The most mediocre video ever... and epic spoofs

[Ancalagon]

So

Talentless teenager with moneyed parents gets music video done by people who do this (think vanity press like). The result is ... it's not the worse video I've seen, but it's certainly the most mediocre. I could only bear to watch about 1.5 min of it. A turd polished to perfection. So bad 13 millions have seen it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD2LRROpph0&feature=player_embedded#at=91

So why am I posting about this? because the spoofs are quite something:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Video+Youtube+sensation+Rebecca+Black+Friday+viral +wrong+reasons/4457251/story.html

:lol:

edit: it gets worse as you watch it... watch for the "cameo"

[Pigs in Space]

huh.

Those are the best lyrics of ALL TIME.

I don't see what is so different about this to most of the top 40 chart stuff.

[Critter]

I don't see what is so different about this to most of the top 40 chart stuff.

Pretty much this. That was my first thought when I heard this.

[shiningbrow]

This is just what R. Crumb's "Gail Snail" would sound like if someone gave her a voice and a video camera. This is from Zap Comix, Nº. 1. Frankly, by the midpoint of this vid, I was seriously praying for a giant converse allstar clad foot to come down on the whole lot of them. (I know this looks too tiny to allow you to read the text in the dialogue balloons, but the text consists of meaningless squiggles because none of these people has anything to say. That foot is the hero of this comic.)

http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll310/zippy2u/gailsnl.jpg

p.s. Loved the spoofs.

[Varaj]

I counter with
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIaeAtus5jU

[Dacke]

BTW, what happened to Chris Dane Owens? Wasn't he supposed to make a sequel to the Best Video Ever?

[Hatter]

I counter with

That video is fucking awesome, I am compelled to inflict it on all my friends now, thank you!

[emerald]

Awesome article fro NPR:

You can bet your sweet patootie that 13-year-old Rebecca Black didn't think that hooking up with a little-known teen-pop factory to make a video of a song about hanging out with her friends would land her on Good Morning America — as it did this morning — so that she could discuss whether she thinks she's put out the worst song in history.

If you don't know Rebecca's story, here it is in a nutshell: Her mom says she paid a company called Ark Music Factory to produce a video of Rebecca singing a song called "Friday," which the Ark folks had written. Ark Music Factory is apparently in the business of making slick, dumb music videos starring kids (mostly girls, based on a look at their web site) between the ages of 13 and 17, which their parents pony up money to have made. In other words, it seems to have a lot in common with a vanity press, where you pay to have your book published instead of the other way around.

It's absolutely true that this is a terrible, appalling song. The lyrics (that she didn't write) are laughable, the audio production (that she didn't work on) is atrocious, and the video (that she didn't shoot) is incredibly weird. And the whole thing taken together, which is genuinely and painfully funny for all these reasons, made great fodder for The Daily What, and then the blog at Tosh.0, the Comedy Central show that's in charge of skewering the Internet.

Interestingly, the Tosh.0 post was called "Songwriting Isn't For Everyone," and it focused on how bad the song was. Right move! But then it went on from there, and since picking on songwriters isn't very much fun and picking on pretty, privileged young women is internet catnip, pretty soon, Rebecca — despite pretty emphatically not being the real problem with this video — became the person associated with it.


And, inevitably, instead of being about the song, a lot of the criticism was about her. Black said on Good Morning America that the worst comment she read once the Internet found this video on YouTube was this: "I hope you cut yourself, and I hope you get an eating disorder so you'll look pretty. And I hope you go cut and die." Cut and die. I have absolutely no problem believing that happened. It took about 30 seconds to find this comment on the Tosh.0 blog entry: "She has that awful Stepford Wives look on her face the whole time." And this one: "Can't sing bitch." And this one: "Rebecca Black is a whore." And those are at a Comedy Central blog. You don't even want to know what YouTube comments are like.

Quick reminders: Thirteen years old. "Whore." "Bitch." "Cut and die."

And so it was that she began to appear on Slate and Gawker (multiple times) and Yahoo! and Time and just about everywhere else, and her official video has now been viewed — say it with me — almost 16 million times.

Black pretty much kept her head down until yesterday, while being analyzed at places like Jezebel, which surmised that she only cared about attention, whether positive or negative, based on a tweet she made about how it was all "fun fun fun."

But then an interview with her showed up in The Daily Beast which placed some context around that "fun fun fun" comment. In the interview, she acknowledges that "At times, it feels like I'm being cyberbullied." (Presumably, these are the moments when, for instance, she is encouraged to commit suicide and develop eating disorders.) She says Ark offered her the chance to take down the video once she became such a target, but she didn't, because she didn't want to give "haters" the satisfaction of seeing her buckle. This, I also have no trouble believing. It's pretty obvious to me that tweeting "fun fun fun" had a lot to do with not giving anybody the satisfaction of seeing her complain.

She points out that she didn't write the song, and that she chose it because her other choice was a love song she didn't think was appropriate for her at 13 years old. Perfectly fair points, no? And her mother says she didn't think at times that the lyrics made any sense, but she chose not to stand over the producer's shoulder and manage that process.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, she's shown an admirable, chin-up sense of humor — particularly for a kid her age — about her predicament/opportunity. (Perhaps we need a name for things like this: "predicatunity" might work.) When she offered to answer questions, someone mocked the lyrics of "Friday" that emphatically explain the days of the week in order (seriously, it's so bad) by asking her, "WHAT DAY COMES AFTER FRIDAY?" "Saturday, then Sunday comes afterwards," Black obligingly tweeted back, parroting the dumb lyrics she didn't write for which she knew she was being mocked.

