Gotta Get Down on Friday

Hi, before we get started today, I wanted to talk to you about something.

Slate, like so many media outlets right now, is contending with the dire economic effects of COVID-19.

My colleagues are working tirelessly to bring you news about the pandemic and also working tirelessly to bring you news and entertainment, distraction, laughter, about everything else too.

If you have gotten anything out of our work, we're asking if you're able for you to become a member of Slate Plus.

Slate is our membership program, a way for you to directly support Decodering, Slate, and the work that we are doing for just $35 for your first year.

You'll get access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive podcasts, extra segments of podcasts, and all of our written content.

If you can swing it, please do.

It will really help us to continue doing this work.

Please become a member.

Please support Slate directly by going to slate.com/slash decodering plus.

Thank you.

Now on to the

in 2011 eleanor kagan an audio producer was working at a job where she had a little too much time on her hands i would literally spend all day scrolling the internet and just like refreshing refreshing waiting for a new post um like there wasn't enough internet for me to read and then one day in march Something interesting happened.

All of a sudden, I started hearing people around my office giggle.

She immediately started looking around online, trying to figure out what they were laughing at.

Everybody was posting the lyrics to a song called Friday.

Just a few days before, this song and the then 13 year old girl who performed it, Rebecca Black, had been completely unknown.

But now that was changing in real time.

Eleanor was discovering this video alongside tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, eventually millions of other people.

Friday was on its way to becoming one of the biggest viral phenomena of the 21st century.

In the video, Black, who has long dark hair and looks as young as her age, reenacts the very detailed, very straightforward lyrics of the song.

7 a.m.

waking up in the morning.

Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs.

Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal.

Hurry me and everything,

She wakes up, she goes downstairs, eats her cereal, she obsesses about what seat to take on the ride to school, and eventually she winds up at a house party.

At first glance, the whole thing sounds and looks passably professional, but then you start to notice all sorts of weird things about it.

There's the monotone affect of Black's voice and the robotic effects layered over it.

The rap verse that comes in just when you think the song is winding down.

There's the way everyone in the video is trying unnaturally hard to have fun.

And most of all, there are the lyrics.

It was incomprehensible.

I could not process what I was watching.

I could not process what I was hearing.

I couldn't tell if it was a joke or not.

I wasn't sure if this was somebody's earnest creation or if this was something being put out there to troll us.

Tomorrow is Saturday

I think like going back to 2011, like that is truly how I felt just bafflement.

Bafflement was a common response to this song, but it was also a gentle one.

In its heyday, Friday was teased, mocked, parodied, ripped apart.

It was a meme that brought the whole internet together in a kind of astonishment that ranged from furious to amused.

Even though it was so bad,

I personally couldn't find it in my heart to actually like hate it.

At the end of the day, in my head, I was singing yesterday was Thursday, to Uday is Friday.

The idiocy of those words was just bringing me so much joy and laughter.

In Eleanor's reaction, you can hear the seeds of something, an ironic enjoyment that in the years to come would stop being ironic.

She and her partner have a ritual in which they wake up every Friday morning to Friday.

It started as a troll, a way to get Eleanor out of bed, but it turned into a tradition.

I would put on the front, like I was very annoyed that he was playing this song in the morning, and then,

but, but then, you know, I do love it.

As Eleanor's relationship to Friday suggests, in less than a decade on this earth, the song has been on quite a roller coaster ride.

It's been an object of hate and an object of love and everything in between.

And if you think it's been bumpy for the song and its listeners, buckle up.

My name is Rebecca Black and when I was 13, I sang a song called Friday.

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Every episode, we take on a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open, and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.

In a three-month period in 2011, Rebecca Black's Friday was viewed 167 million times, making it the most watched YouTube video of that year.

But Friday was not popular because people liked it so much.

Dubbed the worst video ever made, it became the most disliked song to that point in YouTube's history, and it turned Black into a maligned, viral sensation, the object of online abuse, disdain, and bullying.

Nine years after Friday arrived, we're going to try and understand why it caused such a hullabaloo.

The story of Friday is one about the messy swirl of feelings and assumptions that shape how we value music.

It's about how suspicious we are of change and how weird the present looks on its way to becoming the future.

It's about the end of something and the beginning of something else.

And that something else was not just the weekend.

So today, on decodering, was Rebecca Black's Friday really so bad?

