Eliana Steinberg
Life Editor
There are incidents that are bound to go viral—the unbelievable half court shot or the live broadcast racist slur… and then there are those that pry their way onto our homepages, racking up views based on their mere absurdity.
This past week we’ve been hit with young music video maven, thirteen-year old Rebecca Black. Her music video for her single “Friday” was uploaded to YouTube a month ago, but has just recently circulated the Milken social networking scene in these past few days.
In the video, Black takes her audience along with her on a regular Friday, narrating her morning routine: “7 am waking up in the morning/ Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs.”
We are consulted on her seating choice in that same childish tone in which we were asked to find the “clue” years ago by striped-shirt wearing Steve. Rebecca eventually settles for the back.
Rebecca Black was signed by “Ark Music Factory,” an independent music label based in Los Angeles. The label works with numerous pre-teen and teenaged young women to create music and music videos. The videos, which are uploaded to YouTube, chronicle the everyday lives of auto-tuned, sassy kids as they open and shut their computer screens and get driven to school.
Sure, we’ve seen ridiculous YouTube videos. The website is full of them—children falling off of logs, hiccupping babies. But it’s the air of professionalism she exudes as she sings about breakfast cereal, the high-tech camera, and of course the exorbitant view-count that makes her video somewhat remarkable. In brief moments we question if her video is a parody, for instance when an older rapper enters the green screen. Driving down the street, he raps about this thirteen year-old’s excitement for the weekend. After his car-ride shimmying episode, the video fades into a scene of a rowdy crowd, punching their fists in the air in the spirit of TGIF.
YouTube is full of young, striving musicians, of gawky preteens plucking at their ukulele as they cover Jason Mraz. Rebecca has made it. She’s the girl in the tie-dye shirt singing “Party in the USA” in her room, but with some professional lighting and a personal makeup crew.
She has managed to sing about the weekday sequence (“Tomorrow is Saturday/ Sunday comes afterwards”) and achieve relative Internet fame. Her video has reached almost 10 million views in a single month. Does the reasoning behind these hits even matter?
The Internet has given the speechless a voice, and the musically inept a fan base. Rebecca Black, however outrageous her music is, is a prime example of the power of the mouse.
Nate Nourian • Mar 19, 2011 at 1:11 pm
i love that friday song!
Anonymous • Mar 16, 2011 at 3:03 pm
Had this article been about the US policy of isolationism in World War II, I would have remarked that the ideological basis for disagreement between the two sides necessitated intervention on the grounds that a diplomatic and peaceful resolution could never be achieved while one side was set on imperialism. Therefore, the switch from isolationism to interventionism was not only necessary, it was inevitable.