The Rebecca Black Interview
I hate to continue paying attention to this, but holy hell are some of those comments funny. Turns out she’s not a bad singer.
Comments
I really have no idea how this whole thing blew up or how it started going around as “OMG THIS IS THE WORST SONG IN HISTORY!!! YOU’LL NEED TO BLEACH YOUR EARS AFTER HEARING THIS!!!!” Yeah, it’s a stupid pop song but honestly it’s absolutely no worse than Kesha or Katy Perry or Lady Gaga. Especially considering the girl is 13.
More interesting to me is the whole skeevy ARK record label scam thing that generated this whole deal and apparently has a stable full of kids even less talented than this who pay them thousands of dollars for them to attempt to make them stars.
Making fun of children was a lot more fun when I too was a child.
Wait, if she is 13 how old are the kids she are hanging out with ..considering that at least on of them drives??
Wait, if she is 13 how old are the kids she are hanging out with ..considering that at least on of them drives??
The whole video gets creepy when the, much older, rapper comes in and talks about watching the kids on the bus or something.
…This is kinda sad. Like Kevin said its not much worse than any other studio pop song. Her music sucks not because she sucks, but because she has Akon and Justin Beamer to look up to. Her mom should stop killing people and hand her a Beatles cd.
School must be a nightmare for her….
Her mom should stop hand her a Beatles cd.
She’s already playing vacuous, pre-fabricated, pop music with meaningless gibberish combined with vague platitudes and observations for lyrics. There’s no need to make the situation worse.
You are so wrong about so many things.
Look, I know that lyrics like “Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday” are not of the high caliber that “O bla di, O bla da life goes on” or “I am the Eggman, I am the Walrus, Koo Koo Ka Choo” are. And i’m fully aware that that the dilemma of whether to sit in the front seat or back seat does not adequately serve as a metaphor to capture life’s struggles with the same magnitude that pointing out that when one gets to the bottom they go back to the top of the slide and then get to the top and go for a ride does…….but still she can one day dream to write such great lyrics I’m sure.
brittany said:Her mom should stop killing people and hand her a Beatles cd.
Ugh.
Two McCartney songs and Lennon’s most infamous drug trip does not a musical history make.
“She loves you yeah, yeah yeah……she loves you yeah, yeah yeah!!”
“All you need is love”
“I wanna hold your haaaaaaaaaand!!”
“You say it’s your birthday!!!! It’s my birthday too!!!!”
Hey, I’m o.k. with it. The world needs vacant, uninspired, meaningless pop songs with greeting card sentiments passed off as deep and profound, for teenage girls to sing along to. There is no shame in that and Lennon and McCartney should hold their heads high, as should the Britney’s, Beiber’s, Keshas and Black Eyed Peas of the world.
I heard that most beatles songs are really about how the government and NASA faked the moon landings.
I hate you guys.
okay there is no way you can compare rebecca black to katy perry or lady gaga. that’s just ignorant to say and you’re lumping together one genre. you’d be pissed if someone took four metal bands and said “ah, that shit’s all the same…”
you may think it all sucks. but there are levels of suck.
Saw this posted on Reddit earlier…
And it got me thinking: if anything, this whole thing has proven that almost everyone has a suck threshold; that, despite the bullshit I hear when I tell them how much their favorite band sucks, most people are actually quite willing and more than able to objectively judge a piece of art or music as being “bad” or somehow beneath them.
No doubt the people who are mocking this song and laughing or raging about how awful it is will be gorging on some other valueless pop crap three weeks from now. And when I tell someone that the distance between the new Foo Fighters track and Rebecca black is much, much smaller than the distance between Foo Fighters and Beethoven, I’m gonna hear it all over again.
The shame is that the determining factors between good and bad art these days seems to have far more to do with popular opinion and fashion than it does any objective analysis.
I agree. But what you say is true if you’re someone who listens to classical music and only classical music. Or maybe jazz. But the minute you or anyone else ventures into popular music or rock music then it’s all subjective yet almost everyone thinks it’s objective. Every single last bit of it. No matter how much any of us want to think our opinion is all righteous and informed and based on concrete musical merits, it’s all what is fashionable, what is popular, and what captures a moment in our individual lives.