She's linked to one of the many parodies of her video that's popped up in its wake. She's retweeted the teasing she thought was funny. She stuck up for herself with an observant eye at times, saying, "I find it sort of ironic that 'Beliebers' retweet these messages about bullying, yet some are tweeting things like 'go kill yourself.'"

I cannot tell a lie: I kind of love her.

I try to think about what would have happened if the embarrassing, humiliating, heart-strangling, victim-of-my-own-bad-judgment things that happened to me when I was 13 had been available on YouTube, and had become fodder for Yahoo! and Time magazine. I'm not entirely exaggerating when I say I wonder whether I would have survived it.

Yes, this is an overindulgent-parent thing to do. Yes, it probably indicates that too many parents think they can make their kids stars overnight. Yes, they'll probably all think better of it. But again, I find my mind drifting back to when I was in high school — I was a senior, much older than Rebecca is — when my class took our senior trip to some little recreational area or another where they had one of those booths where you could go in and basically do karaoke and they'd record you and give you a tape. My friend Inga and I ducked into a booth and sang "Under The Boardwalk," and if memory serves, a bunch of my other friends sang "Love Shack." I kept that recording for a long time. It wasn't because I thought we were stars; it was just for fun. It was fun to hear yourself, tape yourself, critique yourself. And we didn't put it on YouTube, but I think we probably would have.

Yes, she was trying to get discovered, whatever. She's a kid. She sometimes dreams, as a 13-year-old, about being famous. She sang a song, and it was a horrible song.

But the real Rebecca Black story, for me, is what she decided to do about it. She doesn't consider herself a great singer, particularly, as she told Good Morning America. She didn't ask for this, at least not this way. But now that it's here, she's sort of rolling with it. She'll do a few interviews, she'll sell her song on iTunes for a while, and then she'll probably go away, maybe with some money for college. But she will indeed head out with the knowledge that she didn't give in, and ten years from now, that may feel pretty good.

[Hatter]

Good for her!

[Ink Bleeder]

What impressed me in the GMA interview was her voice. The anchor asked her to sing a bit of the Star Spangled Banner, and she came through with flying colors. The video doesn't do justice to her voice, which is perfectly lovely.

[Redallia]

Good for her!

I'll second that.

[SpikeyFreak]

I don't see what is so different about this to most of the top 40 chart stuff.
Pretty much this. That was my first thought when I heard this.
I am no fan of top-40, but seriously, this is no where near the caliber of that stuff. Seriousy, this is REALLY bad, where as most top-40 songs are at least passable.

It's just like the two dudes who decided they were going to make a chart topper using the known formula. In 8 hours they made a song that had all of the elements of a top-40 hit (same music structure, same type of lyrics, same song material), but it didn't make the charts because it just wasn't very good.

Edit: link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PRKfj_5Oso

Top-40 may not be great, but it's still gotta be decent.

--Cringing Spikey

[shiningbrow]

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/65103be6fc/betwixt-the-music-rebecca-black

[Ancalagon]

the HELL version

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti1D9t8n0qA&feature=player_embedded

although some may say the original *is* the hell version

[Elijah Snow]

http://tv.gawker.com/#!5788237/mcfkkcolbert

i'm not sure, but i think this cover might just be EPIC.

[Hatter]

Yack, Gawker's site layout eats my brain. :vomit:

[Ergeheilalt]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7ReCtipPac
:grey:

[Ancalagon]

http://tv.gawker.com/#!5788237/mcfkkcolbert

i'm not sure, but i think this cover might just be EPIC.

I heartily concur! :lol:

[Hatter]

Not sanity safe:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npgdw5Zb7TY&feature=player_embedded


Also, distractingly over auto-tuned. wtf.

[Harry]

That's a far cry from parody, or even fair use. I'll call that one a flat out copyright violation. She's breaking the laws of Caesar and she's not even made it to the prom yet.

[Ergeheilalt]

Hatter, that was God awful. I'm pretty sure He'd agree.

Also, I can't tell if Harry is being sarcastic. Oh sarcmark, when will you save us?

[Elijah Snow]

it would be totally awesome if this meme ended up being responsible for killing the autotuner trend... please please please please...

[Varaj]

Hatter, that was God awful. I'm pretty sure He'd agree.

Also, I can't tell if Harry is being sarcastic. Oh sarcmark, when will you save us?

She follows a higher law than the law of the land. The same law that makes saddlebacking ok.

[Hatter]

She follows a higher law than the law of the land. The same law that makes saddlebacking ok.

I had to check to be sure it wasn't LBC before posting, it's even funnier because it's real. :D

[Ergeheilalt]

I had to look that up, luckily there is a website http://saddlebacking.com/

[shiningbrow]

It's Saturday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkG0AkIsgFw&feature=player_embedded

[Scutisorex Shrewlord]

I counter with
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIaeAtus5jU

THIS IS AMA-ZA-ZING