Black is the new black
So let’s talk a little bit about the fact that Rebecca Black’s “Friday” is currently #69 on the iTunes chart, and rising. Because that seems like a pretty weird thing to be happening to a song that everyone purportedly thinks is awful, and which you can listen to for free on YouTube. Why would people pay money to listen to a song they hate? Maybe I’m not being cynical enough here, but I think that this success indicates that some people do, in fact, like the song. Which means that we have the following cycle happening:
- A teenager produces a song which no one notices.
- The Internet finds the song and makes fun of it for being awful.
- Because of the attention the song is getting for being awful, people who would have never heard the song otherwise hear it.
- These people like the song and make Rebecca Black an actual professional pop singer.
- A song that was noticed for being awful becomes successful because other people like it.
This seems like a new thing to me; there have been many paths to legitimate pop success, but being known as an awful singer has not been one of them. (In fact, usually you would start small, get a bunch of people to like you, and then not have anyone really hate you until you got big.) Of course, this is all presuming that people are buying it for different reasons than they bought William Hung’s “I Believe I Can Fly” or something, but since a lot of the attention has been focused on the video’s awfulness, why would the actual audio track be so valuable as to require purchase? The whole point of Black’s song, after all, is that it sounds so much like current teenpop, so why wouldn’t people consume it in the same way they do teenpop?
If it is the case that snark is producing success, the bright side is that, hooray, an entire realm of human communication dedicated to making fun of and/or getting angry at things is actually producing something new rather than violently consuming itself. On the other hand, this could just result in a bunch of pop hopefuls being intentionally awful to get attention, which would be horrendous. So, you know, fingers crossed!
