Rebecca Black, Fame, & Exploding in Public
"Fame is a bee. / It has a song / It has a sting / Ah, too, it has a wing." - Emily DickinsonThere have been a couple of instructive internet memes this past week: Rebecca Black and The Greek Seaman. The former is a 13-year-old with well-to-do parents who paid for a professionally recorded music video, the latter a novice writer who attacked a reviewer who did not like her book. The two are seemingly unrelated but for the internet sensation they became, but if we dig a little further we will find some unsettling parallels.
You may count yourself lucky if you didn't get a friend on Facebook linking to "The Worst Music Video Ever" and asking for you to watch it and agree. First, it's not the worst ever (there is so much competition, but a rough internet agreement seems to have settled on Armi &Danni's "I Wanna Love you Tender"). Further, it's surely not any more (or less) annoying that Justin Bieber or a host of other teen sensations. I quizzed my students on why they thought Black was so much worse than any other but they simply shrugged and put it down to fatigue with Autotuned pop music. A valid point, but I think that's a tipping point we reached some time ago...
Read the rest at BBHQ.
5 comments:
And here I thought FUNNY OR DIE had hired a young actress to be a Kardashian/Spears clone. She is at least as talent-free as most NON-THREATENING TEENS (and, increasingly, 20-somethings), but, golly...
I've just reviewed a fan-video for Mountain's "Mississippi Queen." The laurels are safely in American hands, still.
Are you going to link to that video? I want to see the review. OMG, the very best thing to come out of this is the Stephen Colbert performance of "Friday": must be seen to be believed.
Oh, I meant reviewed in the simplest sense, of checking to see if Mountain were for me still the worst band ever to have any sort of sustained audience (Kajagoogoo, with a shorter reign of offal, tried valiantly to match them, and failed). They are. The fan video consists simply of a typically sad photo of Mountain as the static video, and the studio recording of "Mississippi Queen" playing as audio.
It's a gift to be simply awful. I have not yet caught up with Colbert's cover, but did indeed like the FUNNY OR DIE changes they rung with Black's participation...she seems to have a sense of humor about all this. I was going to be listening to THE COLBERT REPORTs for that week anyway, but now need to run them out of order...
I had no sense whatsoever of the other case till reading your column, so I suspect it's solely a creature of the flavors of social media I tend to ignore. It's a gift to be segmented.
Rebecca Black on FOD.
Desperately sad: Mountain
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