Abstract
Rebecca Black’s “Friday” may be annoying and ubiquitous, but it’s also a great example of contemporary cultural production. The author explores the making of a meme and the many hands behind a hit.
Keywords
“The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of the countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a subsection of the music department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. The woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound.”
On March 15, 2011 the singer Rebecca Black released her single “Friday” on iTunes, and it immediately reached the top 100. In and of itself, this isn’t especially odd—songs often become popular very quickly. The strange thing about the song is that it was released by a vanity label (that is, a label that gets paid by the artist) and the song’s popularity was based in a viral commentary relishing the song as an unintended parody of pop music conventions. Both in how it was produced and in how it became popular, though, “Friday” exemplifies growing trends in popular music.
Miss Black is a thirteen-year old girl from Orange County, California, who was recruited to a casting call by the Ark Music Factory. Ark’s business model is to run these open casting calls for “new talent” and to charge the parents of their recruits $2,000 to $4,000. Ark then writes, records, and produces a song and accompanying video with the young singer. This is why the Ark Music Factory isn’t regarded as a record label in any kind of conventional sense, but a vanity label. That such a business exists, and at such a price point, speaks volumes about the nature of popular culture.
Both in how it was produced and in how it became popular, “Friday” exemplifies growing trends in popular music.
The first thing to note is that $4,000 is an amazingly cheap price tag for writing, recording, and mixing a song and making a music video. By way of contrast, a National Public Radio story on the pop star Rihanna estimated that she’d paid her collaborators about $78,000 for writing and recording a song and spent a bit over $100,000 to make the video. Mockable as the “Friday” video is, its technical quality is professional-grade, and the fact that it was inexpensive is a reflection of the tremendous extent to which digital technology leverages the efforts of a low-rent music producer. These cheap production technologies lower the cost of recording a song and video, transforming the act of making a music video from something that was traditionally a big business investment into a consumer splurge for about the same price as a trip to Disneyworld.
She may be a novelty act, but Rebecca Black got a lot of attention on the red carpet at 2011’s MTV Video Music Awards.
Of course, it isn’t entirely unprecedented for falling production costs to create a market for vanity productions. In the early 1950s, Sam Phillips hustled together a living using newly cheap and portable recording equipment like magnetic tape (a German technology that came to America as one of the spoils of the Second World War) to do such things as make audio recordings of funerals. It was through these personal recordings that Phillips discovered Elvis Presley, whom he met in 1953 when Elvis paid Phillips to record him singing (allegedly as a birthday gift for his beloved mother Gladys). A few months later, Sun Records released “That’s All Right.”
Such low production costs result in a market flooded with pop songs. As has been noted by sociologists like Paul Hirsch, Russ Neuman, and Richard Peterson, what gives a song an advantage in a competitive market is the backing of a major firm with the resources and connections to promote the song. Because of the inherent scarcity of human attention, promotional expenses can get bid up to enormous prices. For instance, the aforementioned NPR story estimated Rihanna’s promotion expenses for just one single at about a million dollars, over five times what she spent to actually create the song and video. This is perhaps the most unusual thing about “Friday”—it became famous not because Miss Black went on tour or launched a pricey radio promotion campaign, but because people sent the YouTube link to one another, often using social media services like Twitter and Facebook. The vast majority of the references to the song are negative (the song has about a 90 percent “dislike” rating on YouTube), but that its popularity is derived from making it a hate object only demonstrates the logic of the variously-attributed adage, “I don’t care what they say about me so long as they spell my name right.” All viral publicity is good viral publicity.
Despite the unusual business model and promotional strategy, “Friday” still closely follows both the logistical and artistic conventions of the popular music industry. In particular, Miss Black’s heavy reliance on a songwriter and producer is typical of the high pop genre associated with so-called “Top 40” radio stations. In high pop, collaborators come together on a song-by-song basis, and the producers and composers are, if anything, more important than the singers. Over the last ten years, the Top 40 charts have seen numerous singers, but if you read the liner notes of a CD or “Get Info” in iTunes you will see the names of writers and producers Babyface, Max Martin, Dr. Dre, the Neptunes, Linda Perry, and Timbaland over and over again. In this respect, the Ark Music Factory is simply a downscale version of the standard practices of pop music’s biggest stars.
The only thing that really marks out “Friday” is that the singer is especially young and obscure—and the lyrics are especially stupid.
This sort of collaborative music production is often seen as inauthentic hack-work. As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes in The Field of Cultural Production, romanticism understands art as the authentic expression of an individual artist’s soul. By extension, this makes the idea of singer-songwriters both more salient and more legitimate. Indeed, for the second half of the 20th century, singer-songwriters were very important—we understood a cover version as derivative of and secondary to the original recording. However, this is a historically contingent style of music production. From Stephen Foster composing for the Christy Minstrels through Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Songbook, the first hundred years of the American popular music industry was characterized by a clear division of labor between composers and performers. It was only with the rise of rock and roll in the mid-1950s that we came to expect these roles to be combined in the unified artistic role of the singer-songwriter. In recent years, the singer-songwriter model is fading, as are so many other aspects of the rock era. (The other notable reversion to type is the shift back to singles with digital downloads, after decades in which the industry was characterized by albums with LPs and CDs.)
“Friday” closely follows other genre conventions of high pop music as well. The “Friday” video consists of a bouncy dance beat and a young girl singing somewhat nonsensical lyrics in a voice heavily distorted by a digital technology called Auto-Tune. After the third stanza, there is a featured performance by a rapper. Almost exactly the same could be said of half the songs receiving regular airplay on Top 40 radio; the only thing that really marks out “Friday” is that the singer is especially young and obscure—and the lyrics are especially stupid.
The unintentional humor of “Friday” closely parallels the deliberate satire of the Gregory Brothers projects “Auto-Tune the News” and “Songify This.” In this popular series of YouTube clips and iTunes singles, the band manages to derive song lyrics from found objects like President Barack Obama saying “we do not give up, not today” or Representative Steve Buyer (R-IN) explaining that “it’s not the nicotine that kills, it’s the smoke.” By using modern, electronic post-production to turn arbitrary C-SPAN clips into catchy dance tunes, the Gregory Brothers are in effect asking how can we trust that “real” pop stars are in any sense talented and not merely the artifice of producers, handlers, and svengalis?