“I’m assuming you have heard of Rebecca Black,” my friend said to me one afternoon on Facebook chat.
“Maybe…the name sounds familiar,” I told her, but that might have been because the first name was very common and the last name was a color.
“Watch it now, you won’t be sorry,” she said.
My friend is very smart, recently admitted to Stanford, University of Chicago and Cambridge for graduate school PhD programs. She is also culturally aware, and fairly trendy, so I trust her opinions. When she says watch something, I watch it. She is a maven of sorts, as much as I hate the Malcolm Gladwell reference. That was my first exposure to Rebecca Black’s hit single “Friday.” I watched the first minute and turned it off in disgust.
“That was terrible, why did you do that to me?” I asked.
“No, it’s the best thing ever!” she said.
“Ok,” I said. After ten years of friendship, I’ve learned not to waste my time proving her wrong.
After my initial exposure, I thought I had heard the last of Rebecca Black, until the next day I noticed a trend on my Facebook news feed:
Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today i-is Friday, Friday
We-we-we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today
Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes after...wards
I don’t want this weekend to end
Clearly I missed something, maybe after the first minute Black turns into a musical genius. So I went back to YouTube, when I noticed the play count. “Friday” had over 30 million hits in a month. As it turns out Rebecca Black is not a musical genius, but an internet phenomena thanks to Tosh.O. Comedian Daniel Tosh is a web junkie and connector, to use another Gladwell term. He blogged about Black’s video in a post titled, "Songwriting isn't for Everyone," which pushed it to become viral in a week.
They were not praising Black for her lyrics, creativity or musicality. Instead, they were tearing the 13-year-old apart for recording the “Worst song ever!” The comments range from mild criticism to requests for Black to kill herself. Despite the negative reaction, Black is making the most of her leap to fame by donating some of the proceeds from her Single (which is currently in the top 50 songs downloaded off iTunes) to charity.
What made “Friday” stick? According to Chip and Dan Heath, the authors of “Made to Stick,” there are six basic traits that allow ideas, stories or trends to stick. Black’s video had all of them.
Simplicity: what can be simpler about a song about going out on a Friday. The core of Black’s idea is in her title, her packaging and her tone. She is a young girl who enjoying hanging out with her friends on the weekend. Her message is conveyed through a pop song, which by nature are catchy and addicting. In addition to Blacks video being so simple in content that even the simplest person can feel superior it is also simple in format. YouTube has made spreading information beyond easy. In an era where fast is the norm and faster is better, what can be faster or more convenient than videos on the internet: click a link and watch (no reading required!).
Unexpectedness: Much like Justin Bieber, society does not expect much from its youth. So when a teen becomes an instant celebrity people take notice. None of our names were trending on Twitter when we were 13-years-old (Twitter also was not invented yet), so what makes this girl so special? According to Heath, “Surprise makes us pay attention and think” (68). The surprise of me seeing almost 40 million views on Black’s video made me think enough to blog about her. The surprise for others was her age, the viewer’s reaction or the mention by Tosh and other celebrities or later by the media and social media.
Concreteness: Well obviously if today is Friday, Friday then tomorrow is Saturday and then it is Sunday. In case that wasn’t concrete enough, Black put that idea to a tune and flashed in on cards. The visual images that accompany the song follow the lyrics exactly. Black sings about being in a car while sitting in a car, Black sings about being with friends while surrounded by her friends, etc. In addition to Black’s message being easy to comprehend, the pop beat makes it easy to remember too, both important factors of concreteness.
Credibility: The credibility here does not lie with Black, who has little to none in the music industry, but Daniel Tosh does. Tosh and his pseudonym and television program Tosh.0 has a reputation of being a guide to the internet. He finds the best of viral videos, blogs and broadcasts them to the nation. He takes the guess work out of the process of procrastinating, and allows YouTube surfers to immediate find video that are worth watching because of their humor, shock or entertainment value. Like when my friend who told me about the initial link, Tosh is that same credible source for millions around the country.
Emotional: There was certainly plenty of emotion driving “Fridays” play count through the roof. The emotion was a collective hatred for the poor teen. Black and her song are the epitome of teenage innocence, and like a pack of hungry lions, YouTube views like to prey on the weak. She was an easy victim, and the anonymity of the internet made the barrage of hate even more venomous.
Stories: Love her or hate her Rebecca Black has a story to tell, a story that is still developing and changing, and a story we have not heard the end of.
So, eventually my friend and the reasons above got me to watch the entire video for “Friday,” all three minutes and 48 seconds of it. After I watched that I even watched the “unplugged” version, and guess what, she still can’t sing. But that doesn’t matter, because while Rebecca Black may not be able to sing she certainly can stick.
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