Rebecca Black reveals the deeper political messages behind "Friday"
POSTED BY: canttakesky
UPDATED: Wednesday, April 6, 2011 01:28
VIEWED: 4120
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http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/10d4ba5372/friday-lyrics-analyzed-wit
h-rebecca-black?playlist=featured_videos
I like her. She's a good sport. 
(In case you haven't seen this viral video:)
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Genius.
" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "
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Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon sing Friday:
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It's flat out stupid how folks have gotten so stupid over this.... song.
I got nothin' .
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This gives me an idea.
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
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Quote:I'm holding my breath, so you'd better hurry up.
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
This gives me an idea.
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A little more research (I see Friday I'm in Love is in the opening, along with Thursday's Child and a bunch of other songs we all know.)
The creators are a small vanity house, and they're putting out mixes of tween music for the Taylor Swift set, or, okay, Taylor Swift set is the human race. I mean for the Justin Bieber set.
They hit this by accident. They didn't know how dumb the lyrics were. Their mission is to "keep it clean for the teen/tween scene." Their own channel gives you the "Ark is Evil" video first. (Ark, now I get it, they're christians. Hence the name.)
This explains why they were able to capitalize so quickly: They were set up for it.
Still, one can siphon the traffic if one moves fast.
It's not quite a perfect storm, because the haters are way up and the fans, it's not quite like Boxxy, which was more of a 50/50 split. Still, I have a plan ;)
ETA: I'm feeling now like I was a little overzealous. I think you could actually attract a lot of traffic off of this, and yes, the girl has charm. She gets it. Also, she's the one with the traffic, and everyone wants it. I cannot believe the lyrics of this song. Someone is playing a practical joke on the planet.
ETA2: The media is really feeding the hate, completely unaware that there's no such thing as bad publicity. They appear to be pouring a lot of effort into convincing people that Rebecca Black is not going to make very much money off of "Friday." This is a fairly absurd claim. One site was giving her only $100,000 for the ad revenue on YouTube, not counting iTunes downloads, etc.
Does a song really need lyrics? Or a tune? Hmm. I'm getting the part where this exposes the whole industry: Anyone can do it, and it doesn't really matter what you do. The media wants to maintain a monopoly where you listen to signed singers like Lady Gaga, and not to random people on youtube.
A quick calculation shows that 9 million people liked this song. According to states, 2 million of them then downloaded it. That looks like 1.4 million at the current commission structure, plus the hundred k for the ad revenue is a million and half. Also, just on a spot check, it looks like she's still making a cool $3500/hour.
I don't know, it feels like someone's just poked a hole in the edge of the world and revealed that it's all just a fabrication and there's nothing really there. On the other side, it's possible that this is the way the world is supposed to be, and the idea that there was ever such a thing as a celebrity, and that we were meant to have wages of ten dollars an hour or whatever, while stars made millions was all an illusion, which will eventually precipitate the collapse of the economy.
Just thinking out loud here. I read Angry Birds made a cool hundred mil.
There are now 5 billion cell phone users in the world. A small percentage of those are smartphones connected to online marketplaces, but that percentage is rapidly increasing.
I think this is chaos. Clearly the production people have some promotional tricks, a lot of their singers get decent view counts, but I have no way of telling if that's just Friday spill over. Also, they're going to be pocketing some of the million and a half I figure, or whatever it turns out to be.
Okay, I watched the ABC interview (they were really trying to make her feel bad, and they made her sing without autotuning, she did fine.)
iTunes, I see she's #27 on the top 100. I don't know what that translates to in sales. ABC's poll showed on in 4 like the song, but youtube's like/dislike shows 1 in 9. Either way, when you're getting four million hits a day, you're more popular than most major corporations.
ETA3: I see she's now more popular than Justin Bieber. In sales, not hits, so that's discounting her detractors. I guess there's some simple math here. A certain percent will like you, and then the next more important question is how many will hear you in the first place.
Again, like with Boxxy, this is someone's epic fail. Some blogger mentioned hating her when she was at 4
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By chance I saw this over the weekend with my cousins, they're always on top of the latest youtube craze. Okay, so it was super lame, but it gave us a lot of entertainment, what with singing it to each other at random times and making up random words that sounded just as good and watching the spoof videos etc.
