Top 100 moments in Rebecca Black's "Friday" music video

xp what are you, william butler yeats?

like dumb songs about getting wasted and getting laid have a qualitative difference than a dumb song about a pre-teen eating cereal and waiting for the bus.

get up, get out of bed
drag a comb across my head
made my way downstairs and drank a cup
looking up, i noticed i was late
grabbed my coat, grabbed my hat
gotta get down to the bus stop
gotta catch the bus
'cuz its FRI-EEE-DAY, FRI-EEE-DAY

also has anyone considered the possibility that if this girl 'sounds like' ke$ha it's because maybe she LIKES ke$ha and was trying to emulate her? "gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal" is kinda like a crude 13-year-old approximation of "wake up in the morning feelin' like p.diddy", right?

I feel kinda bad for her tbh, imagine if that fake pop song you recorded in your bedroom when you were 12 was all of a sudden being parodied by 5 million ppl and perpetua was calling you non-charismatic

But it's not like this is the Numa Numa guy in his bedroom, RB has to some degree signed up to "being a pop star" with whatever promotion Ark can offer. It's a bit sad that she finds out how the world/Internet works in such a public way but she or her parents should have known better.

but this 'now i'm doing this, now i'm doing that, making a statement of fact' super banal stuff is actually more reminiscent of the first robin sparkles song on HIMYM than actual charting pop music.

― c sharp major, Tuesday, March 15, 2011 6:52 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark

haha yes, 'let's go to the mall' has inexplicably been in my head as a result of r.b., though idk, they're not quite the same

i guess because partying *is* exciting but going to the ma-a-all isn't.

I'm gonna do this version of the song as some serial killer type might do it and I'll be like super-viral, it'll be so funny

then I will live another 40 years or so with the shame of my act, and then die

an incognito rebecca black will place roses on your grave once a year

man it's gonna be even more awesome to be dead than I thought

she'll only visit your grave when the night winds wail, though.

all the lonely people where do they all come from
fun fun fun fun

gotta have my bowl gotta visit my serial

killer

wait what the hell that doesnt even make sense

thread is moving so quickly that you could declare 'friday' to be the vacuous pop analog of 'life: a user's manual' and nobody would notice. hitler. poo.

friday's probably the best english translation of a perec work yeah

clearly her agonizing over whether to get in the front or back seat is symbolic of the anxiety teen girls feel regarding their impending womenhood. does she ride in the chaste front seat, or become a creature of sexual agency by choosing the back seat?

there are levels of complexity here you sneering ghouls have not even begun to scratch

seeing as the rapper is actually the adult version of her, one could say that this dilemma is resolved by learning to be comfortable in both seats

first you insinuate she is a timeshifting biracial hermaphrodite, and then recommend a path of polymorphous, perverse sexuality? you sir are a cad.

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_li1wy9Izj41qde9zqo1_500.jpg

12. beats a level of Super Mario World at 0:44

can someone plz explain this i dont get it ;_;

LOL politics blogger John Cole:

Apparently this is the newest big thing, and it is sweeping the intertrons because it is apparently really, really bad. Critics are panning it, and Sullivan included one critic who stated that “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.”

Here’s my problem, and why I think I am getting old. First, I’d never heard of it. Second, I watched it and listened, and to me, it seemed not much worse than most of the crap you hear every day anyway. Flip through the television and watch any of the shows on Disney or those networks geared towards teens, and you hear this kind of crap every single day. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t my style of music and I think it is bad in that sense and I will live a very happy life if I never have to listen to it again, but I have a hard time describing it as qualitatively worse than any crap that has spewed from Miley Cyrus or the likes. If I were in a store or restaurant and that was playing in the background I wouldn’t stop and say “That’s really bad,” because it sounds just like all the other crap out there passing itself off as music.

And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.

xp the sound effect in the background is basically equivalent to when you cross the final gate-thing in a super mario world level

hahahah nice, that's pretty subtly down in the mix! XD

You can depend on The Ark for subtlety.

55. The kid in the green shirt at 1:57 shouting "yeah," he's like a one man Smashmouth Junior.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t my style of music and I think it is bad in that sense and I will live a very happy life if I never have to listen to it again, but I have a hard time describing it as qualitatively worse than any crap that has spewed from Miley Cyrus or the likes. If I were in a store or restaurant and that was playing in the background I wouldn’t stop and say “That’s really bad,” because it sounds just like all the other crap out there passing itself off as music.

Though I would never resort to this kind of crochety old guy language, he's basically otm.

if production cost for videos that **look** professional hadnt come way way down in the past couple years 'professional' critics wouldnt have a child's vanity video to get all haughtily critical about. i kind of get the feeling its taken seriously at all bcuz it has a veneer of similarity to 'the real thing'

^^^^

I think John Cole's inability to distinguish b/w Rebecca and Miley et al stems from the fact that he's probably unaware that there are rules at work in even the most simplistic, sub-literate corporate pop.

People find "Friday" hilarious not because it's appreciably more stupid in general than other pop songs, but because somehow it's also stupid about pop notwithstanding the fact that clearly a lot of people involved either have experience in the area or money to hire other people who do.

