“Resolute refusal of the concept of ‘timeless truth’ is in order. Nevertheless, truth is not—as Marxism would have it—a merely contingent function of knowing, but is bound to a nucleus of time lying hidden within the knower and the known alike. This is so true that the eternal, in any case, is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea.”
-Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk
(N3,2, Convolute N)
No doubt you have heard of Rebecca Black, the 13-year-old, accidental viral wonder, whose notorious song, “Friday,” has taken the internet by storm with its ability to generate overwhelming vitriol and disdain. Dubbed “an accidental parody of modern pop music” by Rolling Stone, her song seems, at least initially, as harmless as any other poorly-written, saccharine schlock aimed at the tweens. So what specifically has sky-rocketed Miss Black from the anonymous crowd of equally lukewarmly talented teens to the heights of public mockery? Why, of all the terrible, bland songs already in existence, does “Friday” capture the hatred of a nation, and possibly even the world? Quite simply put: Rebecca Black has become a signifier of everything that is wrong with popular culture and the world is punishing her for it.
To understand the mass reaction against “Friday” a review of the philosophy of the Frankfurt School is required. This group of intellectuals’ brand of thinking was based on the premise that we are all operating as cogs in a big, efficient culture machine, which smoothes over every inconsistency and evolves as time passes, creating a neat, easily-digestible package that the masses absorb and enjoy daily. Everything reinforces the machine, and any outlier of aberrant behavior is eventually subsumed back into it. For example, for a time, punks in London fought the man, but eventually became Hot Topic. The culture machine is not perfect, however, and if you look closely enough, you can find its flaws and uncover the truth. For instance, passing fads, where something you found attractive suddenly becomes completely absurd. (Side ponytail, anyone?) The aforementioned Walter Benjamin quote focuses in on how to discover this actual truth beyond the illusion of the culture mechanism. Filled with zeitgeist, truth must shift with time, and lasts only for a moment. We can identify these fleeting moments of truth by the social discomfort they cause and their appearance as something outside of what is deemed culturally acceptable. Our current uproar over “Friday,” I believe, is one of these ruffles on the dress — something about the song is off, something about it cannot be accepted. Within “Friday,” we see a kind of funhouse mirror representation of ourselves: our own absurdity, our own banality.
It is easy to reduce the “crappiness” of “Friday” to its auto-tune, or its shoddy lyrics (really, astonishingly shoddy) or utter lack of rhyme scheme and bland music video, but these are nothing new to us. Some of our most successful pop stars are not that different: The Black Eyed Peas, for instance, rarely rhyme and are entirely devoid of any lyrical ingenuity, appearing to generate “new” songs by putting the words “start,” “party,” “kick,” “get,” “on” and “off” through a program that rearranges them and then adds one nonsense word to be repeated ad infinitum as a refrain. As for auto-tune, we all know there have been more egregious instances of overusage, most of these stemming from the TV show Glee. So what’s the problem with “Friday”? It doesn’t really seem that much more terrible than what already exists … and this is precisely the point. Since “Friday” was made by an unknown without a hype-man or publicist to convince us she’s “the next best thing,” Rebecca Black was able to reveal to us the depths of our own lack of taste. How lazy are the lyrics, how utterly unoriginal is the subject matter — everyone groans, but in actuality, they are reacting against a violation of the culture machine. “Friday” unravels, for a moment, the perfect construction of pop culture and shows its unseemly underbelly. It’s like seeing the rat-infested kitchen of your favorite diner where your food’s been prepared all these years: distressing, and even more so because you’ve been gobbling it down all this time.
Rebecca Black, we do not hate you, we hate what you represent. You are the embodiment of all that is wrong with popular culture, something that generally we can gloss over while in the heights of our frenzied cardio workout. But don’t worry… in a month or so, you’ll be tucked neatly back into the culture machine, tidily wrapped up in parody and episodes of Tosh.0.
awesome article. i shared it on FB and it’s sparked some very interesting discussions. but seriously, i think you hit the nail right on the head. everyone, for a split second, TOTALLY just realized the emperor was naked.