Tito's handmade vodka is America's favorite vodka for a reason.

From the first legal distillery in Texas, Tito's is six times distilled till it's just right and naturally gluten-free, making it a high-quality spirit that mixes with just about anything.

From the smoothest martinis to the best Bloody Marys.

Tito's is known for giving back, teaming up with nonprofits to serve its communities and do good for dogs.

Make your next cocktail of Tito's, distilled and bottled by Fifth Generation Inc., Austin, Texas, 40% alcohol by volume, savor responsibly.

Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.

Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start.

It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month.

It prevents on average eight to nine 9 headache days a month versus 6 to 7 for placebo.

Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor.

Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms.

Alert your doctor right away, as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition.

Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk.

Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck, and injection, side pain, fatigue, and headache.

Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness.

Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection.

Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lugerick's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

Why wait?

Ask your doctor, visit BotoxCronicmigrain.com or call 1-800-44-Botox to learn more.

When Friday first went viral, nobody knew what it was.

It was like the entire world was starting in media res in the middle of the story.

Was it for real?

Was it a joke?

How did it exist?

Why did it exist?

Who wrote it?

Who produced it?

Who was Rebecca Black?

We didn't know any of these things, but now we do.

So we're going to start with where this song that seemed to appear out of nowhere came from.

Rebecca Black was born in 1997 and she grew up in Anaheim, California, the home of Disneyland.

She has a brother and her parents got divorced when she was pretty young, but not before putting her in a dance class, which she loved.

I grew up as a

theater kid.

Her childhood was pretty normal, which means like a proper millennial, when she felt awkward and out of place, she found solace in the internet and particularly YouTube.

I felt safe.

So many of us were dealing with bullying and dealing with feeling like an outcast and, you know, being different.

It allowed me to fall in love with the idea of being able to be whoever I wanted.

But Rebecca always wanted at least one thing, to perform.

By middle school, theater was her social world and she hoped it would be her future too.

This is something, okay, I'd love to do for the rest of my life.

In my world, like, I was gonna do middle school, graduate high school, apply to like NYU and Juilliard and like Berkeley School of Music and like those kinds of things.

She and her peers, like lots of affluent college-bound kids, knew getting into these schools was competitive.

They were always looking for things that might help them, give them experience.

And then one of Rebecca's classmates did something over the summer that sounded like a leg up.

She starred in in a music video.

I just thought it was really cool and I wanted to try it out for myself, you know, because at this point, we're not going to be America's next pop star.

Like, that's not, you know, we're like trying to just feel like we're doing what we can in our own little, you know, charter school.

And she just told me, you know, who it was and said, like, yeah, go check it out.

The place Rebecca was told to check out was a company called Ark Music Factory.

Ark Music Factory was founded in 2010, just a year before Friday was released, by a man named Patrice Wilson.

I am the producer and writer of Friday.

Patrice's father is Nigerian and his mother is Irish, and he had a musical childhood growing up in Nigeria.

But he got into music professionally only by happenstance.

He was going to school in Bratislava in the 1990s when Ibrahim Maiga, a singer from Mali, who was popular in Slovakia, spotted him on the street.

There were not many black people in Bratislava, Slovakia, So I'm walking on the streets one day, coming back from grocery shopping, and he pulled over, you know, he stopped by and he said, hey, you know, you're a black dude.

I'm like, yeah, I'm a black dude.

So you must do music.

I'm like, sure.

I do.

He's like, do you rap?

I'm like, yeah, I rap.

I was more of a singer, I would say, not a rapper.

But I thought I'm just going to go with the flow.

He ended up going on tour, rapping at concerts until around 2000 when he decided to try and make it in America.

He enrolled in a Bible school in Minnesota, but left for New York, hoping to break into the entertainment industry.

It was hard.

After a year or so of couch surfing and going on auditions, he decided to try college again.

He applied to a school that he thought was in Washington, D.C., but turned out to be in Washington State, which he realized on a cross-country bus.

He went anyway.

He met his wife there, and he pretty much stopped making music.

But a few years later, when they moved to LA, he thought it might be time to get back into it.

I listened

Okay.

The label Patrice started, Arc Music Factory, was not a typical record label.

The relationship between artists and record labels is notoriously complicated, but at their simplest, a record label signs an artist and gives them money to cut a record, a record deal.

But Patrice didn't have any cash.

He couldn't afford to put up the money to sign artists in the typical way.

