Gotta Get Down on Friday: The Rebecca Black phenomenon

Lately, the internet has been abuzz with talk of now quasi-star Rebecca Black. The 13 year old artist is best known for her single “Friday”. But this song has received anything but good reviews. The main subject is Friday, and how good it is to be at the end of the way. Sounds innocent enough, right? Wrong. Black’s voice is so distorted by the auto tune (an obvious and poorly executed attempt to sound like ke$ha) that it barley qualifies as a human voice. Her chorus is nasally, and it can’t be determined if that’s from the terrible auto tune or if she just sounds like that. In fact, if a program that strips human voices from a song is applied, the chorus remains. There’s also an inexplicable rapper that they just threw in there. It’s a song about 8th graders “partying”, and then this 40 year old guy comes in and starts rapping about how fast his car is going. And on the fact of their “partying”, that’s an expression commonly used to express social gatherings, most often with alcohol. So, the message is either “these middle schoolers are getting wasted” or “This girl has no idea what message she’s getting across.” Either way, things aren’t looking so great for Black. Now, down to the best part: The lyrics. She rhymes “Bowl” with “Cereal”. Some other key choices include “Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday”, “We we we so excited” and “Today it is Friday, Friday”. The best part? This was written for her. Proof can be found once again on YouTube. There’s a video of her singing, no auto tune, a version of “Friday” with a professional piano player. However, she forgets the words every couples of lines. In conclusion, this song lacks creativity, musical talent, and vocal skill. If Black had done less auto tune, it may have been bearable, but the constant drive in society to be like everyone else more or less killed her shot at a decent song.