been equivalent to that of a Chinese Paperflower, and it contains more cheesy imagery than the American Cheese Society photo gallery. My auditory and visual systems found it difficult to recognize Rebecca Black as a natural human, as for the most part she resembled the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood attempting to pull off a human impersonation during the Wolf Moon. She also sounds as Auto-Tuned as a robotic Kesha.

If you have beheld the video then you will more than likely noticed the majority of the lyrics are simply Rebecca describing her routine as it happens on screen, essentially making it as redundant as the Betamax tape at a optical disc storage convention. "Gotta get down to the bus stop, Gotta catch my bus, I see my friends (My friends)" she cantillates and in both instances as soon as she mentions the subject (the bus stop and the friends) it appears on the video. It’s as though she is armed with the Seal of Solomon.

She then spouts this gem: "Kickin’ in the front seat, Sittin’ in the back seat, Gotta make my mind up, which seat can I take?" Look Rebecca I appreciate that you may be too young to conclude why internet users are dispensing as much hate towards you as the average Islamic nation does towards the West once it has issued a Fatwa, but when you tackle the question of which car seat to take a sit in as though it were a great philosophical mystery you are clearly taking the levels of piss required to arouse Havelock Ellis.

The chorus: " It’s Friday, Friday, Gotta get down on Friday, Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend,Friday, Friday" just raises the question, what the hell can the average thirteen year old do on a Friday that constitutes the use of the phrase "gotta get down"? Do they get to stay up and play Pokémon until four in the morning? No, it in fact apparently consists of standing in the back of the world’s slowest moving convertible and dancing as though the video were being filmed by the creepy uncle of one of the group; in his basement and after he threatened that if they didn’t take part he would inform their individual mothers just how iniquitous their behavior is meaning there would be no Disneyland trip this year.

She later goes on to sing what are probably the most infamous lines of the song; “Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday. Today i-is Friday, Friday (Partyin’). We-we-we so excited, We so excited. We gonna have a ball today. Tomorrow is Saturday, and Sunday comes after...wards.” Surely there can be no one in or out of existence who genuinely believe that these are good lyrics, if they can even be called lyrics since it is essentially reading a calendar aloud. Not how she pauses briefly midway through afterwards as though to just clarify whether previous statement was accurate like an obtuse Barney the Dinosaur

Since the creators of Friday puerilely thought it necessary to list the days of the week in order, I have charged myself with tutoring them in proper English and pronunciation in the style of the play Pygamlion. So let us begin; instead of saying "we so excited" one would usually state "we’re excited" or "we are highly excited", now please repeat the previous phrases until your IQ rises to above that of a can of out of date Tuna. Speaking of lack of intelligence, one of the song writers (Patrice Wilson) appears in the video as the obligatory guest rapper, a trend in pop that is as insidious as the mandatory virgin sacrifice in movie cults. He presumably believes himself to appear cool and virile, but generally men who drive behind school buses and rap about ‘how crazily’ a thirteen year old girl parties are not considered cool; though it is a direct shortcut to get onto your own exclusive government list, now how cool is that.

This song was intended as a party anthem, the next Saturday Night if you will, though instead of being sung into hairdryers by teenage girls as they get ready to go out on the town it would be better suited to the likes of John Coffey because it could only truly be at home somewhere as depressing as The Green Mile. The simple lyrics do not make it catchy or a karaoke hit, they barely even qualify for troll status. Rebecca’s vocals are Auto-Tuned to the point that she doesn’t even need to have a physical presence in this charade, all she brings to the experience is a repertoire of unsettling facial expressions; so the video could easily be replicated with the auto tune machine’s vocals set to a picture of Jack Elam. Though it is a damning indictment of the Auto-Tuning business because despite the ‘best efforts’ (non-optional sarcastic quotations) of the producers she still sounds like she is suffering from laryngeal cancer; and in all honesty I haven’t heard anything this terrible since The Backwards Music Station was turned into a phone in sex line for machines.

"Uhm, Skynet, its Bjork again she wants us for a video?"

However I will now go down the Loki route and go through the heel face turn and face heel turn rigmarole by briefly defend Rebecca Black (even the protagonist in The Pit and The Pendulum had a trial). The internet vigilantes (me included) have lambasted Rebecca Black for being involved in a song that is like listening to a loved one being tortured in a Middle Age English dungeon for three and a half minutes, but no one has ultimately focused any of that excess ira they have from living comfortable lives onto the song’s writers; Clarence Jey and Patrice Wilson. This is surprising because what we have here are two supposedly professionals whose song writing skills are on par with the average toddler’s drawing abilities. They are two grown men who supposedly have the benefit of life experience and years of learning and understanding, whereas Rebecca Black is just a child whose mother could afford to piss away the expense of building a well in the average African Village. Whatever they wrote was never going to be adopted into our musical heritage the same way as say ‘Johnny B. Goode’ but they could have at least pretended to put some effort into their contribution. It is as though as though a brain damaged Platyrrhini were given a pen and paper and told to “go bananas”.

Unfortunately by dissecting the song and video with a lancet of spite, we are to Rebecca Black what Victor Frankenstein was to his monster. See, her video on Youtube has already received over forty seven million hits in the time it takes Dominos to deliver a pizza. The connotations of this are the fact that the song has become a hit for the record label Ark Music, guarantying we will be seeing more of her in the future (which leads me to suspect the apparent haters are fans of Mortification of the flesh ideology). She will almost defiantly have an album out before the year passes to the history books; this is in part our fault for descending upon this like clowder of cats upon a ball of wool, but the fact the youth eats up anything that is popular (especially if we hate it) is also to blame (which is my I am thankful we are leaving them a planet that is as poisoned as Charlie Sheen’s insides).

Consider this; this time last month she was simply 'talentless generic person Rebecca Black, who had the fortune to have parents who can afford to attempt to launch a pop career', whereas now she is all the things mentioned before but with 'now millions of people know of her existence' added as a suffix. Sure she may be a hate figure to a large percentage of that number but she has regardless accomplished what she had set out to do - achieve fame. And you thought that forwarding the video throughout the office was harmless and counted towards the team work improvement goals set by your boss. I am also aware of the hypocrisy of that last line when I too have contributed towards the video play count by embedding it to this post, but for you to come to my blog and point this out would be like going to 1970’s China and pointing out to Chairman Mao that The Little Red Book is just a book of rejected fortune cookie quotations.

'The force at the core leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party. The theoretical basis guiding our thinking is Marxism-Leninism' "Mum! I got another rubbish fortune again!"