FEATURE:
Too Good to Be Forgotten: Songs That Are Much More Than a Guilty Pleasure
IN THIS PHOTO: Rebecca Black in 2020/PHOTO CREDIT: Teal Management
Rebecca Black - Friday
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SOME people might find it hard…
to get behind and enjoy Rebecca Black’s 2011 song, Friday. Witten and produced by Clarence Jey and Patrice Wilson, it has been named as one of the worst songs ever by some sources. Even though, after a decade, Black might want to put the song behind her. I remember the reaction to the track in 2011. There was so much negative attention that I feel it did not deserve. I don’t listen to the song a lot, though I do feel like there should be new inspection and patience for Friday. There are some limitations in the vocals and the lyrics aren’t especially deep. One can explain the vocal limitations with the fact Black was thirteen when the song was released. I think it is a track that is a lot better than many people have given it credit for. I am going to come to an article about the track very soon. Before then, some background and critical reaction regarding a Pop song that divides people
"Friday" is a song performed by American singer Rebecca Black, written and produced by Los Angeles record producers Clarence Jey and Patrice Wilson. It is Black's debut single. The song was originally released as a music video single on February 10, 2011; it was officially premiered as a single on iTunes on March 14, 2011. The song features a rap verse from Wilson, which was uncredited on the single. Its music video caught a sudden surge of hits after Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax comedian Michael J. Nelson called it "the worst video ever made" on Twitter and the song was featured on the Tosh.0 blog. The song's original reception was highly negative, and it was covered by numerous artists and comedians. It later gained a cult following.
The original music video was removed from YouTube on June 16, 2011, due to legal disputes between ARK Music and Black. By then, it had already amassed more than 167 million views. The song was re-released on September 16, 2011, when the music video was re-uploaded to YouTube. Since the growth in popularity of the song and video, there have been numerous parody videos and remixes. Forbes stated that the notoriety of the song is another sign of the power of social media specifically Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, in this instance in the ability to create "overnight sensations".
The song has received almost universally negative reviews from music critics, for its songwriting, instrumentation, Black's vocals, and the video choreography. Lyndsey Parker of Yahoo! Music asked if it could be "the worst song ever". On March 29, 2011, it surpassed Justin Bieber's "Baby" as the most disliked YouTube video, with 1.17 million dislikes, and once had over 3 million "dislikes", accounting for 88% of the total ratings of the video. The video was later removed, although it has since been officially re-uploaded. The co-writer and producer of "Friday", Clarence Jey, said about the song that "the concept we feel seems to have crossed a lot of boundaries, for the better or worse". Observers have called it "bizarre", "inept", and "hilariously dreadful". The song and Black herself were "savaged" on social networks across the Internet, while being seen as a "YouTube laughing stock". On YouTube, the video was met with negative comments and video responses, including comments interpreted as "violent". Kevin Rutherford, a columnist for Billboard magazine, wrote, "Black's video for 'Friday' is one of those rare occurrences where even the most seasoned critics of Internet culture don't know where to begin.
From the singing straight out of Auto-Tuned hell to lyrics such as 'Tomorrow is Saturday/And Sunday comes afterwards/I don't want this weekend to end' and a hilariously bad rap about passing school buses, 'Friday' is something that simply must be seen and heard to be fully appreciated." Many other reviewers also singled out the lyrics in particular for criticism, which were described as "overly simple and repetitive" by TNT Magazine. Jim Edwards of BNET and Doug Gross of CNN both noted that the rap break from the considerably older rapper was "creepy". Time magazine ranked it number two on a list of "Top 10 Songs with Silly Lyrics".
I listen to Friday now and I feel it hasn’t really got any modern soundalikes. Maybe it was a product of 2011. Despite the fact it has been attacked and mocked, it is a track that has energy and plenty of fun. The song itself is pretty good. I reckon the video is one of the worst parts of Friday. Perhaps the concept and direction is a reason why Friday received a lot more criticism than it otherwise might have. Slate revisited Friday last year. There are some portions of the article that caught my eye:
“Black was seeing the first of what would eventually be millions of comments slagging the video. “Friday” was on its way to becoming one of the biggest viral phenomena of the 2000s. Over the next three months, the song would be viewed 167 million times, making it the most-watched YouTube video of that year. But people weren’t watching because they loved it so much. Instead they were baffled, bemused, disdainful, confounded, and, in some cases, horrified. The song was dubbed “the worst video ever made” and became the most disliked song, to that point, in YouTube’s history. The entire internet seemed to unite in making fun of it and the then-13-year-old who sang it, whose whole life would be upended by its notoriety.
