Ain't No Romance Around There Welcome, ?uestlove fans.

Of course, if you haven't heard it, you're welcome:




Confession: This song is the impetus for the existence of this blog. I simply couldn't get it out of my head. In fact, when I first tried to organize my thoughts about "Friday" a week ago, I found myself unable to find the appropriate angle with which to tackle the song. It wasn't because I had nothing too say; I actually have more than enough to say about the subject matter. My difficulties were mainly due the the fact that my opinions were changing the more I considered the song.

In a medium such as pop music, where most differences of opinion can be in part attributable to varying tastes, it's the extraordinarily rare exception that everyone recognized how bad of a song it is. And everyone is right. It is an objectively terrible song, and this was my instantaneous reaction the first time I heard it.

But that was just an initial reaction, right? When told to watch something because you have to witness how bad it is, it's usually simply hyperbole when you declare it the worst ever. Sure, The Star Wars Holiday Special lived up to its epically-bad billing, but M. Night Shyamalan couldn't have literally forgotten everything he knew about film-making. I didn't let that stop me from calling Lady In The Water the worst movie I've ever seen, though, and I've seen The Brothers Solomon.

Rebecca Black's song couldn't really be that bad.

Could it?

(A note before I continue: I don't mean that as an insult towards Rebecca Black herself. She's only 13, and I can only imagine that ten years from now she's going to think that middle school absolutely sucked, and that she would feel that way whether or not "Friday" had ever been recorded. I won't be taking any potshots at her.)


Three of my favorite songs of all time are George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord," Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine," and, more recently, Cee Lo Green's "F*ck You." While I find each of these songs to be powerful (and I'm sure most would agree with me), one could argue that that each has weak, or at least unimaginative lyrics. In the case of Harrison's song, the lyrics consist of approximately 15 words in various permutations for four and a half minutes. The third verse of "Ain't No Sunshine" consists of the words "I know" repeated twenty-six times. Cee Lo's song has the "you" in the title alternating between the object of his affection and her new lover, depending on the convenience of the rhyme.

But here's the dirty little secret about pop music that no one likes to acknowledge when defending his favorite songs or ridiculing his least favorite: Lyrics don't matter in pop music. And yet, the most common complaint against Rebecca Black's song seems to be the words. Consider the following:


Woke up, fell out of bed7 AM, waking up in the morning
Dragged a comb across my headGotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs
Made my way downstairs and drank a cupGotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal
And looking up, I noticed I was lateSeeing everything, the time is going
Found my coat and grabbed my hatTicking on and on, everybody's rushing
Made the bus in seconds flatGotta get down to the bus stop
Found my way upstairs and had a smokeGotta catch my bus
And somebody spoke and I went into a dreamI see my friends


The words on the right side of the page are the first verse of "Friday." On the left, we have lyrics written by one of the most successful song-writing teams in music history, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They are from a song by The Beatles ("A Day In The Life"), from what is considered to be one of the most important albums of all time (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band). Sure, there's an interesting rhyme scheme going on in The Beatles' song, as well as an allusion to marijuana, but the sentiments are eerily similar, and their words are just as banal as Rebecca Black's.

The Beatles actually took their mockery of lyrics even further on their 1969 album Abbey Road. The track "Sun King" concludes with the following three lines:

Quando paramucho mi amore de felice carathon
Mundo paparazzi mi amore cicce verdi parasol
Questo abrigado tantamucho que canite carousel

Don't try to translate these lyrics; they're meaningless. In fact, the phrase "cicce verdi" is a play on a Liverpool schoolyard taunt, "chicka ferdy." But these nonsensical syllables are able to come together to create something truly beautiful.

(I can hear it now: "But at least The Beatles' songs rhyme!" This is true, but even this isn't a necessity. Have a listen to Rooney's eponymous 2003 album. It's about forty minutes of pop-rock brilliance and only contains about a dozen rhymes in total. Even those that are there are likely incidental.)

That's not to say that lyrics are never important. The right lyrics can take a song from great to transcendent. I have songwriting friends who I know slave over their words in an effort to reach this level of craftsmanship with each and every one of their songs. Hell, the name of this blog is taken from a song lyric. It's just to say that lyrics alone can't make or break a song as long as everything else about the song is working.

Unfortunately for Rebecca Black, nothing else about the song works either. I can't comment on her singing, because her voice has been distorted so terribly by an amateur Auto-Tune user. The distortions themselves are hardly what could be described as a melody, and some of the attempts at melody are simply bizarre-sounding. What we end up with, between the production and writing, is something that resembles the hypothetical love-child of will.i.am, Andrew W. K., and Miley Cyrus.


