It’s been nine years since Rebecca Black released ‘Friday’ and subsequently became an internet punchline, even to this day.
While she’s managed to overcome the awful and unwarranted torrent of abuse heaped upon her and is seemingly in a much happier place doing what she wants to do (which includes making new music), one can’t help but think that Rebecca Black could’ve easily been a leading figure in today’s influencer culture had the timing been right.
Speaking of viral songs, the GOAT team talk about 2020’s big viral hit ‘Dinosaurs In Love’ on It’s Been A Big Day For… below:
When Rebecca Black first dropped ‘Friday’ on us in 2011, no one quite knew how to react to the song and music video. Is it meant to be serious? Is it a joke? Is it meant to be satire? Is this taking the piss?
As humans are wont to do when faced with something they don’t understand, they react with hostility and Rebecca Black soon became the internet’s punching bag for years, and all for a song that’s literally about looking forward to the weekend.
Yet in a way, ‘Friday’ helped ready the internet for the torrent of viral stupidity that was to be unleashed.
Just a few years after ‘Friday’ was released, social media started to boom, an increasing number of people starting jumping onboard the trend, and folks started doing dumb stuff and sharing it online. Having already endured ‘Friday’, the internet were more accepting of increasingly stupid antics since everyone in becoming increasingly desensitised to it, and thus the internet celebrity and influencer culture was born.
Rebecca was one of the first people to get internet famous and was ahead on the curve on the viral fame front in a way. It’s just an awful shame that it came a few years too early for her to really take advantage.
In hindsight, all that hate directed to Rebecca and ‘Friday’ was completely unwarranted since people are getting rich and famous for videos that are several hundred times more idiotic and problematic than a music vid about the weekend. If the song were released today, Rebecca Black would be a massively famous and you know it.
While it must sort suck for Rebecca to be the testing ground for influencer culture rather than a leading figure, she’s managed to come out of the whole ‘Friday’ debacle intact and is ironically doing influencer things, like YouTube videos and a constant stream of Instagram posts.
So next time an internet challenge or viral video arrives, just remember that Rebecca Black crawled so future influencers and internet-famous idiots could run.
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