So instead, he decided to start a company where the artists would pay him.

It's not quite as shady as it sounds.

Somebody has to do an investment in the music, the videos.

Well, it could be the artists.

They can invest.

They can own the rights, you know.

The idea was that Arc Music would be like a one-stop shop.

You pay them a couple of thousand dollars and they do it all.

Write you a song, get you a studio, produce the song, take photos, record a video, and even submit all of that to more more legitimate record labels.

You were paying for all of these services and also the company's expertise, and you got the rights to the song, which isn't always the case with a real label.

Patrice wrote the songs and he hired a producer off of Craigslist, a man named Clarence Jay.

Patrice and Clarence hoped to develop a variety of talent good enough to take to labels who might legitimize art music.

And in Patrice's case, even give him a recording career of his own.

But from the very first audition they held, it became clear their company really only appealed to one demographic.

The first audition was more like, what the heck is going on?

You know, these are all kids.

The people who were going to college could not pay.

The older artists could not pay.

The younger artists, the parents were like, oh yeah, sure, we wanted to do this.

You know, we want to do this definitely.

Those were the people who could afford it.

Arc Music's business model.

They got paid when they signed people, incentivize signing people, whatever their musical ability.

We try to go with

being selective, but when you're also starting a business, we can't be too selective.

As non-traditional as all of this is, it was pretty popular.

Lots of kids wanted to star in a music video, and enough of them had parents who were willing to bankroll it.

One of the teenagers who tried out, who Patrice actually thought was pretty good, was named Alana Lee.

She became one of Arc Music's first artists, or customers, really, recording a song and a video called Butterflies.

Patrice posted butterflies to YouTube, like he did with all the Arc Music videos.

In the aftermath of Friday, ArcMusic would be painted as having this savvy knowledge about the workings of this video platform, like it really knew how to use YouTube to amplify its intentionally viral fare.

But the reality was more haphazard than that.

Patrice hoped the videos would get views, and butterflies actually did pretty well.

But he mostly relied on YouTube to share the videos with parents, his actual customers, and to get the videos passed around between friends, frenemies, and schoolmates, building the word-of-mouth network that was keeping him in business.

That's how Rebecca Black came to Arc Music.

She went to school with Alana, saw the butterflies video, and asked her mom if she could make one herself.

My mom, she comes from

the Hispanic world of mothers who really would die for their kids and would do anything for their kids to have any sort of opportunity because it's something that she had to fight so, so hard for.

So when I said, hey,

there's this thing that, you know, we can go and I don't really know anything about it.

I kind of said it thinking like, there's no way.

And she was like, yeah,

let's send them an email.

Let's try it out.

Sure.

Her mother remained game even after she heard how much it cost.

$4,000.

Did the fact that it like cost money, was that like a problem or was that okay you know it's something i've always wanted to ask my mom about because

i i come from a family of divorced parents and my mom

i was actually just talking about this the other day to my therapist my mom is someone who has always tried so hard to

ensure my brother and I that everything is fine and there's not a problem, but I can 100% guarantee that, you know, even though she acted as if it was not a problem, that that put a huge strain on her.

Still, they went ahead with it.

At this point, Rebecca was totally new to every part of the process.

She'd never even been inside a recording studio, and she was really excited about all of it.

But not, she says, because she ever thought it was going to make her famous.

I remember them saying, like, you know, if this video gets 100,000 views, if we upload it to YouTube, like, you can start actually earning money off of it.

And I was like, okay, sure, great.

But again, like this,

this never happens to

somebody like me.

I just imagine like teenagers being like, you telling me this is going to make me famous?

And they're like, yes, absolutely.

That is what is going to happen.

So like, was there really no part of you that was like, ooh, maybe?

Or you really were like the sensible person.

I just never thought that it would happen to me.

Like, what gave me the right to

have that happen over everybody else.

I mean, these are meant to be machines to churn, you know, out as many as they possibly can.

And it's like you meet, they send you a song.

I mean, I couldn't believe they even sent me a second song because I said no to the first because I was too afraid of singing a song about love.

Wait, what was the first song they sent you?

It was a song called Superwoman.

It was that.

It was about being somebody's superwoman, which literally, like, within the span of two weeks, I had broken up with my first ever boyfriend because I was too afraid to talk to him at school.

So

my whole first relationship lasted about three days.

