If you were to ask someone what the top trending topics are on Twitter, they might respond with Japan, Gadhafi, Nuclear Reactor, Tsunami, or Mass Animal Deaths. While these are very good guesses, they’d be wrong. The top trend of this past week has been Rebecca Black and her smash-hit single Friday.
Thanks to Miss Black’s mother, 2,000 dollars, and a few mean-spirited YouTube viewers, Friday has gone viral. From silly jpeg memes to covers and even Rolling Stone articles – it seems that everybody is talking about Friday. This isn’t your typical rise to stardom. Friday is popular for all of the wrong reasons – simply, people LOVE to HATE this song.
Aside from all of this, big-dollar record execs are probably drooling over the cost to play ratio. When you consider that; a) this song cost $2k to release, b) this girl has no prior fame or recording, and c) it has 27 million views in a week – one could imagine that they are following this one very closely.
While I agree that it’s a ‘nails-against-the-chalkboard’ kind of track, I am somewhat persuaded by the Rolling Stone article that suggests this track is an unintentional critique of modern pop music. Friday is the epitome of the conventions of pop music, the cookie-cutter 4-chord musical structure, auto-tune, stating the obvious, and so on. How insulting to our intelligence that she should explain how Saturday follows Friday, and how Sunday comes “after-wards”. And it’s Rebecca Black, the 13 year old, pop anti-sensation who is the one to make this so crystal clear that it’s almost mocking. Can Top 40 ever go back to being Top 40?