Just a few months before “Friday” took off, Black was a regular middle schooler living in Anaheim, California, a self-described theater kid with aspirations to go to New York University or Berklee College of Music and train to become a performer. Like lots of middle-class, college-bound kids, she knew getting into these schools would be hard, and she was always looking for anything that might boost her chances. Over the summer, one of Rebecca’s classmates did something that sounded perfect: She starred in a music video. “It sounded cool, and I wanted to try it out for myself. At that point we’re not gunning to be America’s next pop star,” she says. “We’re trying to just feel like we’re doing what we can in our own little charter school.”
The video was left online, and Black became famous overnight. She would go on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno and appear in a Katy Perry video. “Friday” would be performed on Glee. But if this sounds good, it wasn’t. In 2011, we were pretty much nowhere when it comes to an awareness of online bullying. It Gets Better, the LGBTQ anti-bullying campaign, had started some months before, but the general conversation around these issues was relatively rudimentary. The concerns that are so pervasive now just were not then. And a 13-year-old girl was deemed fair game by just about everyone. When Black went on Good Morning America, the interviewer, Andrea Canning, read mean comments to Black’s face, looking for a reaction. At one point she asks Rebecca to recall the comment that hurt her the most, and Black tells her about the comment that said, “I hope you cut yourself, and I hope you get an eating disorder, so you’ll look pretty. I hope you go cut and die.”
“I just remember this overwhelming feeling of just suck it up, smile, stay strong. Nobody can know that you’re hurting—just laugh with them,” Black says. “And as soon as I started doing that, people saw me as kind of in on it, and that at least felt better than feeling like the butt of a joke. All of the actual pain and embarrassment and shame that came with all of that just kind of got swept under the rug for a good few years.”
And those years were difficult ones—a lot of opportunity, but a lot of isolation. Black’s parents were there for her but also as overwhelmed and confused as she was. She started being home-schooled. The family’s relationship with Ark Music quickly fell apart, and lawsuits started flying. Black got a new agent and manager, and her first single after “Friday” did well enough, but the following ones petered out. In this period, she released one song that charted, peaking at No. 55 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2013. It was called “Saturday.”
Wilson, who was mocked and harangued for his role in producing “Friday,” was trying pretty much the same thing, releasing “Happy,” the official sequel to “Friday,” among other songs. Neither this nor any of the other songs stuck. Ark Music Factory went defunct. Wilson started a new label, which tried to do what Ark Music had done inadvertently, creating so-bad-it’s-good viral videos on purpose. He had some success, but the shtick had become really calculating and heartless. And YouTube, which had once been the engine of online virality, was ceding that title to other social media platforms. It got harder and harder to make a living, and that combined with the online backlash took a toll on his mental health. Today, he still makes music and looks back on “Friday” fondly.
“I really liked the song,” he says. “I still listen to the song now to see what I did back then versus what I’m doing now. How did I make such a catchy song? I wasn’t thinking about, ‘Oh, my God, people are going to hate this’ or ‘People going to like it.’ It … just came naturally.”
After a few years, Black decided to put “Friday” behind her. “I just was doing everything based off of what somebody else told me to do, and I was just miserable,” she says. “So there came a point where everybody that I was working with, management, all of that, I let go of all of them, and I just stopped. My parents and I agreed: I’m going to go back to high school.” After she finished high school, she made a deal with her parents that she would try music again”.
I don’t think there are guilty pleasure songs – though there are people who would label Friday as such. I have a soft spot for the song and Rebecca Black. Her studio album, Rebecca Black Was Here, is out next month. I am looking forward to seeing what she comes out with. It must be strange looking back a decade for any artist. For someone so young who was met with a lot of negativity, I am pleased that Rebecca Black is still recording. Friday is a perfectly fine song. It is one that you can spin if you need a bit of a boost. If one were to go back and change anything, perhaps redoing the music video would be near the top of the list. Apart from that, there is not a whole lot wrong with it. If you have avoided Friday for years or felt that it was a guilty pleasure, then take a few minutes out and give it a listen. It is a song that certainly was given some unfair press…
BACK in 2011.