Black Friday

Occasionally Black Friday happens more often than the day after Thanksgiving. In this case, May 13th, 2011.

I heard about Rebecca Black’s music video from my students mere days after it was released.

It was absolutely shocking. In a William Hung sort of way.

Her family loves her very much, and decided to spend a fair chunk of change to help their 13-year-old daughter produce a music video.

Based on how happy she and all her friends are in the video, they must have had a great time producing it.

However, she always sounds flat—which even auto-tune can’t help—has a small vocal range, and can’t write lyrics. A “professional” rapper is in the video, but he is completely disconnected from her part. Couldn’t he at least have helped her along the way?

And yet I can’t stop listening to her music video and feeling great! Not because of the music, the lyrics, or her vocal stylings, but because she isn’t me! And every time I see an over-the-top remake of her video (thank you Steven Colbert and Jimmy Fallon, and finally Glee) I feel even better.

She could take this implicitly mocking attention in the star-wars-kid way by hiding in a hole; refusing to deal with people; absolutely horrified at the huge amounts of negative attention on YouTube and the endless remakes  attempting to capitalize on her accomplishments.

But she is apparently taking all of this attention with a smile, and I congratulate her.

My prediction is that she will fall out of the limelight by the end of the summer. However, in the fall she will somehow magically appear in front of the American Idol judges during the first two weeks of shame. At the very least we will see a bunch of idol wannabes sing her song in front of the judges. At worst, we will see both her and the wannabes.