So I really was like, I can't,

I can't sing this.

In turning down this song, Rebecca put Patrice on a pretty tight deadline.

He was working hard writing songs for all of Arc Music's customers.

So it's about 1 a.m.

and I decided I'm going to call it a night.

But I'm like, wait a second, I'm going to just one more time.

So I play a beat and I make up a song Friday, Friday.

And I'm like,

well, because it is Friday.

In the morning, the song still sounded pretty good to him.

So he sent it to Rebecca.

I was like, okay, sure, great.

This works.

This is true.

I mean, I like to hang out with my friends on the weekends and I go to school.

I really didn't think that much about it because, again, like, nobody's going to see it.

At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments.

It's about you, your style, your your space, your way.

Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right.

From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows.

Because at blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you.

Visit blinds.com now for up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost.

Rules and restrictions apply.

Okay, so we're going to leave Rebecca right there for now, back in 2011 with no idea what's what's about to happen to her.

And we're going to dig into the song for ourselves here in 2020, where for a number of reasons, it seems to sound differently than it did back then.

Anyone who thinks that this song only caught on because it was, I guess, so musically offensive, I think is completely misguided.

Nate Sloan is an assistant professor of musicology at USC and the co-host of Switched on Pop, a wonderful podcast about how pop music works.

Friday is absolutely plugged into the most successful kind of formula of popular music.

It's Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday.

Traditionally, in like an earlier period of popular music, after that chorus, you would go back to the verse.

Friday doesn't do that.

It does this gambit, which is very typical of 21st-century pop music.

It adds this section called a post-chorus.

We have this rapper enter the scene in the music video.

Which also felt like very much in keeping with the musical vocabulary of mid 2010 pop.

Friday's subject matter, having fun, was also very of the moment.

The radio was dominated by female-fronted, candy-colored anthems that were all about partying.

Songs like Kesha's TikTok and Katy Perry's California Girls.

But Friday also comes with the smooth, zero-calorie aftertaste of a boy band album track.

It sounds very of its moment, but its musical roots go back even further than that.

And one of the ways that it sticks in your head is by using one of the

perennial chord progressions of American popular music.

It's called the one, six, four, five progression.

Sometimes it's called ice cream changes.

You can trace it back to the 1930s in a song like Blue Moon by Rogers and Hart.

You can pick it up in Stand By Me by Benny King.

And then fast forward to 2019, and even Taylor Swift is using it in her song Me.

So this is just like one of the most durable chord progressions of popular music and Rebecca Black is using it in Friday.

Still, no one is saying Friday is perfect.

It's close, right?

But what is like the no cigar part of it?

Like what about it is that like actually distinguishes it from a pop song that's good?

There are these moments that kind of betray it.

You know, I think you can start in the verse

with the very first melodic lines: 7 a.m.

waking up in the morning, gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs.

That is a one-note melody.

There is no deviation, it's just like this rat-a-tat-tat.

And then you skip ahead to the chorus, and there's another little thing that's off.

It's the way she sings Friday.

It's an effect on her voice that is very common in popular music called auto-tune.

You know, the goal of auto-tune is to be almost invisible, to just tweak the singer's voice so subtly that you don't really notice.

We've cranked it up, it starts to sound unnatural.

And as she literally says the word fry,

it sounds like her voice is being fried.

So it's this very kind of unintentionally funny moment, I think.

And then finally you get to the post-chorus and again it just feels like this moment where they just give up.

Fun, fun, fun, fun.

It's those little moments of ineptitude that make the song so, so enjoyable.

Talking to Nate made me think that not only is Friday not that bad, it's actually it's not that badness that counterintuitively made it so infuriating.

Friday is close enough to being good that you can actually hear where it fails.

Instead of in worst songs, where the whole thing is such a mess, your ear doesn't know where to begin making judgments.

There's one other thing that Friday is doing, musically speaking, that bears mentioning.

This is a song that sticks with you because it's catchy.

Catchy is understating it, and it's hard to be as catchy as Friday.

But catchiness is a key part of why the song was so divisive.

One woman's catchy is another man's insane-making earworm, after all.

In the days after Friday began going around the internet, some people were already starting to take Nate Sloan's view of it, to admire how sticky it was, how simple but effective, how funny, how guileless.

Meanwhile, others were just plagued by it, like it was this parasite that was doing something to them against their will.

