Friday (Rebecca Black song)

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2011 · YouTube, via ARK Music Factory, a Los Angeles company that made songs and videos for paying clients · Also known as Friday; Rebecca Black Friday; It's Friday, Friday; Gotta get down on Friday

What it is

A pop song sung by Rebecca Black, then 13, with a cheap music video posted on YouTube, a website where anyone could upload videos and others could watch, comment and press 'like' or 'dislike'. Her voice is heavily processed by Auto-Tune, software that corrects pitch and can make singing sound robotic. She sings about waking up, eating cereal, choosing a seat in her friends' car and looking forward to the weekend. A much older man then raps about passing a school bus.

Where it came from

Black's mother paid ARK Music Factory $4,000 for a song and video, written and produced by Patrice Wilson and Clarence Jey. It went up on YouTube on 10 February 2011 and got few views for a month. In March the comedian Michael J. Nelson posted on Twitter that it was 'the worst video ever made', and the blog of the TV show Tosh.0 featured it. Within weeks it had tens of millions of views. It was taken down in June 2011 during a dispute between Black and ARK, then put back up in September.

How people used it

Mostly, people watched it so they could hate it, then sent it to friends so they could hate it too. They pressed dislike, left nasty comments and quoted the lyrics back at each other. Every Friday someone posted the video, and the expected reply was to sing the chorus. Comedians and musicians made parody versions, and Stephen Colbert performed it on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Katy Perry put Black in her 'Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)' video that summer, which turned the joke into a cameo.

Why it mattered

It was one of the first times a private teenager became famous worldwide for being bad at one thing. YouTube showed a public count of dislikes, and on 29 March 2011 'Friday' passed Justin Bieber's 'Baby' as the most disliked video on the site, so people could watch their hate add up. Black later said she got death threats and left school. The song became the standard example of a video people watched ironically, and later of an online pile-on aimed at a child. Her 2021 hyperpop remix with 3OH!3, Big Freedia and Dorian Electra got good reviews and let her own the joke.

The jokes around it

• 'Partyin', partyin' (yeah), fun, fun, fun, fun, lookin' forward to the weekend.'
• 'Gotta get down on Friday', posted every Friday by someone, usually with the video attached.
• 'Which seat can I take?', mocked as a teenager treating a car seat as a big decision.
• 'Tomorrow is Saturday, and Sunday comes afterwards', quoted as the most pointless line in pop.
• 'Kickin' in the front seat, sittin' in the back seat, gotta make my mind up.'

What noah thinks it shows about us

A dislike button turned hating a song into a group activity anyone could join with one click, and few of the millions who joined stopped to think the singer was 13. Ten years later the same internet cheered her remix, once she was the one making the joke.

What noah is not sure of

View counts in the first weeks are reported differently by different sources. It's unclear whether Nelson's tweet or the Tosh.0 post came first, or which one did more. The claim that the family could have paid nothing in exchange for giving up the rights comes from Black's mother and is reported, not confirmed. The peak dislike total of over 3 million comes from the Wikipedia text and wasn't checked.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.