For those as yet unfamiliar with13 year old Rebecca Black, a summary: she is an American child-woman who has been doing her level best to rip the internet asunder over the past week with her controversial debut single, Friday.
And what is so controversial about the song? Does it contain overtones of Lolita that right-thinking people will find disturbing? No. Is it full of bad sweary words, as part of a misguided attempt to emulate Chloe Moritz in Kickass? There are not.
In actual fact, the only problem seems to be that she’s had the audacity to sound exactly the way you’d expect a 13-year-old girl to sound - inarticulate, excitable, and rather dull.
The song details the minutiae of a typical tween’s Friday in mind bogglingly boring detail. Rebecca, just so you know, goes downstairs (OMG, I’ve been downstairs!), has some cereal (breakfast is the most important meal of the day), and goes outside to wait for the bus. So far, so not really worth making a song about. But on the other hand, they do say you should write what you know.
The video takes a slightly odd turn at this stage when our heroine – who you may remember is waiting for a bus – is approached by a sports car full of her pre-pubescent friends. This creates a problem of two halves.
As Rebecca sees it, the most contentious issue here is which seat to choose (although given the other four are taken it pretty much has to be in the middle at the back). But surely a more pressing concern is that fact that the combined age of everyone in the vehicle still doesn’t give you one adult old enough to have a driving license? There must be a lot of road accidents in the US.
Having solved the problem (by sitting in the middle at the back, not by locating a responsible grown up to give them a lift), Rebecca goes on to inform us: “Yesterday was Thursday, today is Friday […] Tomorrow is Saturday, and Sunday, comes afterwards.”
I could go on, but you get the gist. It’d be fair to say that the track has all the lyrical depth of a minor coffee spillage. But whilst it’s OK for the likes of super-fetus Justin Bieber to spout crap like this (lest we forget, his best contribution to world music goes ‘baby, baby, baby… oh!’), Rebecca Black gets 316,880 ‘dislikes’ on youtube and a bajillion comments saying stuff like “stupid spoild lil whore, die!” and “i think my spleen just ruptured.”
And to add insult to injury, Simon Cowell has been quoted as saying she’s a genius. Remember Simon Cowell? He was the one responsible for Zig and Zag. The fact he thinks he can market something does not mean it’ll be remembered fondly by popular culture.
Can anyone remember what people did in the times before we could spend our evenings spewing vitriol at young kids on the internet? Answers on a postcard, please.
Although I don't know where you'll find one of those in this day and age.
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