But she's 13, lets give her a break, she's a young girl and I'd rather see a 13 y/o girl singing a goofy song than singing something about rutting on the kitchen floor with her new boyfriend that she just started dating etc.
If she does well from this, either by positive or negative recognition then good for her. I do hope that people stop being so hard on her because she is just a young girl.
"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya
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One little side concern I have is one that always comes up when kids make a fortune: Who actually ends up with the fortune. She's going to haul in a million plus here, I don't doubt that, but will she get it, or the parents, or the record execs?
ETA: I see the link has more rants by her
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/65103be6fc/betwixt-the-music-rebecca-
black?rel=by_user
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/6c4e44a1af/which-seat-should-i-take-w
-rebecca-black?rel=by_user
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/a085babc82/rebecca-black-s-greatest-h
its?rel=player&playlist=329518
ETA2: This is a pretty good use of 15 minutes, kinda scary. Traffic is king, of course. Writers, musicians, artists, programmers, anyone who creates, is in the same boat. We all know many of these people, we probably do some of it ourselves.
What's proven here is that there's no great judge who's going to determine whether or not your content is "good enough."
Earlier youtube sensations have usually been some sort of "and the people shall judge." This one has the Boxxy twist. Yes, and if the people judge you poorly, then you fail, right? Wrong. You succeed. Because the people like you by percentage. If 11% or 24% or whatever like "Friday" (Oh, you really find that so amazing? 52% or something vote to *re-elect* George W. Bush. personally, four years of hearing friday every day would be better. I got to the point where just hearing that man speak made me ill.) Anyway, it's a percentage. If it's a percentage, 11%, say, of a high number, 81 million say, then it's 9 million. That's twice as many people as watched Firefly.
Unpopular is popular. Not just in a bad way. Because anything controversial has traffic, sure, and add to that that some percent of people will like anything, suddenly she has 9 million fans.
Once you have traffic, there are other issues, like, how do you hold traffic, how to use it to your advantage. This girl is 13, and I thought her response videos were so clever its scary. Boxxy was sort of freaked, and her attempt to deal with it, well, led to more Boxxy downloads. She handled it very well, but of course she doesn't know what to do with it, who would.
Let me put it another way: That's twice as many people that watch Glenn Beck. Not her view count, her fan count. If someone with this kid of hit could take those fans, and then post to them every week, that person would have more influence than Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin combined.
Switching back to Angry Birds. Okay, a couple guys in Finland wrote this little addictive game that you all know, in the way you know Friday, and it's the sort of game that I wrote tons of as a teenager, it's pretty well thought out, and like Loderunner, it exploits endless level design inherent with the game. Like Friday, it's not particularly novel, it's the rehashing of some old ideas. The thing that strikes me about Angry Birds is not just that they got a hundred mil, it's also the total investment of time that they collected. More time spent playing angry birds than watching network news. And a larger audience.
People who want to see more Firefly shouldn't be appealing to the Gods of Broadcast to bequeath unto them Firefly. They should make it happen. Ditto for those who have political ideas, or entertainment creations of their own.
So, the $64 million question is "Is this just some sort of lottery, or is there a trick to it?"
ETA3: "Jay Leno gave me a Wurther's original" is double product placement.
ETA4: Friday manipulation. Poll for "best weekend song" Run the poll, and always make sure that you stack the results so that Friday is just a hair ahead of whatever people are really voting for. Vary that lead from a few votes to a few percent. This way, the haters will come and vote on your site, and get their friends to, so they can displace it. Let them do so, almost but then have it go back up. They will keep coming to vote, and you'll be hauling massive traffic, like that Serenity best movie poll. You then should keep the ru
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Quote:Haha. What hooks me is the "partyin', partyin' yeah!!!" LOL. Makes even lonely people feel like they are at a party, participating in a group chant. It's a good feeling of belonging.
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
The song is still stuck in my head.
The lyrics are indisputably inane, the tune is somewhat pedestrian, but there is a innocent, group hug flavor to the song that is appealing.
I say good for her.
I'm going to write a song about December and take my shot at fame.
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