Trying to make sense of this Rebecca Black thing...

Cafe Society
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…and not having a whole lot of success. Still, whenever I run into a truly baffling mystery, I can be very persistent in my attempts to unravel it (see also: Mike Tyson and Tiger Woods; how much fracking debt do they gotta rack up before you start demanding cash in full?). So here goes.

Okay, quick summary…vanity project, parents put $4,000 into it, eventually uploaded to YouTube, snark, criticism, hatred hatred hatred, death threats, meme, Most Talked About Songs On YouTube list, downloads, has her own YouTube page now, working on a new song and might make it a career.

Huh…where to even begin? All right, one level at a time:

Issue 1: It’s a lame, pathetic, worthless, crappy, insipid song!
Yeah. Agreed. Totally. Uh huh. Fer sure. Yeah. And? Seriously, and? You’re telling me you’ve never a heard a bland, forgettable pop song before? You’ve never heard someone use Autotune? You’ve never heard words repeated? Ever? Were you born on the space station or something? I’ve FORGOTTEN at least a hundred songs far, far worse than this. I have the EMF album which I spent my own money on, dammit. “Pop star releases empty fluff” is like “movie star sleeps with woman who’s not his wife”. Add the right factors, and it might be worthy of mild outrage. By itself, it’s nothing.

My god, there’s someone on the YouTube site who said “Rebecca showed me that you don’t need talent to be famous. Guess you learn something new everyday.” Are we talking Tea Party material or what?

Issue 2: She sucks and has no talent and relies on Autotune too much and oh yeah sucks!
All right, aside from the fact that she was 13 at the time and this is the first song she released ever, so expecting her to be the next world-changing megastar is a bit unreasonable (repeat after me: Michael Jackson was a fluke. Michael Jackson was a fluke.)…well, not to burst anyone’s brain stems, but when does this become objectionable? When the singer in question gets undeserved fame and fortune, of course. Completely justifiable with the Spice Girls, appropriate for Paris Hilton, and understandable for Justin Bieber, who has all kinds of merchandise despite his musical relevance being a notch above Reuben Studdard’s.

Friday was a vanity project her parents paid for and put on a website. No 8-figure contract. No whirlwind 15-city tour. No two-hour CNN expose. No guest spot on American Ninja Warrior. She doesn’t even have an album for crying out loud! (Unlike EMF!) As far as I can tell, the video elevated her from a random nobody to a random nobody who gets talked about a lot on one specific website. Even William Hung was bigger than that. Hey, do you the term I use for a singer with no record deal, concert schedule, or marketing? AMATEUR. If you expect Grammy-caliber material from a flippin’ amateur, well, she’s not the one I’d call a loser, if you know what I mean.

Oh, but she is pulling in some cash (which she should be thrilled with; I certainly would be). Something like $25,000 a week from downloads. A nice profit, to be sure, but hardly Michael Jackson territory. Plus she’s only making what her fans think she should be getting, as evidenced by how many of them are willing to pay for her song. I’ve had walks to the park that were more worthy of outrage than this.

Issue 3: I hate this song so much, I’m going to make a parody of it! That’ll show her!
Um…seriously, what? Hey, remember how every song Weird Al Yankovic ever parodied fell off the face of the planet and was never heard again? Me neither. He did parodies to boost his own career, not take down others. Because that doesn’t work. Everyone in the industry knows that bad publicity is still publicity. And violent hatred still means that you’re paying attention and spreading the word to others. Look at William Hung. If his detractors just said “This kid’s no good” and left it at that, he wouldn’t done exactly what they wanted, faded into obscurity. Instead, we got 50-page dissertations about how, when, and why he sucked, flame wars, parody videos, the whole package, and as a result his career lasted about 200 times as long as it should have. This wasn’t that long ago, folks!

So, in summary: Hate the song, fine. Think her 15 minutes will be up soon, naive but understandable. Hate her, don’t really see the point. Think YouTube is a haven for brilliant, professional-quality music, dumb. Think there’s anything shocking about a no-talent pop star having some success, super-dumb. Feel savage, violent, blood-curdling hatred, Bizarro world.

Phew…anyway, discussion?

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If she’s that bad, just ignore her until she goes away. That’s how I got rid of that Mubarak fellow.

But yeah, I’m puzzled by the rabid hatred folks have for Rebecca Black and Justin Bieber. I’m fond of pointing out that the only reason that Rebecca Black is so famous is because people who claim to dislike her can’t. stop. talking about her. Everywhere. The only reason I’m aware that Justin Bieber exists is because people couldn’t help but complain about him all the time. I still haven’t heard more than 10 seconds of any of his music (not counting his rap battle versus Ludwig Von Beethoven, of course.

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I don’t really think that too many people actually hate her all that much. It’s better if you think of Rebecca Black hatedom as a meme.

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Okay, now defend Jedward.

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Rebecca Black is the logical conclusion to the microwave-button-instant-stardom-burn-out-or-dead-at-27 craptastic artists and music prevalent in the world today.

What’s next? Some preteen farting through cotton panties backed with a Dr. Dre booty bass beat?

The line of no-talent assclowns with disposable cash stretches out the door. Rebecca was last in line, just after last year’s American Idol rejects.

