"Friday" by Rebecca Black

Yeah I know, I'm like 2 months behind this whole "Friday" thing, but I really don't care for Youtube celebrities unless they roll out multiple videos in succession and they're GOOD.

On February 10, 2011, a video was posted on Youtube, featuring the debut single of 13-year-old Rebecca Black, "Friday." Her label, Ark Music Factory, decided that Youtube would be the best place for exposure. Apparently, AMF did not exactly understand that Youtube has a Like/Dislike system rather than 1-5 Stars and people have the ability to comment on videos. As of the writing of this sentence, "Friday" has 69,665,519 views and 1,319,187 dislikes compared to 160,595 likes. Unfortunately for Rebecca, her song is just absolutely horrendous for so many reasons. The lyrics are just atrocious with lines like "Friday, Friday, fun, fun, fun" and "Yesterday was Thursday, today is Friday." The melody sucks too, it's just impossible to sing along with the song (although why anyone would want to is beyond me). And just to top it all off, Rebecca is not a good singer and she needed to be auto-tuned to sound even remotely like she was singing.

She also has a face that stares into your soul.

It's very sad really. Even 5 years ago, Rebecca's single would probably have hit the shelves, maybe an iTunes only single, and then no one would ever hear of who she was. Now with so many singers putting their official music videos on Youtube, music labels are taking risks and putting new singers for the whole world to critique.

This whole "Friday" fiasco is one of the biggest reasons that I believe the music labels are the main culprits of ruining the music industry. Artists are not allowed to own their own music unless they purchase it and even then, it's an auction for the highest bidder. Because of this lack of ownership, there's been a trend ever since the death of Kurt Cobain of musicians making music to make money and not because they love singing and the poetry behind songs. The boy band craze, the teeny boppers of the early 00's, and the Black Eyed Peas; all of these were created by musicians with a relative amount of talent wanting money. The artists who actually sing because they could care less about the money noticeably release songs and albums much more infrequently than those who are all about the cash.

And then, there's weird cases like Lady Gaga. Stefani Germanotta was an unsuccessful and struggling artist in her late teens early 20s, but she possessed uncanny lyrical writing and a voice like few others. Follow in the footsteps of Alicia Keyes, Germanotta did not reinvent herself to become a professional singer and rather just stayed Stefani. None of this worked of course, and she eventually was reborn as Lady Gaga, a woman? who dresses incredibly crazy and has songs you might find in a club. One thing that set those songs apart though, was her ability to actually sing and lyrics with weight behind them. It was a success and now, even though Gaga still dresses crazy and makes songs intended to be danced to, people generally know Lady Gaga to be a fantastic singer with poetry behind her music. Unfortunately, she had to reinvent herself to become known and bring her love of music to the world. As much as she says "this is who I am," it's very clear in interviews that she is incredibly uncomfortable dressing in the outlandish ways she does, similar to how Christina Aguilera was not a fan of all the pop songs she had to sing to compete with Britney Spears.

Left, the Christina manufactured by Disney. Right, X-Tina breaks free from Disney to become herself.