Just one of the many reasons it was not to be trusted.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So let's return now to Rebecca Black, who in early 2001 has just recorded the song and is about to record the video that would change her life.

Attention all small biz owners.

At the UPS store, you can count on us to handle your packages with care.

With our certified packing experts, your packages are properly packed and protected.

And with our pack and ship guarantee, when we pack it and ship it, we guarantee it.

Because your items arrive safe or you'll be reimbursed.

Visit the ups store.com/slash guarantee for full details.

Most locations are independently owned.

Product services, pricing, and hours of operation may vary.

See Center for Details.

The UPS store.

Be unstoppable.

Come into your local store today.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game?

Well, with the name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills.

Try it at progressive.com.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.

Price and coverage match limited by state law.

Not available in all states.

as with everything else about arc music the process of making the video for friday was both way more professional than it could have been and also kind of shoestring they used a green screen but the video shot at rebecca's dad's house they wanted a school bus but they could only afford a convertible those are rebecca's real friends and that's patrice in the video performing the rap first

February 10th, 2011, ArcMusic uploaded the finished video to YouTube and sent it to Rebecca, who watched it for the first time.

I just remember my first reaction watching myself back was like, oh my god, I am so awkward.

And I showed, I think the first person I showed it to was my dad.

And we watched it together, like in full, and we were both just kind of like, okay, well, that was, that was cute.

Okay.

And yeah, I mean, I showed my friends and then that was, that was definitely it, like in my book.

Like it went online and I was like, okay,

and I moved on.

And for a while, that really seemed like that was that.

The video, like so many videos, just sat there with a few thousand views and a few comments.

It seemed like it really was going to be what it was intended to be, a learning experience Rebecca had in middle school.

One day, I got

some comment posted that they'd seen the video on Tosh.0 and that they hated the song and that the song sucks, but they said the song's going to be big.

And I was just like, what?

Tosh.0 is a now long-running TV show that premiered in 2009.

In it, the comedian Daniel Tosh roasts viral videos and internet culture.

But the show also had a popular blog, and on March 11th, it had published a post titled, Songwriting Isn't for Everyone, that it embedded Friday, which it had aggregated from a popular meme site called The Daily What.

The song was also getting attention on Twitter, making the rounds with a viral tweet describing it as the worst music video ever made.

So I immediately, like, as soon as I got home, I, you know, ran to my computer and I scrolled down to the comments, and that was immediately when I was like, oh no, oh no, no, no, no, this is not happening.

For the first like hour or two, I was definitely just with my mom trying to like let that first emotional kind of shock pass through.

And

pretty soon after, you know, she got on the phone with the company that, you know, is responsible for all of it.

And

they asked me if I wanted to take it down.

And my mom was very much like, this is your decision.

What do you want to do?

And

God knows why, but I said no.

And I think something told me like, oh, if you do that, then all of a sudden everybody else wins and you've just immediately given up any sort of little bit of power you had.

And so I kept it up.

And then the next few days, it was just kind of like watching this thing blow more and more out of proportion and just not stop.

Lots of things go viral, but few things go viral to the extent that Friday did.

The song just kept accruing views.

It became omnipresent offline as well.

It made the Billboard charts.

In fact, if Billboard had been factoring in YouTube views then, as it is now, it probably would have been a top 10 hit.

Just about every media outlet in the world wrote about the song, and Rebecca hit the talk show circuit.

She appeared on Good Morning America and Tonight Show.

Oh, it's so crazy.

It's so weird.

It is weird.

Well, how did the whole music video come?

In May of 2011, a cover of Friday appeared in the TV show Glee.

Friday day, Friday day.

In June, Rebecca cameoed in a Katy Perry music video.

Perry was Rebecca's hero, and the video was for a song titled Appropriately Enough: Last Friday Night.

In it, Rebecca leads Katy Perry, who is dressed in full 90s nerd drag, she has headgear and everything, through a massive house party.

It was Rebecca!

She had a party!

Rebecca Black is a nice girl.

If some of this sounds good, a lot of it was really bad.

What's clear in hindsight about the reaction to Friday is that in 2011, we were pretty much nowhere when it comes to an awareness of online bullying.

It gets better.

The LGBTQ anti-bullying campaign had started some months before, but the general conversation around these issues was relatively rudimentary.

The concerns that are so pervasive now just were not then, and a 13-year-old girl was deemed fair game by just about everyone, not only internet commenters.

