Rebecca Black's "Friday" hailed as the worst song ever

 Alex Nancarrow

One can find numerous types of videos when searching the popular site YouTube.com. Some of the most popular viral videos to come from the site include music videos, comedy sketches, videos of animals and even babies. Generally these videos become viral because they are extremely funny or are just a quality production. Some videos, however, become popular for all of the wrong reasons.

California teen Rebecca Black recently acquired popularity for a music video which she starred in called “Friday”. This video was recorded and produced by ARK Music Factory. ARK is a small record label in Los Angeles, California who attempts to discover new youth singers. The company will work with the artist to write (or help write) a song and then they will usually create a music video to go along with the song.

Black’s video was uploaded to YouTube on February 10, 2011 and it received several thousand views within the first month. Starting around March 11, 2011 the music video’s views skyrocketed into the millions in only a few days. As of March 24, 2011, “Friday” has received over 44 million views. She has done interviews for radio stations and has even appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to perform her song and then discuss with host Jay Leno the negative feedback she has received for the song.

But why have people given such a negative response towards Black’s music video? It is possible that she has not received praise for her musical talent because her voice is auto tuned throughout the entire song, which just does not sound very good. Maybe it is because of the simplistic lyrics in the song, which includes “7 AM, waking up in the morning, gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs, gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal”. After this, Black sings about going to her bus stop to go to school, but she sees her friends drive up. She then contemplates which seat she will sit in, even though the only spot left in the car is in the back seat. Perhaps the silliest part of the song is when Black sings “Yesterday was Thursday, today is Friday…tomorrow is Saturday and Sunday comes afterwards” as if we do not know the days of the week already. “At first I thought the song was obnoxious, then I thought it was funny,” says Burris junior Molly Boylan, “I still think she is a terrible singer though.”

Despite all of her criticism and the fact that her song has been unofficially named “the worst song of all time”, “Friday” has peaked at positions 72, 88, and 33 for the top 100 songs in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand respectively. Her music video on YouTube.com has also been steadily receiving more views every day. Numerous parodies and remixes have also spawned from the video as well. Black plans to donate what she makes off of her iTunes sales and ad revenue from YouTube to the relief effort in Japan and also to her school, El Rancho Charter.