The other day I came across a song named Friday by a 13-year old American girl called Rebecca Black that I found out had overtaken Justin Bieber as the most disliked and hated video on Youtube. I instantly felt the need to check out the song since I’ve always maintained that being shittier at singing than that half-girl-half-Daisy-Duck-sent-from-the-planet-Faggotron-to-erase-every-last-piece-of-decent-music-left-on-Earth is a task beyond accomplishment. Kind of like attempting to beat Twilight at being melodramatic and gay.
So I stream the video and three minute forty eight seconds later I’m left totally perplexed and in awe of the epic masterpiece I had just witnessed. This song by Rebecca Black is so unbelievably informative yet so simple. Her idea of representing themes of fast-paced modern day life, breaking the chains of conformity and oppression, educating school kids about calendars, paedophiles, nationalism along with carefully placed subliminal messages to her friends and racists with such simple usage of metaphors totally blew me away.
Hence I am going to analyze this song line-by-line for you lesser folks not bright enough to figure out the encrypted and complex sub-meanings.
So sit back and prepare to get enlightened.
Yeah, Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ark)
Oo-ooh-ooh, hoo yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
This is a simple announcement of herself in the world of Justin Bieber-esque Pop music with simple yet meaningful crooning in an auto-tuned voice with background techno music that could signify that aliens do exist, the first piece of symbolism used in the song.
7am, waking up in the morning
Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs
Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal
Seein' everything, the time is goin'
Tickin' on and on, everybody's rushin'
The first line, like the rest of this para is an indicator to the strict, monotonous, heartless and boring daily routine that people have to adhere to these days(also, this line guarantees itself an automatic nomination for the Avril Lavigne-he-was-a-boy-she-was-a-girl award for best lyrical intro to a song).The genius metaphor that cannot be overlooked here is the repetitive usage of the word “gotta” which again signifies how she has been forced to perform daily activities she doesn’t like by her parents. Could this also be a subliminal message to Childcare?
Also worth noting is the usage of “morning” even after 7 “am” has clearly been mentioned which could either be for educational purposes and also a sarcastic dig supporting the statement that the average IQ of American schoolchildren is 168.9 points lesser than that of a 3 year old self-ball-licking Labrador. Forced to eat food she hates, she’s like the handicapable Hellen Keller who is enlightened and all seeing while also supporting Albert Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity.
Gotta get down to the bus stop
Gotta catch my bus, I see my friends (My friends)
Over here she intelligently makes the point that going down to the bus stop is not always synonymous with actually catching the bus, this could either be a reminder of punctuality to the lazy people or another deeper-meaning sarcastic poke at schoolgirls who leave home for the bus stop every morning but don’t quit make it on many occasions. She makes it very clear that she is an ethical girl with every intentions of taking the bus before she notices her friends in a car. Noteworthy, is the repetition of “my friends”, possibly another figure of speech that I frankly, am not gifted enough to figure out the meaning of, although it could indicate subliminally that of all the people in the car, she only considers a select few her real friends.
Kickin' in the front seat
Sittin' in the back seat
Gotta make my mind up
Which seat can I take?
Now these four lines might actually be the reason that I consider this song the pinnacle of deep meaning and symbolism. First of all, she and her 13-year old friends are trying to break away from the conformity portrayed in the first para and descending into anarchy by driving around illegally (a clear “fuck you” to the government).She also claims that two of her friends are “kickin’” in the front seat while the remaining two are sitting in the backseat, which if noticed clearly is the exact opposite of their actual positions in the video. Surely this is supposed to be another encrypted figure of speech.
This is followed by the epitome of lyrical genius; she has to decide carefully what seat she should take as this is a decision that would probably decide and affect the outcome of the rest of her life. It’s like the legendary poem: The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost in which he explained in the form of two paths how certain decisions impact the way our lives shape up, but Rebecca has gone a step further by symbolising it with a car seat. All my respect to you, mam.I’m forever a fan.
It's Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend, weekend
Friday, Friday
Gettin' down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend
Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Fun, fun, fun, fun
Lookin' forward to the weekend
The chorus kicks in where she makes the gut-wrenching revelation that “it’s Friday Friday”, could this be another indicator to the Black Friday and the Mayan interpretation of catastrophe and tragedy with regards to the world of music since Justin Bieber isn’t the only one anymore? Also worth noticing is the repetition of words once again which could only be for stronger and more in-your-face ambience formation.
Also continuing the anarchist twist she screams partyin’ partyin’ while her friends chant yeah in unison.Historions are already scratching their heads trying to figure out if this actually beats the intensity of all those Nazi chants back in the Holocaust days.Also, the usage of fun 4 times in succession might be a hint that she is ready to start having some real high school fun? In which case, the following line; looking forward to the weekend takes a totally different meaning.