To get a sense of what I'm talking about, I want to play you a clip from the interview Rebecca did with Good Morning America's Andrea Canning, just a few weeks into Friday's virality.

I'm going to read you just some of the comments that people have been saying online and they're not nice.

No.

Her song Friday is the worst song I've ever heard in my entire life.

Even deaf people are complaining.

Okay.

It doesn't bother me.

I hate her voice.

It's going to be stuck in my head for life.

Friday, Friday, Friday, OMG.

What's the meanest thing you've read that maybe hurts you the most?

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.

Have you cried at all throughout all of this?

Or are you just...

What's notable to me here isn't just the awful comments, though they are awful.

It's the way canning and trying to appear concerned and sympathetic.

amplifies those comments.

Instead of shielding Rebecca from them, giving us this context with Rebecca off screen, she reads them to this 13-year-old girl's face, mawkishly trolling around for some kind of reaction.

I just remember this

overwhelming feeling of just suck it up, smile, stay strong, nobody can know that you're hurting, just laugh with them.

And as soon as I started doing that, people saw me as kind of in on it.

And that at least felt better than feeling like the butt of a joke.

All of the actual like pain and embarrassment and shame that came with all of that just kind of got swept under the rug for a good few years.

So, I want to take a step back now to try and contextualize the reaction to this goofy little pop song.

The overreaction, really.

The thing you have to understand is that Friday was not just a song.

And one of the places you can see that most clearly is YouTube.

In 2011, YouTube had only been around for six years, but in that time, we had gotten used to it regularly serving up a very specific kind of viral meme.

Ones that were homemade, like this extremely lo-fi-bit ultimate dog tease that's just a close-up of a dog whose owner is making these doofy voices.

And I thought, yeah, I know who would like that.

Me.

So I ate it.

This video, plus a home movie of two infant twins yakking at each other in their twin language, were two of the absolute most popular YouTube videos of 2011, only behind Friday.

The tone in which people appreciated YouTube videos was that it was cool that people were making their own art in their bedroom.

Carl Wilson is Slate's music critic.

It was this kind of like folk expression in, you know, in an internet key.

And then this seemed like cheating on some level.

Oh, this is weird.

This like rich kids' parents paid for this.

that was definitely a lot of the like suspicion there was this idea of like oh people are trying to buy their way into

some kind of like internet popularity which again yeah now is completely routine but at the time felt like it was somehow going around the rules Friday had a totally different approach to YouTube and virality than the one that had dominated the platform and the internet up to that point.

It was commercial, intentional, semi-professional, things that YouTube has only become more of in the years since.

In its use of YouTube, Friday also raised all sorts of questions, ones that we're still asking about how we evaluate talent and dispense fame in this new digital age.

In other words, it wasn't just a song, it was a change.

And I think that helps explain the intensity of the reaction to it.

People weren't just responding to what Friday sounded like.

They weren't just responding to a song with the smooth, zero-calorie aftertaste of a boy band album track and a demonically catchy hook.

No, they were responding to it as a harbinger of the future.

But before we get to the future, we're going to have to stick with Rebecca in the past, the years right after Friday in particular, and they were difficult ones.

There was a lot of opportunity, but a lot of isolation.

Rebecca's parents were there for her, but also as overwhelmed and confused as she was.

She started being homeschooled.

The family's relationship with ARC music quickly fell apart and lawsuits started flying.

Rebecca got a new agent and manager and her first single after Friday got 50 million views, but the following ones petered out.

In this period, she released one song that charted, peaking at 55 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2013.

It was called Saturday.

It was more sophisticated than Friday, but the video referenced all of Friday's highlights, the cereal bowl, the house party, riding around with friends in a convertible.

She was only 15 and she was already raiding her own viral past.

Patrice was trying pretty much the same thing, releasing Happy, the official sequel to Friday, among other songs.

Neither this nor any of the other songs stuck.

Arc Music Factory, which was caught up in multiple lawsuits, went defunct.

Patrice started a new label, which tried to do what Ark ArcMusic had done inadvertently, creating so bad it's good viral videos on purpose.

He had some success, but the shtick had become really calculating and heartless, and YouTube, which had once been the engine of online virality, was ceding that title to other social media platforms.

It got harder and harder to make a living.

He got divorced and his mental health suffered seriously.

