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You are here: Home / Culture / Rebecca Black: Voice of Today’s Youth

Rebecca Black: Voice of Today’s Youth

03/16/2011 by backofthebook.ca 4 Comments

by Rachel Krueger

Rebecca-Black-Friday-500x360Rebecca Black’s “Friday” has been making the internet rounds to guffaws and heaps of ridicule, and there’s no denying that it’s that bad.  But is it not ALSO a scathingly accurate anthem for our disaffected youth?  To wit:

The opening lines of the song have taken heat for being needlessly and idiotically itemizing.  Every event of Rebecca’s morning is listed, with separate lines being given to both the “bowl” and the “cereal,” to both getting to the bus stop and having to catch the bus.  Yet aren’t the teen years just one damn thing after another?  I mean, “7:00 am waking up in the morning/ gotta be fresh/ gotta go downstairs/ gotta have my bowl/ gotta have cereal” when all you want to do is sleep till noon?  Get off my back, mom.

Arriving (finally) at the bus stop, Rebecca “see[s her] friends kicking in the front seat/ sitting in the back seat” of Hot Johnny’s car.  Plaintively she cries, “Gotta make my mind up/ which seat can I take?”  Oh Rebecca, how deftly you capture the fears of adolescence.  What if she were to chose the front seat, and something awesome happened in the back seat, like, a really funny joke, or something?  Or if she chooses the back seat, and Hot Johnny puts his arm around Slutty Ashley instead of her?  The horror, you guys.

The chorus consists simply of “partyin’ partyin’” to which her friends respond insipidly “yeah.”  The clear subtext to the monotonous, auto-tuned “fun, fun, fun fun” highlights the unvarying nature of this entertainment, a fact only underscored by Rebecca’s dead eyes.  Woe to the teens, with nothing to do on weekends but get sneakily drunk and paw at each other.  Fun fun fun indeed.

The bridge brings ostensibly the most banal, but secretly the wisest, of Rebecca’s claims.  “Yesterday was Thursday . . . tomorrow is Saturday and Sunday comes afterwards.”  Is that so different from Shakespeare’s “To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow,/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day”?  I think not, friends.  It speaks to the plodding inevitability of life!

Is the musicality abhorrent?  Sure.  Does Rebecca’s voice straddle the border between “nasal” and “unlistenable”?  You betcher.  But if we peer deep into the song’s gray matter we might find a more accurate reflection of our own teenage years than we are prepared to face.

Either that, or we’ve all been punk’d.

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: internet, kids-these-days, music

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Comments

  1. jimmycrackcorn says

    04/04/2011 at 12:34 pm

    This is like that William Hung guy…..it’s so bad you have to listen to it again just to remember how bad it was. it’s like a zombie mating ritual…..it’s evil.

    Her mom paid $4000 to have this song put out by Ark. This poor kid is going to miss out on an education, because her mom thought she could sing. Not true. She cannot sing. she can only whine using autotune.

    Now they’re suing Ark because they need to get all copies of this song and burn them. I’m sure Rebecca (if that’s even her real name) can’t go to the mall without everyone pointing, staring and laughing.

    Let it die……just let it die.

  2. Rob says

    03/17/2011 at 12:14 pm

    Must have been awkward for the girl to her left when she sings “my friend is by my right.” Teenaged girls are so catty…

  3. Jordan.Y says

    03/16/2011 at 10:03 pm

    This song is just unexplainable of how dumb it is,serriously?obbessing over where she is going to sit in a car,which the kids inside the car look to young to posses a legal drivers liscence,I think it`s ovious that she`s using auto-tune,and it still sounds horrible,I can`t even believe how Usher got into this “Music” video,I think he`s to over confindent about himself finding new talent after taking Justin Bieber.The part of this “song” that I really hate is when she says “yesterday it was Thursday,now it`s Friday, Tommorow is Saturday then its Sunday,Listen up,I`m pretty sure we know what the days of the week are,it`s bad enough we`re killing our brain cells listening to this Garbage.Personally I Believe that she is not the voice of teens,We do not wake up and just stand still in the middle of our houses while our family is bolting all over the place while she is standing there with her yellow bag pack,then going outside and instead of just going into the car thinking what seat she is going to sit in,oviously the front seats are occupied.This video is just….just trash.

  4. Heywood says

    03/16/2011 at 9:37 pm

    wow, thanks for explaining the lyrics. i really didn’t get it ’til you broke it down for me.

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