I just removed a Facebook status I made about Rebecca Black's video Friday, which I'd been ignoring/overlooking up to this point. I don't really pay attention to music trends. Pop music's not my specific thing. I'm not one of the types who's scathingly critical of music for being popular or commercial. Sometimes I encounter pop music that I like. Again, I say it's not my specific thing.
But two people on my Wall were talking about her, so I Googled the original video and found it. The thing that struck me about it was that the lyrics and video matched up in a really obvious and banal way that reminded me of the "literal video" trend, where the bizarre imagery of a typical music video is described by parody lyrics. The best example (in terms of both quality and humor) of this that I know is the
Total Eclipse of the Heart one. The Facebook post I made was a play on this. I took it down because however amusing this is to me, I don't care to be part of either the hype or the ridicule that's swirling around this young woman.
I do want to talk about the phenomenon, though, and to do that I need to start this post by mentioning two very important things that I learned approximately five seconds after noticing Rebecca Black and her video existed. I'm mentioning these things because six seconds after I noticed their existence, I realized a lot of people talking about her and the video
don't know these things.
The first is that Rebecca Black is a thirteen-year-old girl, and no, that's not cause for mockery.
Or rather, it is but it shouldn't be.
To be a thirteen-year-old girl in our society is almost categorically to be the subject of cruel mockery. That doesn't change if you're "the popular girl" instead of "the outcast", if a Platonic School exists somewhere that these classes are absolute. The popular girls are being viciously mocked by the outcasts. I'm not trying to say that they go through equal amounts of social hell, but it takes a naive understanding of sociology and psychology to think that popular, conventionally attractive tween/teenage girls aren't harmed by the ridicule directed at them.
I'm also not saying that thirteen-year-old boys aren't the targets of scorn and ridicule. They are. Among the list of failures of the United States education system, the failure to provide a safe environment for
anyone is pretty high on the list, and it contributes to the other failures. But this is a case of intersectionality. Intersecting pressures and prejudices don't add, they multiply. Young women are under more pressure from more directions, and bullying tends to hit the same pressure points that are already weakened.
So, no mockery of Rebecca Black from me. And none from you who are reading this. Not here. Not in space that I control.
The second important thing is that she didn't write the lyrics or direct the video, no matter how DIY it seems. These were handed to her by ARK Music Factory, which advertises itself as an indie record label but is actually a vanity press for would-be musicians. It's like those places in the mall where you can go and have a CD or DVD made of yourself singing a popular song in front of a bluescreened background or whatever (Do those places still exist? Did they ever? I've only ever seen them in TV shows.), except they charge you thousands of dollars and represent themselves as a place that can help launch a career.
The song is seriously shitty. The video is equally shitty. The reason for this is because they were produced by a company that exists to part people from their money as efficiently as possible, and you don't do that by spending a lot of money on songwriters and cinematographers. The verses of the song are blatantly filler. The refrains aren't
actual refrains. They are imitations of a refrain written by someone who has heard many.
Now here's where it gets interesting to me, and this is the reason why I want to talk about Rebecca Black even though I don't want to add even my small voice to the firestorm around here. If I just felt bad about the status update I would have deleted it.
But as I said, here's the interesting thing.
Like Douglas Adams's "holistic detective" Dirk Gently, ARK Music has managed to accidentally deliver on their scam. Thanks to the magical intersection of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and assholes on the internet, Rebecca Black's a star. Sure, she's getting reamed by the interneluminati and panned by critics... but hey, so are lots of legitimate musical acts.
And in fact, while we can pinpoint how and why the lyrics suck so badly, the fact is that it's hard to find anything bad to say about Rebecca Black that isn't a focused microcosm of the general criticism that pop music tends to receive.
So here's the question: her utterly manufactured celebrity, her fame that is utterly divorced from whatever creative talents she may or may not have... is Rebecca Black somehow a less legitimate sensation than the Spice Girls, or the Monkees, or any number of boy bands or girl bands or pop stars who were manufactured
on purpose, by people on the inside of the music industry making deliberate and cynical use of its apparatus?
Please don't jump in to tell me about how talented members of the Monkees were. I'm not saying they weren't. I'm saying their talents didn't make them famous. Men in suits made them famous. Their genuine talent was incidental and in fact a little inconvenient.