I mean face it, objectively there is nothing musically superior about Nirvana over say Nickelback or Creed. In fact in anything speaking strictly musically the latter two bands are probably more complex than the former. Is it lyrics? Maybe, although again that’s something that is personal and based on opinion rather than an objective analysis of music.
Again….Katy Perry and Lady Gaga…why? Honestly what sets them apart from Rebecca Black? The fact that they write their own vacuous pop crap rather than have someone else write it for them? That has nothing to do with the quality of the music and is something beyond just the musical merits of the songs themselves.
And I also don’t think that the determining factors between good and bad art these days has to do with popular opinion and fashion. I don’t know anyone who thinks say The Black Eyed Peas are good. But they are hugely popular. Yeah, there are exceptions with something like Kanye West, but that’s pretty rare.
You know what else I think about this? Once we get out of the realm of what is technically good music (again, classical would be the main go-to here) and into the realm of rock and pop and all that there are 2 things I think cloud this whole discussion:
- People either unknowingly or willfully confuse sincerity with musical ability or musicianship.
- We all like to think that we’re good judges of what is and is not sincere.
It’s why bands that are smaller or less popular are somehow regarded as more sincere because they are not doing it as much for money (not necessarily by choice). It’s why people think that Coldplay as a small, relatively unknown band is good, but Coldplay as a big stadium act is lame. Did their music change THAT much? Maybe a little. But did they become more bombastic and less innocent and what we perceive as sincere? Hell yes.
The problem with this is that we can’t ever really know who is sincere or not and it’s all based again on our subjective opinions and perceptions, and also that it’s very easy in this hyper media age to market and craft an image of sincerity.
It’s also why we think that someone writing their own song (even if it’s a bad song) is better than someone who performs and equally bad song. At least the other person’s bad song is sincere.
That’s why I think someone like Kanye West is considered “good” and critically acclaimed. Because his public persona is pretty much insane and narcisstic. And that’s kind of hard to fake and also why would someone choose to fake something that would make people hate them. Therefore he must be sincere and therefore that makes him better than other people doing very similar things musically.
Obviously musicianship comes into play. I don’t think that it doesn’t. But I definitely think that our notions of legitimacy and sincerity are what we ultimately end up arguing over.
I think of people arguing about music like I think about people arguing about sports; a completely meaningless and self serving debate where no one could ever win, and I try more and more not to get involved. People like what they like, whatever.
Except country, that shit’s hella lame.
It’s funny — on your previous post, Kev, you asked about the difference between Nickleback and Nirvana and my first thought was “artistic intent” which you went on to pretty much say in your second comment about sincerity. And I think you pretty much nailed it. Though I would add one more element, on top of sincerity and musical ability: uniqueness. Uniqueness of sound or of the intent, but I think we all sort of rate pop music based on those three things. That’s why Kanye’s last is so great: sprawling, amazingly crafted songs by a dude who is clearly bearing his weird little soul to the world with some very unique sounds and messages. It’s shit we haven’t heard before, done well, by someone who means it. I think if you can say that about an album, it’s a guaranteed to be great.
I was going to mention uniqueness but then that’s opening a whole other can of worms. Unique to who? I didn’t/don’t dislike Nirvana but they were not unique. There were tons of bands doing that style and more or less that level of songwriting for years prior. I mean they were unique in that they were the first band to get mainstream exposure playing that type of music. And to their credit they always paid respect to their forebearers. But nowhere near original in any sense of the word.
But again…..that’s something beyond the music itself. It was right place/right time….it was canny marketing….it was a willingness to engage in the machinations of pop stardom.
So I definitely agree about those 3 things. I’d say musical ability to most people is probably the least important of the 3, but people like to think it’s the top priority. But the thing is that the sincerity can be faked and/or marketed, and uniquenss to a lesser but still substantial degree can be faked, contrived, or marketed.