Rebecca Black and the Art of Being Bad

It’s official: Bad is the new good. For the moment, anyway.

While music tastes and styles have always been subjective, there’s no disputing that the buzz that built overnight around “Friday,” fledgling teen “singer” Rebecca Black’s ode to the weekend, is a sign that you don’t necessarily need to be good at what you do to draw attention. If you do it badly enough, that’ll do the trick. 

Rebecca’s now infamously bad little ditty was uploaded to YouTube in February earlier this year, but no one paid it much mind. And why should they?

It was produced by an outfit called Ark Music Factory, a Los Angeles-based music label that seems to be the depository for all of those “We Can Turn Your Kid Into A Star” seminars that stage parents shuttle their kids to in hotels conference centers in suburbs across the country. Like Rebecca, Ark hosts a ton of these singing tweens and teens, making “factory” an appropriate term for their namesake. Though considering the level of talent they’re signing, Titanic Records might be more fitting.

Were it not for Comedy Central’s “Tosh 2.0″ blog (and other social media leaders) picking up on Rebecca’s mediocrity with the aptly titled blog post: “Songwriting Isn’t For Everyone” on March 11, most of us would’ve never come across her or her “talents.” That pivotal burst of distribution set the wheels in motion, spurring Rebecca’s name to the top of Twitter’s trending topics for days.

The best description of the song and video is that it’s kind of like Ke$ha, but slowed down, sandpapered to remove any semblance of edge and uncomfortably awkward. The fact that Rebecca Black manages to sound awful even with autotune at work is a remarkable feat in and of itself.

As Rebecca painfully bleats out the mangled chorus, “FRIDAY! FRIDAY! Gettin’ down on Friday!” you suddenly begin to appreciate the Justin Biebers of the world. See for yourself:

 

The top 4 things that make “Friday” so bad in short order:

• The Lyrics: Rebecca is not the first pop star to leave much to be desired when it comes to her prose, but whoever put this song together couldn’t even be bothered do little more than dictate, literally, the girl’s day down to the most minute details. Sittin’ in the front seat, sittin’ in the back seat, who cares? Just go to school, Becca.
• The Lie Telling: Rebecca is not honest in this song. First, she tells us she’s going outside to the bus stop to wait for her school bus. But a bus doesn’t pull up to pick her up. Instead, a convertible (!) driven by clearly underage teens pulls up to the curb to scoop Becca up for a thrilling weekend. Are we really supposed to suspend disbelief and swallow the fact that a band of 14-year-olds is really hitting the highway for a wild night out on the town?
• That Old Rapper Dude: Is that Ludacris’ cousin twice removed or Usher’s middle-aged uncle going through a mid-life crisis? Say what you will about Rebecca, but at least she has the folly of youth as an excuse for her poor taste. But this guy is a grown man who should know better. He should’ve left his “rapping” on MySpace.
• The Overwhelming Stench of Awkwardness: You’ve gotta feel for Rebecca. Puberty is a strange, uncomfortable time in many people’s lives. But that doesn’t mean we should be forced to witness her stiff performance with her hands by her side at all times and her robot-like facial expressions. And the scene with her tween friend with braces trying to get jiggy in the drop top is just too much.

While dressing down the video for all its flaws is great fun, as a piece of content, it’s turned out to be solid gold for Rebecca and Ark Music Factory. Some might say the Internet’s amusement with Rebecca is a sign of our ever-decreasing standards, but let’s not pretend like the nation wasn’t swept by the dreadful “Macarena,” ok?

What the openness of the web allows for is the masses to choose its stars. (Though Comedy Central’s Tosh 2.0 taking part in its distribution might taint that slightly) Rebecca Black would never have made it onto the roster of serious music labels like Sony, Universal and Warner Bros, but with YouTube and social media, we the people can rubberneck at all the train wrecks we want without anyone trying to filter for quality. That may be good or bad, depending on your point of view, but it’s letting all sorts of content into the wider public that we’d otherwise never see.

Of course, the fact that Rebecca’s video has gone viral doesn’t mean she’s destined for a Grammy anytime soon. This kind of “fame” is often short-lived as Rebecca is nothing more than a meme and a canvas for people’s sarcastic barbs and biting commentaries. We’ll all move on to the next awful thing in no time.

But with over 9 million views on YouTube, countless covers and parodies, over 24,000 followers on Twitter, the song “Friday” hitting the top 100 on iTunes and a write-up on RollingStone.com that calls her widely panned song “actually good,” Rebecca Black is winning Charlie Sheen-style.

But will this flash-in-the-pan have any staying power? The odds are, probably not (William Hung, anyone?) So for organizations trying to tap into this trend of bad as the new good for their content strategy, tread carefully, because after sweeping the nation off their feet you’re likely to be swept back to obscurity.

Related articles

• How Rebecca Black Became a YouTube Sensation (mashable.com)
• Rebecca Black: Why is She Trending on Twitter? (blogs.forbes.com)
• Rebecca Black Releases the Worst Song in Recorded History (thehollywoodgossip.com)
• Even Negativity Brings Fame On YouTube and Twitter (webpronews.com)