The difference between those examples and Rebecca Black? Well, apart from the fact that the full extent of her talent has yet to be seen, the main difference is she doesn't have the men in suits backing her. ARK Music, yes, but they probably didn't expect more than from her than any client whose check they cashed, and that would mainly be the check and some more referrals from their friends and relatives before the shine wears off the dream. They aren't savvy insiders in the business of creating genuine stars. It's like the difference between being an actual kingmaker and being the casting director for a community playhouse production of
Richard III.
If Rebecca had been positioned for stardom by insiders, she might have slightly better lyrics... or at least lyrics that are awful in conventionally acceptable ways. The overprocessing in post-production of her voice would be better done, but it would still be just as overprocessed. The video would probably be horrible in ways that go way beyond being banal. And the same corners of the internet that are eviscerating her now would be eviscerating her. Given the number of "how did she get a music deal?" comments I've seen while writing this post, it seems likely that a good number of the people tearing her down don't realize she's not actually a typical pop starlet. There are plenty who do know at the very least that her video is "an internet thing", but be honest: if you heard the song for the first time on a Top 40 radio station, would you be thinking "Clearly this is some internet nobody's song that somehow was played by accident here." or would you be thinking it simply reflected the state of the pop music industry that this sort of thing can end up on the radio?
I don't know if radios are playing it, but her song's on iTunes, and I have to believe that some people are buying it, given the number of people talking about it. Some people are enjoying it
unironically... as I've said in a previous post, the thing that you think is the shittiest thing in the world is somebody else's favorite thing. Yeah, more people are listening to it for free on YouTube or downloading it from a friend or peer-to-peer network, but the thing about iTunes and similar services is that they're cheap enough and convenient enough that they twig as "practically free" to a lot of people on the level where snap decisions are made. (Shades of the e-book price discussion here.)
She's now performed her song on Good Morning America. And much like a pageant contestant stripped of 17 layers of makeup, her voice turns out to be a lot better without all the autotune. Not what you would call "professional quality", but careers have been built around worse voices. Will she have a career as anything other than a novelty act? Don't know. Could she have managed to start a career some other way? Don't know. But it's too early to say she's a flash-in-the-pan.
Tori Amos started out with an 80s hairband. Natalie and Nicole Appleton started out as members of All Saints. Hanson started out as Hanson. Musicians overcome their roots and re-invent themselves all the time. I don't believe... and this carries the caveat that it is based entirely on watching two performances... that Rebecca Black has the chops right now for a "serious" career, but it's worth repeating that she's thirteen and "wouldn't be able to get a scholarship to a classical conservatory based on a singing audition" or "wouldn't impress Simon Cowell" aren't the same thing as "doesn't have a voice worth listening to" or "couldn't establish a musical career".
I'll put it in very simple terms: her voice is good enough that if she were singing something I thought was worth listening to, I would listen to it. Unless you're a choral music snob or something, the same is probably true of you. I like some musicians with amazing vocal talents and ranges, and I like some who have throats that
get the job done while they sing songs that I like and they sing with emotional authenticity and passion. I think this is probably true of all of us.
And yes, this echoes what I said about writing the other day. You don't have to have a "good" voice, for any objective measurement of "good" that anyone wants to propose, to be a singer. A voice that is interesting and/or inoffensive can be enough if your music speaks to people.
(More on the significance of gender: I believe that audiences are more forgiving of men who don't have "good" voices. I'm not saying there aren't women who built their careers around a distinct and unconventional sound, but society is loads more superficial when it comes to women in the spotlight than men. There are a lot more gravelly-voiced male singers than female ones. If a woman is going to sound bestial or grungy, she's also got to sound
sultry while she's doing it.)
And even if this is the beginning and end of her career as a musician, she's had this experience. She's got her 15 minutes.
Now, if you're a musician trying to launch a career, I don't recommend that you seek out ARK, or anonymous assholes on the internet who will tell you to kill yourself. (You don't have to seek the latter out, anyway. They come with the gig. Anonymous internet assholes are the 21st century equivalent of "groupies".) The point of this all is more to simply say: take heart, social media exists and it is mighty. It's mighty enough to turn a scam into reality just by existing.
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