7:45, we're drivin' on the highway
Cruisin' so fast, I want time to fly
Fun, fun, think about fun
You know what it is
I got this, you got this
My friend is by my right
I got this, you got this
Now you know it
Exactly twelve hours and 45 minutes have passed since she woke up this fateful day and the act of rebellion advances further with the 13-year olds taking to the highway, they are cruising so fast that time has apparently become a 3-dimensional quantity that can fly like a bird along all the three axis. Good lyrics indeed. She brings up the argument of kids being made to live a forced lifestyle again by hinting that while her parents might think she’s happy and having fun, she actually craves for it as merely driving on the freeway with a couple of braces-wearing chicks will not quench her thirst for the wholelotta fun she mentions continually in the song.
She wants the listener to closely pay attention to her desperate plea and expects them to get her point. The last three lines actually lift the lid off the heart-stopping suspense she generated in the earlier lines by finally enlightening the audience that of all the four girls in the car only the one on her right is the real friend that she was earlier talking about. While not picking the one on her left is understandable since that chick looks ugly as fuck, dumb and has no fucking idea what she’s doing throughout the video, not picking the two girls sitting in front might actually be a little controversial since one appears to be of African-American descent and the other one surely an Asian. Could this be a secret hint that Rebecca Black hates minorities and wants us to “know it”? You decide.
Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today i-is Friday, Friday (Partyin')
We-we-we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today
Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes after... wards(words?)
I don't want this weekend to end
She continues her exciting wordplay and double meaning symbolism while educating school kids at the same time. Not only is she validating the fact that days of the week indeed follow the Thursday, Friday, Saturday sequence after which Sunday follows, she’s also using Thursday to represent that yesterday was like living under a loaded gun while today(i.e. Friday) she has broken all chains of conformity and is a free spirit.The “we-we-we” so excited part clearly represents the unification of people in true Gandhian spirit as “we” is clearly a word that should be preferred over I.
Tomorrow being a Saturday could represent a revolution to bring down the government in its totality which again makes it interesting, the plans she might have for Sunday, the meaning of which has been kept open to all interpretations(also justifying the interesting way wordplay while she sings afterwards/after words).Also, interesting to note is the intentional usage of incorrect English(we so excited, we gonna have a ball) which again signifies her struggle against the codes and traditions, this time not caring for the rules of prepositions and nouns written 200 years ago at some far-away University in England by grey-haired oldies that probably never got laid their entire lives.
R-B, Rebecca Black
So chillin' in the front seat (In the front seat)
In the back seat (In the back seat)
I'm drivin', cruisin' (Yeah, yeah)
Fast lanes, switchin' lanes
Wit' a cop on my side (Woo! )
(C'mon) Passin' by is a school bus in front of me
Makes tick tock, tick tock, wanna scream
Check my time, it's Friday, it's a weekend
We gonna have fun, c'mon, c'mon, y'all
The Rap part is probably the most astonishing and deep-meaning part of the song, while simpletons might believe actually argue that this is the part, like in many modern pop songs where a black guy raps for about half a minute before the song hits into the powerful last chorus, the intentional portrayal of an old black man, bad rapping and what appears to be stupid lyrics only represents that the presence of this black guy symbolizes something deeper, which actually is to warn the school kids about creepy paedophiles and child-molesters rampant on the streets these days and their incessant urge to fuck a kid without a care in the world for traffic rules(switching lanes without flashing appropriate indicators) or even cops driving next to them. These scary men have libidos in form of a time bomb that gradually ticks until they come across a school bus and that is when they cannot control it anymore and scream representing some misplaced sexual fetish and ecstacy.The man checks his watch, this indeed is rape time. He wouldn’t mind having group sex with all the kids present on the bus, hence leading to the double meaning last line: “(I’m gonna)c’mon y’all” which needs no explanation whatsoever.
The song ends with Rebecca presiding over the party(revolution) and pumping up the newly united(and paedophile-cautious) kids not to let the fire inside them fizz out, followed by appreciation and applause for Rebecca at the end while she casually blushes in a yeah-I-know-I’m-the-next-Bob-Dylan kind of way.
So while this might come across as a simple teen pop song about partyin’ and fun(multiplied 23748 times)it actually is the most complex and interwoven piece of art we’ve seen in the modern times where Christopher Nolan thought he was cool just because he came up with Inception and Memento.
Honestly, being one of the lucky 98 million people on this planet that have savoured every second of this song on Youtube, I can only laugh while mocking the 1,927,983 dumb people on Youtube and hundreds of critics that disliked this video since they’re not intellectually capable of figuring out something so special, that too by someone who can sing like a robot.
Up yours!