The key mistake "Friday" makes being that it's form is pop-as-storytelling and yet it has no story to tell (or rather, one so banal it's not worth telling) and no sense of how to tell a story. If it was designed for dancing to the lyrics wouldn't feel as prominent as they are. And that general mistake flows through to all the specific mistakes: the insane and meaningless level of detail with which Rebecca describes events that no-one seriosusly could imagine the listener caring about similarly sets her up to be lambasted for the poor writing in general.

We could of course go after Britney's "Three" (or "Hold It Against Me" for that matter) for similar reasons but any listener who has a basic working understanding of pop knows that the lyrics there are simply placeholders for some functional sex-and-dancing-frission effect.

But obv "Friday" isn't worth getting haughty about - if anything it's like an instructional video for budding pop songwriters. If I was running an Ark equivalent my project for students would be to take the song and make it good while changing as little as possible.

ugh wrong "it's" totally undermines everything I just said.

when she says "gotta have cereal" her lips say something totally different. maybe they changed the lyric in post?

like maybe she said the brand name of a cereal in the song and they made her change it?

ok, this is going to destroy me, who reads lips?

I can - she was originally saying "smoke weed every day"

The song that it reminds me of a bit is Ashlee Simpson's "L.O.V.E." (crossed with the Degrassi Junior High theme tune), which is barely more intelligent or thoughtful in the lyrical department - but this really shows up the difference, in that Ashlee doesn't perform "L.O.V.E." in a storytelling style, so when she simply starts spelling out the letters in the title it doesn't feel (as it does with Rebecca when she starts repeating "fun fun fun") that she's simply run out of things to say, it's more like she's just messing around and, if particular factual nuggets emerge from the mix ("my boyfriend should be calling me now anytime" etc.) these are impressionistic condiments rather than solid plot points.

People find "Friday" hilarious not because it's appreciably more stupid in general than other pop songs, but because somehow it's also stupid about pop notwithstanding the fact that clearly a lot of people involved either have experience in the area or money to hire other people who do.

yeah most of the people finding it hilarious are people who actually love pop. and who love pop going to extremes, like this is so hilarious a new low that it just elicits pure delight. j shep and i were talking about this on twitter, you gotta talk about the rules of camp w/r/t this song's "popularity" - obv m-perp failed to even come close to this - and the thing is even the people still stuck on "hating" it, who keep talking about how it's THE WORST - they're playing by the exact same rules of camp as all the kids on ONTD and last.fm calling her the wig-snatching new queen of pop.

if anything it's like an instructional video for budding pop songwriters

yeah the lyrics really feel like placeholder lyrics - like when a songwriter has a structure and melody mapped out and is just singing la-la-la stream-of-consciousness words to sketch it out.

are we sure it's not an actual instruction manual for teens put into a song?

A modern Schoolhouse Rock, then.

really looking forward to lots more thinkpieces about the vanity-commissioned song that went viral - high hopes for some really awesome thinkpieces

the first couple of lines just made me think of like a fascist camp for school children

7am wakin up in the morning
gotta be fresh
gotta go downstairs
gotta have my bowl
gotta have cereal
gotta give thanks to my lord and protector
gotta serve our nation's great leader

Man, so wanna post a picture now of Kim Jong-Il with "IT'S FLIE-DAY, FLIE-DAY" lyrics but it just seems in bad taste.

yeah it's a shame cuz in the right context that would seem witty and thought provoking

I had the SouthPark pokemon training camp in the back of mind the wholetime, so I am picking up what you're putting down there, Phil

gotta have my bowl
smoke weed, listen to sade

People find "Friday" hilarious not because it's appreciably more stupid in general than other pop songs, but because somehow it's also stupid about pop notwithstanding the fact that clearly a lot of people involved either have experience in the area or money to hire other people who do.

I'd say it's actually not very stupid about pop at all if you take into account the low expectations one normally has from a vanity song. I mean when I first saw it without knowing what it was I didn't mentally categorize it as another zonday-type lol video, I just thought "here's another unambitious and mediocre pop song." Once you find out that it's a vanity thing I feel like you can only come to one of two conclusions: (1) that it's become incredibly easy to make a moderately catchy pop song or (2) that Ark Music are awfully good for vanity producers. Or possibly both. Seems like there's maybe an underlying attempt by the Ark Music guys to show that they can make a hit with ANYONE, that the singer doesn't matter at all. Which is sort of interesting, I guess.

The thing is I don't feel like there are clear rules of camp anymore, because camp so dominates the culture. I can't tell if the lyrics of this song are supposed to be funny or not and either way they seem so mind-numbing that it doesn't matter to me.

maybe she wrote it! are their song credits anywhere? maybe i missed them somewhere.

lex, you were born for this thread/song/etc or something. write something about it somewhere.

And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.
And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.
And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.
And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.
And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.
And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.
And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.
And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.
And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.
And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.
And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.
And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.
And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.
And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.

i think it's true what scott said about the negative just not mattering to anyone any more. the ridicule doesn't mean a single thing to rebecca black and/or ark. they are officially the hottest thing on the internet as of this moment right here and i feel very confident that every single downvote or negative comment they see as just the inevitable haters hatin. the bigger you are the more haters you get, etc.