Today, he makes music, but he's still in Friday's long shadow.

Do you still like Friday, like, as a song?

I really like the song.

I still listen to the song now to see what

I did back then versus what I'm doing now.

How did I make such a catchy song?

I wasn't thinking about, oh my God, people are going to hate this or people are going to like it.

It was like, I would say just came naturally.

Rebecca has done a better job putting Friday behind her and she started by walking away from it completely.

I just was doing everything

based off of what somebody else told me to do and i was just miserable so there came a point where everybody that i was working with management all of that i let go of all of them and i just stopped i mean my parents and i agreed like i'm gonna go back to high school i'll figure it out There was one exception.

Even after everything that happened, she kept posting on her YouTube channel.

And then after she finished high school, she made a deal with her parents that she would try music again.

Damn, this was the one thing that I always wanted to try and I never got to do it on my own terms and people decided what they were going to do for me and now I've been kind of left to pick up the pieces.

But I want to try to do this on my own and I want to do it in a way that feels good to me and is the way that I would have done it if I would have been able to foresee everything that was going to happen, which is, you know, learning how to write music and hopefully write good stuff.

Rebecca says that for a while, being the Friday girl meant people in the industry didn't want to get in a room with her, but she persevered.

And that's the thing about something like Friday.

As awful as the experience may have been, it gave her a name.

It might not have been worth it, but it was a leg up, a bruised leg up, but a leg up all the same.

In 2019, she released three singles, including this one, a song called Sweetheart.

In the video, Rebecca takes out her cheating lover with the help of some friends.

It's dark and grown up and contains no references to Friday.

Don't call me a

These days, when Rebecca, who I should say is all of 23, does hear about Friday, it's mostly nicely.

I mean, the amount of people that asked me to sing the song for them or record a video doing it because they played in their office every Friday, very unironically, is amazing to me.

So I have to say, having listened to to this song like a gazillion times for this episode, I am confident that it is not the worst song ever.

I am confident, in fact, that it is very, very far from being the worst song ever.

But the fact that there was a moment when it was widely described this way is what is so fascinating about it to me.

Friday, at all of nine years old, is this incredible artifact of its exact time.

It's a throwback to a moment when YouTube was still amateurish and the primary driver of viral culture.

A throwback to when people thought striving to go viral was some kind of social faux pas.

A throwback to when we were reflexively cruel to 13-year-olds who didn't know their place.

A throwback to when being a huge viral smash was not completely synonymous with success.

A throwback to when a wannabe musician might imagine the best way to break into the business, the best way to get experience, would be to pay some gatekeeper $4,000 to make them a snazzy music video.

Now, of course, the gatekeepers are the ones chasing after the teens who are buying beats for $20 online and trying to start a dance craze on TikTok.

And yet, for everything about Friday that is so of that ancient time, 2011, it also pointed clear as day towards those teens, towards right now, towards a pop culture that is constantly trying to make something weird enough to go viral.

And if you need an example of what I'm talking about, have a listen.

Lil Nas X's Old Town Road, Like Friday, is a funny, bizarre, totally inauthentic song made by a teenager no one had ever heard of that, on the strength of its viral success went on to become the longest-running number one song in history.

Old Town Road is a better, more purposefully produced and made song than Friday.

It has in Lil Nas X a more confident and charming performer than a 13-year-old Rebecca Black.

But it also exists in the world Friday helped create.

One where oddball, catchy, viral pop is appreciated and not reflexively disdained.

Rebecca, for her part, is still trying to make Friday itself something she can appreciate, which means taking it in another direction.

It sounds completely different than, you know, it sounded.

There's no like buzzy auto-tune or anything on it.

It's much more of like a 90s meets Courtney love Lana Darre thing.

She plays it at shows and people seem to like it.

And to me, that's what Friday is really all about.

How infuriating the present is as it becomes the future until the future arrives and then everyone just wants to sing along.

It's Friday, Friday.

Gotta get down on Friday.

Everybody is looking forward to the

camera.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willapaskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our Feed and Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Willipaskin.

It was edited by Benjamin Frisch.

Decodering is produced by Willapaskin and Benjamin Frisch.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

Thanks to Merritt Jacob, Amanda Hess, Carrie Battan, Amanda Dobbins, Amos Barshad, Matthew Perpetua, Forrest Wickman, Michael J.

Nelson, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.

See you you next month.