Highest-Paid Actresses 2011

Since it was first posted in mid-February of 2011,Rebecca Black’s self-written song and YouTube phenomenon “Friday” has received more than 34 million views and is on the iTunes top 100. Produced by Ark Music Factory, the video features 13-year-old Rebecca and her friends driving around town in an obviously fake car singing about how excited they are for the upcoming weekend.

Rebecca Black’s single “Friday” consists of meaningless lyrics such as “gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal” and “we, we, we so excited; we, we, we going to have a ball today,” making the song not only terrible, but also completely grammatically incorrect. Black also has a break in her song when the lyrics tell us “Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday. Today it is Friday, Friday. Tomorrow is Saturday, and Sunday comes afterwards.” As if we didn’t know, Rebecca, as if we didn’t know.

One of the worst aspects of the song is Black’s awful singing voice — I mean, is this the chipmunk version? The high-pitched squeals of Rebecca’s voice put my eardrums in an agony I thought could only be brought on by car alarms and wailing infants. Her voice, which I assumed was overly auto-tuned, actually sounds exactly the same in her live acoustic version, which she performed for Good Morning America on March 18.

Watching the content of this video, which is produced surprisingly well, makes me sick to my stomach. Thirteen-year-old Rebecca Black and her friends really have no need to drive a car (even a pretend car) all over the city to “party, party, yeah!” These middle school-age girls with full faces of makeup, wearing high heels and short dresses are pictured driving around in cars with boys and out on the town — where are these girls’ parents anyway?

Nowadays it’s not even surprising to me that our culture spends spare time listening to crap like this. If I heard this on a top-40 station, I wouldn’t even be surprised. The song itself, which I honestly thought was a parody when I first heard it, has no substance — but then again, neither do most popular songs by Britney Spears or Rihanna. It is honestly sad to me we can make this horrible video one of the most played on the Internet while plenty of capable independent artists cannot get their music heard. I’m not going to pretend to be a songwriter, but I do think Black could have written lyrics that at least rhyme or don’t sound  like a preschool lesson on the days of the week.

To put the whole in thing in perspective, however, Rebecca Black is a 13-year-old girl, with no previous experience in the spotlight whatsoever besides the lead in her school’s production of Oklahoma! She also only made it big because her parents pumped a large amount of money into their daughter’s “career.” A pre-teen such as Black probably has nothing to worry about except “getting down on Friday,” and the song — although awful — may become a hit among young girls in similar situations.

Rebecca Black describes herself as an “aspiring entertainer” on her Ark Music Factory profile. Let’s all hope she remains “aspiring” for awhile.