WTF of the day!
Click to viewToday one of my friends posted this on Facebook, and I have some thoughts and mocking that I feel the need to vent.
Brought to you in part by Angry Gandalf.
I was confused by the Ark Music Factory thing, so I looked it up. Their website is complete bullshit, but they explain it a little better in this Billboard article. It sounds like they find random people, autotune the shit out of their voices, and make them ~superstars. This gave me flashbacks to the Josie and the Pussycats movie when they re-market random bands to brainwash teenagers into buying shit (orange is the new pink!). Also, by calling themselves a factory, it's like they either know exactly what they're doing or someone didn't tell them about the joke when they picked that name for the company, but either way, lulz.
I bet she doesn't even know what songs those quotes are from at the bottom of the little tear-off calendar. Google tells me she's 13. Keep this in mind if you watch the rest of the video (I won't blame you if you back out now)
She looks awfully happy about getting up at 7am on a Friday. Even if it is Friday, I'm in a bad mood when I wake up early. She sings about eating cereal and getting her stuff together but doesn't actually do any of it.
Then she raps about going to the bus stop to wait for the bus, and a car full of her friends drives up. If she's 13 I'm guessing the rest of them are also 13-14, why the hell are they driving a car? Get on the damn bus, idiots.
I don't even need to say anything about the "which seat can I take?" part because it's just that ridiculous.
Then there's the chorus, which is basically her chanting "Friday" and "partying" over and over. How the fuck do 13-year-olds party? I feel like Party Cat would be disappointed with their partying.
Suddenly they're hanging out of the car, which is driving fast on the highway. Again, if they're 13 you don't want to be in the car with them let alone sitting on the backrest going at that speed. The girls on either side of her are so awkward, the dancing is hilariously bad.
I also noticed that there's a full moon in the background, and remembered that her name is Rebecca Black. Clearly they are subliminally tapping into the Team Jacob market, which further supports my Josie and the Pussycats brainwashing conspiracy theory.
Right after that she says "I got this, you got this, my friend is on my right," then repeats it without including the girl on the other side. You can bet that Other Side Girl is going to hold a grudge for the rest of her life now, because that's what middle-schoolers do!
Once they get to the actual ~party, the kid in the foreground with the black shirt seriously looks 10. A few seconds later, Green Shirt Boy ("yeah!") also looks like he belongs in daycare rather than this ~party.
Then we get to the lyrical magnificence that is the bridge:
Yesterday was Thursday, today it is Friday
We (we, we, we) so excited, we so excited
We gonna have a ball today
Tomorrow is Saturday and Sunday comes afterwards
I love the poignant contrast between the formal, "today it is Friday," and the informal, "we so excited." Truly, it is a masterpiece.
At this point I came to the realization that Rebecca Black is what would happen if Ke$ha was in middle school and hadn't yet discovered glitter, or what it means to be a skank. The auto-tune, the horrible grammatically incorrect lyrics, the awful pseudo-rapping...it all fits.
Speaking of awful pseudo-rapping, I almost feel bad for this poor guy that has the "legit" rap break at this point in the song. Who is he? What kind of sad situation is he in that his agent presumably said, "Hey, I found a really great job for you!" He looks like he's trying so hard with his watch and his car "driving in the fast lane," but it's just awful.
This reminds me of that Aaron Carter song about how he beat Shaq at basketball. It's the same level of WTF.
After that sad sequence the rest of the video is just Rebecca singing in front of a crowd of kids fist-pumping to the "yeah!" response interspersed with "soulful" shots of her "belting" some random notes and Rapper Guy looking satisfied with himself.
I'm no stranger to pop music, or to music that's silly for the sake of being silly, or that's just catchy marketing gimmickry. I listen to Katy Perry on occasion, because I like to bop along with it in my car. I like k-pop, ffs.
That said, I think this is going a step beyond that. I didn't know about Ark Music Factory until today, and I think it's bullshit. If you want to talk about decline of the music industry, I think that right there is rock bottom. I'm glad to a certain extent that she's not prancing around in underwear or whatever, but that's literally the only remotely positive thing I can say about this.
Thankfully most people seem to agree, I haven't heard one person say that they love this song (then again I don't really hang around 12s too often...there must be someone out there who's like "AWW YEAH THIS IS MAH JAM," and not in the ironic way). I've seen several people ask if this is a parody, or call it the worst song/video ever. Predictably, she's become a meme.
Apparently people are saying that she's the next Justin Beiber.
God help us all.
EDIT: I found her tour schedule. There is no God.