"I could sell a mil sayin' nothin on a track."
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So proclaimed the rapper MIMS on his 2007 single "This Is Why I'm Hot," in a prophecy that turned out to be not only self-fulfilling (recall the argument: "I'm hot cause I'm fly"; "You ain't cause you're not" ), but also kind of a lowball estimate. So what makes him different from 13-year-old Rebecca Black, the internet's favorite new object of derision?
She — or rather, the company, Ark Music Factory, that was paid $2,000 to make her feel like a star — has bequeathed to the world a song about nothing more than one of the days of the week. That day is between Thursday and Saturday. It is fun. (Or, as she sings, "fun, fun, fun, fun.") The song makes the Meow Mix jingle look like Joni Mitchell. Yet precisely because it's so devoid of substance, it's become a viral epidemic — which is to say, a substantial thing.
On the one hand, it's a good sign that we as a virtual nation have decided to tar and feather the song itself. It seems to prove that our collective unconscious has a built-in threshold, a notion of absolute zero — a point at which nearly any human being with ears will agree that a song ceases to count as a song, and must be regarded as either a non-song or a joke.
The movie "Idiocracy" hypothesizes that by the year 2500, American culture will be so intellectually degraded, so devoid of substance, that "Ass: The Movie" — a film that is literally just a picture of an ass, farting — will be No. 1 at the box office and win every Oscar. The backlash against "Friday" proves that we're not quite there yet. We won't accept a song that talks about the relative merits of various weekdays (even if, for some reason, people still like Garfield). We won't accept a song that just repeats the words "partyin'" and "fun" instead of forming phrases. We won't accept a song that literally recites the calendar. Ergo, we can probably rest assured that if "Ass: The Movie" were to arrive in theaters next weekend, it wouldn't even beat out "The Lincoln Lawyer."
On the other hand, as several have pointed out, much of the hate on "Friday" hasn't been directed at the song itself. People have been attacking a perceived sociocultural backdrop: the privileged class that can afford to spend (and is cool with spending) a substantial amount of money on a teenage girl's diva-play; the existence of such a service — it even comes with black people! — in the first place. Many have used the song as an opportunity to excoriate the whole "My Super Sweet 16" apparatus. Some have raged against Black herself, who didn't even write it.
When a piece of pop culture accumulates this much derision, it can tell us two things: what we perceive to be bad absolutely, and what we perceive to be bad only because of context. I'd like to think that the hate on "Friday" has proven a universal standard of taste — proven that a song of such utter banality is irredeemable in the marketplace, except by the generosity of irony. But then I think of MIMS; I think of Enrique Iglesias' "Tonight I'm Fucking You" (currently No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100); I think of the collected works of Ke$ha, for whom a dirtier "Friday" could've been a B-side. "Ass: The Movie" may be looming after all.