6

I just thought the song was funny as fuck. The video was hillarious as well… I played the shit at work just to crack people up… tortured my kids with it when I picked them up from school…Never put that much thought into it…

The dude rapping on the song was EPIC!! I think the Black family played a lot of this shit up for publicity as well they should have. BTW RustyCage has some nice stuff on Youtube…

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It’s not a horrible song – it’s a canned one. The practice probably dates back to the beginning of recordings – people would write music, you’d add lyrics and then pay to sing it. It would impress your relatives.

The only difference is that now it’s a video and put up on Youtube. It would have been promptly forgotten except the someone decided to call this the worst song ever, and the video went viral.

There are far worse out there and it’s stupid to hate the poor girl for being one of the very few who fell for this semi-scam and managed to get noticed for it.

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Them’s fighting words. I can have 20,000 Jedtards (not sure if that’s the word) signing up here to make your life a living hell in just a couple of tweets. :slight_smile:

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I don’t hate Rebecca Black. I find her annoying, but that’s not her fault. I’m sure she didn’t plan to have the overnight fame she ended up with when she made a record to share with her friends. She’s not a very good singer and the song is insipid…but damn that thing’s catchy. It gets stuck in my head and I can’t get rid of it. Fortunately her new one doesn’t share the same trait (even when a couple of my WoW raid team members can’t shut up about it!). I expect she’ll be a footnote in a year, just like all the other YouTube sensations out there.

Now Justin Bieber is another story. Every time I see his smirky “I’m cool and I know it and you’re not” face I want to punch it. Or put a bag over it. I’m not sure which. He’s way more annoying to me than Rebecca Black.

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But what about this?

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As far as Bieber goes, it kind of helps if you think of him in the role of baby lesbian Ellen-Degeneres-stalker, Single White Female style.

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I have no idea who she is, but she’s pulling in 25,000 a week on a 4,000 investment? Damn how do I do that.

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How does that even work? How do you get paid for youtube views?

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If you get enough hits, you get some ad revenue.

As for this Rebecca Black thing, this is the first I’ve heard about it in probably a couple months, I figured her 15 minutes were already over. As for the actual phenomenon, or whatever it is, it’s a combination of a few things. First, I think there was a lot of hype by her parents and relatives around it that made people think it was bigger than it was which made people react to it as if it was bigger than it was, which actually made it become bigger.

Second, there’s nothing particularly special about her. Her talent is mediocre at best, she’s not especially cute, she doesn’t demonstrate any dance ability, etc. So, to some people this probably comes across as “look anyone can do it, maybe I can too” and they get inspired and do something. To others, it comes across that anyone try to do it and she did, and they hate it all the more because of how much they dislike the result. Either of those makes for people being interested.

Third, it really is awful, musically and lyrically, even by pop music standards, but that’s sort of the point, it’s still kind of catchy, and the trite awfulness of the lyrics makes it quotable. It’s this catchiness and quotability that help to propogate the song into social consciousness. And, of course, hatred actually gets you more views than people liking it, so it makes it even more popular because they’re actively talking about how much they hate it, getting people interested in seeing how bad it is, and getting multiple views so they can trash it and vote it down.

Either way, she’ll make her quick bucks, but all the interest will be lacking when she releases a second song because the interest of the first one won’t carry her forever, and she’ll have to have talent, hotness, dancing, scandal, something to keep attention on her and it won’t be there. She’ll be utterly forgotten in a year.

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She’s already released a second song. It’s called “My Moment.” It’s not anywhere near as catchy or insipid as “Friday”–just your typical bland, boring pop song. I suspect you’re right, except that it won’t take a year before she’s forgotten.

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She’s a very bankable meme.

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43,000 iTunes downloads & a Glee cover for a start

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The discussion is centering around Rebecca Black, but that’s not the issue. The issue is, why so much hate?

Something kind of fun and kind of profitable happened for her. She didn’t deserve it? Meh, everyone deserves good luck, no-one does.

She’s taking something from ‘real artist’? Spare me. Real art, like virtue, is it’s own reward. Meaningless pop is always more profitable.

There is just no reason to be so vicious about this little girl.

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I’m not sure if you’re overthinking or underthinking this, but I think it’s pretty easy to understand the Black hatred (err…).

“Friday” is the worst song most people have ever heard with that level of production and obvious money spend on it.

That’s all there is to it. It’s not lousy like a Black Eyed Peas filler track lousy. Or lousy like a 13-year-old with Garage Band and a cheap mic on Youtube lousy. It’s lousy in a “how is it even possible that this exists?” way. It is to pop music what “The Room” is to film. It transcends “bad” to become “fascinating.”

The hubbub and death threats and blah blah blah are all just the random accretion that surrounds anything “viral” nowadays. People always get upset when somebody “cheats” their way to the top.

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I was going to say that Rebecca Black is not going to profit off of any covers of this song since she is not the writer or publisher. She may own the video (apparently there may be some dispute over this), but not the song.

But then I looked in the ASCAP data base and much to my surprise I see the following listed under “writers”:
BLACK REBECCA
JEYARETNAM CLARENCE RANJITH
WILSON ITEKE PATRICE

Patrice Wilson is the owner of Ark Music Factory (the vanity recording studio) who has claimed credit for writing the song. Jeyaretnam (a.k.a. “Clarence Jey”) is the producer of the video.

I would be interested to know if anyone could explain how Rebecca Black came to be credited for writing the song.