11 March 2011, 13 year old Rebecca Black uploads the new music video for her song “Friday” and wakes up the next morning to find that her video received a few hundred thousand views overnight! What she didn’t realize at that point was that the video went viral for all the wrong reasons: people hated it and she is now the internet’s latest meme!

How this video came to be: Rebecca Blacks’ parents thought it would be a good idea to give some money to the company “Ark Music Factory” to create a music video for her. So the company wrote the song, created the music and got the teen to robotically recite the incredibly “profound” lyrics so they could autotune it to death.

Accompanied by a badly shot video and a short rap verse sung by a random dude, who seems way too old to be shouting Rebecca’s name and thinking about fun, we now have the nauseating combination of all the right things to make a song go incredibly wrong.
Take a look at Rebecca Blacks’ “Friday”:

I would like to point out that what you have just witnessed is not much different to what studios do for the bigger pop stars. Both Ark Music Factory and the bigger studios create a product. They find people, dress them up, write some lyrics, autotune their voices and rake in the dollars.

The difference is that the bigger studios have the right budget and the right team to make a jingle seem catchy enough and to create more appealing (but equally meaningless) songs and videos.

To be fair to Rebecca Black, her voice is not that bad when you hear her sing without the auto tuning. I blame her parents for submitting her to a music factory instead of sending her to a music school where she could have voice training, and learn to play musical instruments, and find a deeper appreciation for authentic music created by artists in the true sense of the word.

People have been mercilessly making fun fun fun of this song all over the internet and there are tons of spoofs on YouTube!

Here are some:

But this is what I call #BI-WINNING: A Bob Dylan styled version of the song appeared on YouTube and it has been receiving a lot of positive feedback for turning a meaningless song into something profound. The way it is sung combined with the acoustic guitar, the song now seems to be symbolic of hardships in a time of war, or another popular take on the song is that it’s about the civil rights movement.

YouTubers quickly got creative and started commenting on the song, stating that this version of the song is actually the original song and that Rebecca Black did a cover of it and ruined it. It’s quite hilarious to see that many people actually believe the story and are now angry at Rebecca for destroying a Bob Dylan song (which is in fact sung by Mike Bauer).

Some really creative comments:
“In ’68 I was caught stealing this Dylan record from a store in Miami. The judge told me I could spend two days in jail or do a tour of duty in Southeast Asia doing some black ops s*** for my Uncle Sam. A month later I was on a Huey near the Laos border when a RPG hit our rear rudder. I woke up on a cot in an army field hospital with a priest reading my last rites. I asked him what day it was and he smiled and said “it’s Friday, man. You got this.” I knew right then I was going to be ok.”

“@CyberKiDxBRnM could not disagree further if anything dylan is obviously bringing up how african americans served in both world wars espically the line which says “you know what it is” meaning the whites should have relized that african americans fought by them. while the whites “kicked in the front seat” the blacks often had to sit “in the backseat” and dylan and others were often confilicted as to where they should sit.”

“I remember when I first heard this, winter of ’65. All the songs and protests about the war were meeting deaf ears, I think we all needed a little partyin. And yes, we looked forward to the weekend. We got a little excited. And even though we knew the war (i.e. Sunday) came afterwards, it was Friday and we had to get down.”

“Whichever one of you who brought up Dylan’s communism is right on. This is clearly and anti-capitalist epic, championing anarchy (partying) and fun (fun, fun, fun).  The fixation on the weekend, days when reasonable people in communist countries always get to party and have fun, fun, fun, juxtaposed with the drudgery of having to wake at 7am and get fresh and determine the horrors of capitalist classicism (which seat can i take?”

“This song wasn’t “A” counter culture hymn back in the day, this song was THEE counter culture hymn, the one by which all other anti establishment songs were measured, and if you listen to the lyrics (not hear, but listen) you can see why.”

“Don’t you know the history of this? Dylan wrote this in the early 1960s–’62 or ’63. It was released only on 45. It never made it onto LP because of the political firestorm it ignited. There were record burnings in many cities. The John Birch Society put up billboards around the U.S. stating: “IT’S NOT YOUR FRIDAY. IT’S OUR FRIDAY, AND IT’S WHITE.” Columbia was forced to recall the record. When the 45 is played backward, you can hear Dylan saying, “Bury them all!”.”

“You think this is just a video dude? This is a fucking tenement to the problems with the social order found within the American society. Do you not hear those deep and meaningful lyrics projecting the deepest love anyone could feel between getting down and Dylan? If you don’t understand what I’m trying to say just listen to him as he sings “yesterday was Thursday, today is Friday, tomorrow is going to be Saturday, the day after that is going to be Sunday,” its so deep man.”

Now I present to you the movie “Apocalypse Now” edited to “Bob Dylan’s” timeless and PROFOUND song “Friday”. (Warning: some violent scenes.)

 

[Eds note: This Dylan/Apocalypse Now/Friday video was produced by Arkadia and the rest of the very talented gang at EccentricHusky, and was originally posted to their Facebook page - go say thank you!]

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Arkadia Love has made 3 kickass contributions to The BlaBla Blog.

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