Rebecca Black has become the latest Internet tween sensation with her hit single "Friday." With the video climbing from just 3,000 views on YouTube to 18 million in a week (right now sitting pretty with nearly 30 million), "Friday" can be called a success story — right? Sort of.
The 13-year-old's song was christened with the title "Worst Music Video Ever" by Gawker and only garnered public exposure after comedian Daniel Tosh's segment "Songwriting Isn't For Everyone" on Tosh.0. In essence, Rebecca Black is famous for being awful.
With incredibly bad lyrics like "Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday / Today is Friday, Friday / Tomorrow is Saturday / And Sunday comes afterwards / I don't want this weekend to end," why does anyone listen? Why do bad things get so popular in the first place? Jersey Shore, anyone?
For one, the simplicity of the lyrics makes it extremely catchy and therefore easy to replicate in parody. Moreover, a great deal of the video's "virality" comes from the numerous video parodies in response.
"Friday" has its origins in Tosh.0, a show that parodies video clips on the Internet. The only reason anyone even talks about the junior high schooler from Anaheim Hills, California is solely to make fun of her. But there are plenty of bad videos, many of which have been featured on Tosh.0, yet none have spawned such popularity as Black's. What makes this one special?
The song infiltrates the masses in two ways: through re-appropriation, link-sharing and parody via social media like Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr and Twitter, and through the explosion of media coverage that uses the song's viral popularity as an excuse to begin discourse on the current degradation of popular music. It's no wonder the song has spawned articles in low culture gossip rags to more legitimate sources like Reuters, Forbes, The Daily Beast and TIME.
What makes "Friday" popular is not that it's bad or catchy, but rather , it is the song's utility. Rarely do people begin conversations with "Wwere you at so-and-so's party on Friday?" anymore. Rather, we exchange stories of what we saw online last night, not of shared experiences. Communities begin online and take on lives their own.
The things that will become popular on the Internet are the ones that give us fodder to talk about in real life. Given the ongoing dissection of her origins and interviews with her producers, Rebecca Black gives us plenty to discuss. After all, she and the song are truly mediocre at best and Black is well aware of this. While featured on last week's Good Morning America, Rebecca tells the interviewer, "I don't think I'm the worst singer, but I don't think I'm the best."
There it is. Only at the peak of the Internet generation could something so unspectacular become so explainably extraordinary.
