I love it when the internet takes something and just runs with it
Beatcha to it–see post #68 
The song’s awful, but I fail to see how it’s vastly worse to other similar efforts that aren’t vanity effort.
I did enjoy Charlie Brooker’s unusually mild piece on the vitriol.
Well…ah…confidentially…I’ve heard worse.
I’m not sure this is true.
Ok, when I’m not practicing law, I work on the side as a DJ (nothing great, just a wedding/school dance/church group kind of thing). Because I have just enough business to justify it, I have a subscription to a DJ CD service that sends me promotional releases a month ahead of the formal release in hopes that I will expose people to it. It is the same (or one of the same) sent to radio stations and the like.
“Friday” was on the CD a while back. Someone planned to release it. Granted, only about a third of the songs on any given CD get any serious airplay, but it seems clear someone wanted this exposed to the world before it became a youtube joke.
That was fucking awesome!!!
There’s a clip on ABC news of her singing a little bit of the national anthem, and she sounds a lot better. Not perfect, but better.
For some reason she wants to go all nasal on “Friday.” I think she’s mimicking what she hears in Auto-Tuned pop, but that’s normally added by the filter and the mixers, not the voice itself. She thus gets a sort of double dose of the effect, and it’s too much.
Because that video is painfully cheesy and isn’t pretending to be pop. It was either recorded long ago, or is a throw back to a much older style. The thing that freaked people out about Black’s video is that the video quality is rather good, and confirms rather well to the way modern music videos are constructed. It is a rather well crafted video. The problems are in the voice and lyrics (and perhaps the less than model perfect extras). There’s so much about this video that is right.
The problem is that there is currently a large backlash against bad singing and bad lyrics in pop, and this takes it a lot further. It takes it so far that many people thought the whole thing was a joke until Black started defending herself. And once it appeared on Tosh.0, it officially became cool to make fun of her video (as that’s what that show is all about).
Of course, at that point, it’s in the media, and the counter-backlash started. Celebrities started defending her. Talk shows and news shows wanted her to appeal to a younger demographic. They don’t want to be caught behind the meme like they were with Rick Astley. There is now a big controversy over whether she deserves to be insulted as she has been, and controversy means popularity. Combine the TV and the Internet, and you have a modern pop culture sensation.
And if she gets what she wants and gets Bieber to do a duet with her, she’s going to create even more controversy, and her 15 minutes are going to last even longer.
It’s an odd mixture. She originally wanted in just as a little fun thing with her friends, but the studio wanted more.
The story as I understand it is that Black had written a song, and wanted to do a video for her friends. She spies an ad in the paper that wants young singers for a video, if they pay for it. She goes to an audition, and they decide that, while they don’t like her song, she has a good voice, image, etc, and give her a choice of two songs to sing. One is about teen romance, which she doesn’t feel comfortable with, so she picks the other song.
The studio had actually put out the ad to try to make a real pop video, and they see Black as their best chance. She is told that, while it’s a long shot, she might become popular. Black had wanted to be a singer-song writer eventually anyways, so she jumps on the chance. As a reward to her friends who got her started in all this, she gets them all in the video. They all assume it’s going nowhere, but it’s a fun little project.
Of course a studio is going to push as much as they can for their new pop attempt, so it doesn’t surprise me that they didn’t just release it on YouTube. They definitely weren’t expecting Tosh.0 to pick it up.
Friday done like it was an actual song.
Somehow it’s worse.
I thought about making another topic for this, but I’ll just post it here:
Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, and The Roots Perform “Friday.”
Easily the most amazing, epic version of this song. Videos like these should make everyone just pack it up and go home. It can’t be topped.
This is proof that God loves us and wants us to never sleep again.
Worse? Worse?! That’s the best link in the thread! 
At this rate, “Friday” may soon pass The Beatles’ “Yesterday” as the most-covered song in history!
You heard the song, now play the game…
http://www.bored.com/game/play/151297/Rebecca_Whack_Its_Friday_.html
I really liked that. I’ve saved the video, and am converting to an mp3.
Then there is this version, more about Sunday than Friday, from some USC Film School folks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEI-KRf9WgY
Is it wrong that this version made me kinda like the song? I cracked up about 4 times watching it…
I hate this song but it’s catchy.
I do, however, understand all the hatred and death-threat-levely amount of bile this song and Black inspires.
If I didn’t get so much pleasure mocking it, in a parallel universe I might have been one of those people.
All I can say is thank god that Weird Al didn’t parody Friday for his lead single, as I feared he might…