Sigh.

Yeah, yeah, you’ve all probably heard it by now. There’s this video on YouTube with this girl singing this ridiculous song and it’s horrible. In fact, it’s so horrible it made its way onto Tosh.o, or as I refer to it, “The Show Everyone Wishes They’d Thought of First”. Now, before we launch into the song proper, let’s look at a few burning questions: Who is Rebecca Black? Why does this song exist? Who would go through the trouble of making this?

Well, the song and artist come from Ark Music Factory, who seem to be Asylum Studios made into a record label and earned a 8.6 on the Creepy Fuck scale. An investigation of my own turned up this article, which basically reveals Ark as a company made by a pair of scrubs in the music industry who realized they could make money by taking jailbait age girls, turn them into low-budget Miley Cyrus knock-offs, charge the parents a hefty sum, and walk away with the leftover cash.

…Hollywood should shelf The Hangover 2, because this shit is a movie premise if I ever heard one.

Now, I had honestly planned to cover a real person song this week in a Radio Rant (hence the quotes in the title), but this actually got a few requests this week, and I’ve realized I have a few things to say on the subject of the song.

Before things get too crazy, let me begin with this.

“Friday” is a bad song. “Friday” is a bad, bad song. “Friday” will be the scary story that pop songs tell younger pop songs to scare them into being good. It’s the cancer of pop music. “Friday” is so holistically bad that each bad aspect compliments the next bad aspect in the Circle of Bad. It’s bad beyond the point of being likeable. “Friday” is as bad of a song as the The Room was a movie.

And yet I’m not inspired to hate it.

I can hate “Like a G6”, “Whip My Hair”, and “Blah Blah Blah” because those professional artists took those songs seriously, and ended up making lots of money off each one. Ke$ha’s at peace with her carefully crafted reputation, and is probably buying more glitter and trailer trash clothes with her tour money; Rebecca Black is probably having either an awesome time or a terrible time because of her new “fame”. If lampooning “Whip My Hair” was shooting fish in a barrel, “Friday” is dropping a tactical nuke on a  goldfish in a pop can.

But let’s see what’s so terrible. Alright, this cheapass-video game music production with a drumbeat that’s equal parts kick in the head loud and “First result when I Googled ‘free online drum machine'” is legitimately bad. Then there’s the rap bridge by who I assume is one of ARK’s founders, which I swear mentions driving past a cop car and a school bus (fill in your own pedophile joke here), and that’s terrible as well.

But the real star of awkward is Rebecca Black herself. Rebecca Black is someone who, and I say this honestly and without any ill will, should not be a pop artist. At no point does her delivery hit on target. All her inflections are wrong, and she puts the accents in the wrong places. On top of that, she sounds terrified and singing entirely through her nose, which, combined with Auto-Tune, produces the most grating tone possible. The fact that she was saddled with lyrics below the standards of 1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters doesn’t help her any.

Aside from it being an easy target, the other reason I was hesitant to review “Friday” is that production values aside, it’s really not that much worse than a lot of dumb pop hits. But I could be wrong on that. No other song features a two-note, major third chorus consisting of one word repeated over and over, right?

The song that made him (in)famous.

Well, ok, that one was luck. No one else writes hits that narrate their day until they go to a party that night, especially with gratuitous Auto-Tune.

The #1 song of 2010. God, how I wish that wasn't true.

Ok fine, but who the hell would be dumb enough to name the days of the week in their song? Surely, Rebecca Black has to be alone in doing something that incredibly stupid? No one would buy a song that resorts to something as juvenile as naming days of the week.

One of the all time digital top-sellers.

“Friday” is still a horrible song, but honestly, it was never really meant to be good, and because of that, I really can’t hate on it. I just hope this whole ARK thing blows over.