YouTube and the new standards of musical atrocity

Cafe Society
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[This is largely in response to that “Hot Girls” video thread a little down.]

I remember making a thread asking, in all honesty, why the disco era created such monumental outrage. In a nutshell, the problem was that it was absolutely everywhere, nonstop, and there was no avoiding it. Plus it was crowding out 70’s rock acts. All of this culminated in an incredibly violent incident that ended up cancelling an entire baseball game. Then came gangsta rap and the culture of violence it glorified (punctuated by a number of real-life murders, most notably Tupac Shakur). After that was the boy band craze, clogging the airwaves with pap that would make Whitney Houston cringe.

In all these cases, there was massive hatred…because something really bad happened. Maybe a bit overstated, but it was understandable. Lesser offenses generated correspondingly lesser outrages. For example, hair metal was meaningless fluff, but for the most part the bands knew that, so today the virulent hatred is mostly the domain of super-hardcore metalheads and Cracked writers.

And then Rebecca Black came along.

Let me recap. Parents did a music video costing a few thousand bucks for her as a birthday present, and she put it online. That’s it. No radio play. No record deal. No tour. No awards-show appearances. No nationwide speaker circuit. No TV show. No 24/7 CNN coverage. No mountains of cash pouring in from Sony or Virgin Records or 19 Entertainment. All she ever got was a little profit from ITunes, a success which, predictably, she hasn’t been able to duplicate.

I was flabbergasted by the incredible howls of outrage the video generated. I swear, I don’t think most professional singers of this quality got anywhere near this much outrage. William Hung didn’t get as much outrage (and he has five albums!). For a video you can’t even see at all unless you’re specifically searching for it. (I think I heard about it from a Cracked article; I certainly don’t remember a word about it from TV or radio.) It’s just so…disproportionate. Yeah, it’s autotuned and boring and low quality etc. etc…She’s. An. Amateur. Whatever happened to “Don’t quit your day job”? (I suppose the equivalent here would be “Stay in school, kid”. Same diff.)

And how, Hot Girls, done by a pair of complete tabula rasas known only as Lauren and Not Lauren. Who, by their own admission, were just doing it for fun. I.e., there’s not even any specific purpose for this, unlike Friday, which we at least know was a birthday present. This has exactly the same level of depth, importance, significance, and, most importantly, profitability of a bunch of college buddies hanging out in the food court and swapping stories. How exactly does this warrant pages upon pages of amateur psychoanalysis and raging debates over their true quantified level of attractiveness?

The CNN story, in particular, was just baffling. Never mind the frankly unsettling implication that a completely random YouTube video deserved its own segment (and you know that will only encourage future goofballs), but that completely random nobodies whining and moaning about the video or making stupid parodies deserved a deference that the original video did not. The real howler, though, was that bleeding-ear poster saying “Make it stop”. Um…make WHAT stop? The only place the video exists at all is on the Internet. Your browser has a back button. And a close button. You absolutely do not have to see or hear one more millisecond of this than you want to. You are, in effect, calling for Internet censorship. Someone pushed for that a few months back. Didn’t go over so good.

Seriously, folks, what am I missing here?

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Yeah, I didn’t get it either. I mean, I can understand a YouTube video people thought was funny going viral, and I can understand people mocking a video that really was not very good, even though I thought a lot of the things said about Rebecca Black herself (who is just a kid) were inappropriate and cruel. But I did not get all the *complaining *about how bad “Friday” was. Of course it was bad! It was a song produced by the musical equivalent of a vanity press and performed by an adolescent amateur! What’s more, “Friday” only became well-known because it was considered so bad. If someone sends you a link for a song that’s supposed to be really bad, and then you watch it and it is really bad, whose fault is it that you were exposed to a bad song? I can see getting annoyed if you were RickRolled with it, but that anger should be directed at the person who created the link and not Rebecca Black.

My suspicion is that a lot of the outrage over “Friday” was from various creeps and losers who saw this as their way of getting symbolic revenge on all the pretty teenage girls who’d ever rejected or wronged them. I haven’t seen the “Hot Girls” video, but I’d guess it’s more of the same.

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It’s really not that bad, if you imagine Lou Reed is singing it and that it’s about heroin.

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Stealing this.

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But yea, as to the OP, I agree. Complaining about Rebecca Black is like going to a strangers school play and complaining about how bad the acting is.

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I failed to understand the outrage, too. The song is no worse than plenty of other songs (including some big hits) and Black clearly is just playing rock star for fun.

Part of the hatred is the herd mentality in parts of the Internet. People are told that it’s the worst thing ever, and then just follow the herd and agree without really listening to it. Then people start piling on. I’ve seen the same thing even before the Internet was big with things like Ishtar.

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The only complaint I’ve seen against Black herself is the (undisputed) fact that she has no singing talent. Heck, I’m not much of a singer, either. Most of the real vitriol seems to be directed towards the writers, producers, etc. who put together all the other pieces.

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The version of the national anthem she sang on ABC begs to differ. She has decent talent–she just doesn’t have anyone to teach her to shape it into something good. Sorry, I know that’s irrelevant to your point, but as a musician myself, it’s a pet peeve when someone is called unfairly called talentless.

Oh, and let’s not forget that Black received death threats and was pulled out of school. That is relevant to your point. People were indeed mad at Black, or at least took out their ire on her.

As for the OP: the answer is simply that she was a symbol. She stood in for all the pop dreck that people hate by being the worst of it.

The new song is intentionally exploiting this ire, but also combines it with the Samantha Brick ire. And, yes, I say intentionally–it’s too politically aware otherwise. I just hope we don’t have to go through too many more of these before people figure out they are trolls. I used to think my generation were savvier than this.

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I think part of it is too that there are a lot of people posting videos on YouTube who consider themselves to be “real” artists looking for recognition. Ever since Justin Bieber was discovered that way a number of people feel that they should be the next big discovery.

A lot of the vitriol directed at Rebecca Black seemed to initially come from people going “How does she get attention when I don’t!” They did take it personally.

Of course, once it went viral the whole Internet piled on because there is nothing the majority of the Internet likes more than kicking someone once they’ve been identified as an acceptable target.

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Here’s a link to the video in question. FYI, the duo has a name, “Double Take”, they have other songs, and they’re available on ITunes. I don’t know how successful they’ve been thus far; until I get some numbers, I’m pegging them as still in the “throw 'em against the wall and see if something sticks” phase.

One of the IMO puzzling things is that a lot of the ire is directed at the actual lyrics. I thought we were more sophisticated than that. I mean, anyone with an ounce of sense knew that Material Girl was a mockery of shallow, materialistic, self-absorbed golddiggers; certainly nobody who’s followed her career trajectory thinks it was about herself. (Seriously, how is advertising yourself as a living embodiment of a disgusting stereotype supposed to sell albums?) In The Air Tonight has long been debunked as being about an actual drowning Phil Collins witnessed, and you’d have to be legally blind to think that any member of Right Said Fred is too sexy for anything. It makes perfect sense that they’re joking. Not a good joke, but a joke nonetheless. They certainly didn’t come across as snobby it girls in the CNN interview.

Oh, and just as an interesting footnote, Rebecca Black is just eating this up. Go to her YouTube homepage. She’s beaming. She absolutely refuses to get upset. I know the morons can’t help but hurl endless bile, but you gotta know a lost cause when you see it, guys.