So how did this happen? The production, I mean.

It turns out that Rebecca Black is signed to a record label call Ark Music Factory, a small company run by Patrice Wilson and Clarence Jay. According to The Daily Beast, Rebecca Black's parents paid the label $2,000 for two songs (Black was allowed to pick which to record) and one music video. Apparently, $2,000 doesn't buy you a second draft (find the rest of Ark Music Factory's roster here for proof).

Strangely, Rebecca Black's mother had second thoughts about the project. From the linked Daily Beast article:

"A few times, when I heard some of the lyrics, I was like, 'That doesn’t make sense,' [Black's mother, Georgina] Kelly recalled. “Rebecca said, ‘I sang it as they wrote it, Mom.’ So I didn’t micromanage it."

Odder still are the comments from Clarence Jay:

"Funniest part of the whole thing is Rebecca Black is actually [an] amazing singer [with] a unique tone and a fantastic fun person. The concept we feel seems to have crossed a lot of boundaries, for the better or worse."

That sound you just heard is me banging my head against a table.

What we have here is an over-involved parent investing a substantial sum of money to make her child famous. Despite her better judgment, this parent refuses to jump in after it becomes clear that she's been delivered a turd. We also have a producer that recognizes his client as having talent, but decided to turn her voice into that of a robot in an attempt to be current. (Aside: shouldn't this song be the death knell for Auto-Tune? I can dream, can't I?)

So why were so many poor decisions made in the lead-up to this song? The fact of the matter is, "Friday" is popular. Despite being universally despised, it's #37 on the iTunes song charts as of this writing. I doubt Rebecca herself is seeing much of those royalties, but the men behind Ark Music Factory are clearly cleaning up. And why shouldn't they? They've created a business that bears no risk. They charge wealthy parents upfront for a product with no standard. If Rebecca Black's mother is typical, they don't have to worry about these parents stepping in an saying, "I'm not paying for this." Should a song, against all odds, become a hit, they reap most of the rewards. It's a plan that can't lose.


The success of "Friday" leads me to an even greater question that I've been weighing for a while now:


There's a part of me that hears "Friday" and hates the existence of the internet. Without the internet, youtube, and recording and editing software, there is no way a group like Ark Music Factory gets off the ground or has an avenue with which to promote their product... at least in an ideal world. In the real world we live in, novelty songs have managed to find their way to the top of the Billboard charts for years. See 1997's "Barbie Girl" by Aqua (peaking at #7 in America) and 1976's "Disco Duck" by Rick Dees (which reached #1 and stayed in the Top 10 for ten weeks) for examples.

Jon Bon Jovi recently had this to say about the music business in its current form (via Huffington Post):

"Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it... Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business."

I think there is a lot of truth to what Bon Jovi says. With the rise of digital music, we've lost a lot of the experience, the tactile aspect, of buying a new album. It's one of the reasons I started buying vinyl records; I want physically own my own music in the most aesthetically pleasing format.

It seems that the "album" as a work of art has gone by the wayside, and the emphasis has returned to the single. You can convince 2 million people to pay $1.29 for a throw-away song that they don't have to ever physically handle. It's much more difficult to convince a fraction of those people to spend substantially more on a number of songs that will not immediately sound familiar.

On the other hand, Jon Bon Jovi takes things too far. Although there is a loss of a tactile shared experience that he recalls, there is still the chance for a cultural shared experience. It's one of the things that makes Rebecca Black so delightful.

Furthermore, the internet is providing more legitimate acts with the opportunity to make music. I don't have the stats to back me up, but conventional wisdom tells me that fewer and fewer musical artists are performing arena tours than were doing them twenty years ago. I would also assume that it's far less likely for one act's album to go platinum, but that far more artists are able to make a living. I know that I wouldn't have known about my new favorite obsession, The Bamboos, without pandora to lead me to them. I'm sure many bands have similar stories, and it's good that while they probably won't get rich, they'll be able to make a living doing what they love.



Does all this make "Friday" the worst song ever? I'm of the opinion that the worst thing a song can do is be uninteresting; it's why for years I've argued that Creed's "With Arms Wide Open" is the worst composition of all time. Scott Stapp's opus not only suffers from the same weaknesses that Rebecca Black's does -- poor production, no melody, and incredibly trite lyrics -- but it also manages to be incredibly boring. It's all-around terrible.

Rebecca Black's "Friday" may not be good. It may not be so bad it's good. But it is so bad it's fascinating. And that's quite an accomplishment.