Update: Yesterday she tweeted to Mike: “So apparently you’re the one to ‘blame’ for these past couple days. If that’s the case – Thanks so much! :) xoxo.”
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s “Film Hound” blog tells the story — and mentions us!
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One Snarky Tweet Makes Talentless Teen RichGet the full story about how Mike made Rebecca Black a star here.
45 Replies to “One Snarky Tweet Makes Talentless Teen Rich”Commenting at Satellite News
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Mike went from “Mike Nelson: Destroyer of Words” to “Mike Nelson: Destroyer of Talent”.
Mike went from “Mike Nelson: Destroyer of Words” to “Mike Nelson: Destroyer of Talent”.
From what I’ve read, that girl has no talent to destory. You can’t destroy something if it doesn’t exist.
From what I’ve read, that girl has no talent to destroy. You can’t destroy something if it doesn’t exist.
I used to have a soul before I watched that video. The very talented Jackson 5 took the ABCs and made it catchy, this Disney Channel reject seems like she was making a video to teach the days of the week to stupid children, instead of reaching for the music stars.
This is why I don’t bother with “viral” videos. I’m glad I haven’t watched it and have no intention of doing so. And I’d like to backhand that little (insert degoratory word here).
yep…sure it’s extremely inane…but it’s also kinda catchy!
I felt kind of bad for her, since she is only a 13-year-old kid… but she seems to be enjoying the notoriety, so I guess no harm done.
Actually, it’s not much worse than most other pop sings you’ll hear today. And, as Tom Servo might say, this song is refreshingly itself…
I have a feeling that 30 years from now Rebecca Black will be yelling – I had a pretty mind!!!
My FAVORITE part of the video is when she’s in the back seat with her two girlfriends and she’s the only one without braces. It seems very purposeful.
Yeah, those ARE some dumb lyrics but I once heard a song on the radio whose words were, “Shanny is an eenie-meenie-miney-moe lover” and it killed my soul a lot more than the words to Rebecca’s song.
Yeah, this is a bad song and a bad video, but I think it’s really just garden-variety bad, lacking in that spectacular badness we so crave. Sure, she clearly can’t sing and relies on Autotune to produce the melody, and said melody is lame and repetitive, and the lyrics are also lame and repetitive, but that describes more current (successful!) pop artists than I can count. Still, badness points for:
– Terrible chromakey shots
– Referencing other and mostly better songs in the intro
– Long stretches of words sung on one pitch
– Guest vocalist out of nowhere
– Proclaiming that since today is Friday, “yesterday was Thursday”
– Equally terrible rotoscoping
FUN FUN FUN FUN
Intentional or not, it’s a brilliant parody of modern (?) pop music!
I say ?, because you go back 50 years, the stuff was just as bad. Even the Beatles started with such pap as “I want to hold your hand” and “She loves you”
Aw, c’mon, Mike! For a 13-year-old, the song’s not bad. If you want the worst video ever made, try digging a little deeper for Maxine Swaby’s “Pardon Me”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dbU2f90OAw
Rebecca Black<Willow Smith<Ke$ha<Katy Perry<Lady Gaga<Madonna
In other words, a new low in pop garbage. Thanks Mike.
What, pray tell, is a “Fry-ee-day”?
I’m starting to think my folks had it easy when putting up with my NKOTB phase… at least that crap (yes, I can call it crap now) wasn’t auto-tuned beyond all recognition.
I’m disappointed to learn the 13-year old didn’t write the song . . . I wonder if the auto-tune wrote it.
How rich can she possibly get from a lot of people watching her video for free on Youtube, and having them almost universally making fun of it? It’s not like she’s been “discovered” in any good way, or will get anything out of it in the long run. How much does Tosh.0 pay? Because going on that show is about all she can probably expect from her singing career. There is something about our society today where some people just can’t tell the difference between the good kind of exposure where you are discovered and actually can do something meaningful, and the bad kind of “discovered” where people are so shocked by your awfulness that millions of people want to watch it, but everyone soon tires of you, and you wind up working at Arby’s with only the occasional drive through customer recognizing you as the idiot he saw on Youtube.
And as for people saying it’s not any worse than most pop songs… WHAT?! I mean I despise about 99.999999% of modern music, but this is WAY worse. It displays absolutely no talent on the part of anyone involved. The song is the most ludicrous and stupid thing I’ve ever heard, and she has so little singing ability that even the incredibly heavy use of autotune can’t hide how terrible her voice is. And her pronunciation is so bad I feel like Mike and the Rifftrax crew should have introduced her the the pink lipped pronunciation guy from the short. Here is my favorite line from the song…
“We
We
We
so
excited.
We
so
excited
We gonna have a ball tih-day” (her weird sounding pronunciation of “today”)
This song is the Birdemic of pop music. It’s so bad it actually makes you have a little bit more appreciation for even the worst of everything you’ve seen/heard before it.
There is now a “Groundhog Day” remix of the song. Thankfully brief…
http://www.buzzfeed.com/melismashable/rebecca-black-friday-groundhog-day-remix
Geez…people need to get off her back. She’s thirteen, for cryin’ out loud. Give her a break and let her enjoy whatever brief notariety she can squeeze out of this whole thing. It’s just a homemade music video…it’s not like she’s spreading the plague or something.
When I first saw the video on Salon.com, I wasn’t aware of the part Mike played in its viral success. I don’t know much about modern teen pop, but this song and the video really seemed singularly awful to me in a very special way. She is just a kid, so we should cut her some slack and wish the best for her and hope she’s having a good time with it. It’s the hacks who wrote and produced this processed piece of crap who we should direct all our ridicule towards.
Being thirteen does not give someone the right to walk away unscathed after unleashing this kind of thing upon the Earth. Hitler was “only thirteen” once too!
But seriously, I agree that if this was just a video of some 13 year old girl singing poorly in her bedroom or something it would be bad to be making fun of her, but it’s not a homemade music video or song. It is a “professionally” made… thing. Go to the website listed on the video’s Youtube page and you can see that they are preparing an entire army of “pop sensations” for what I can only assume must be more such attacks on us all, and everything we hold dear!
I saw the video for the first time three days ago. It’s a monstrosity, but there are some pluses:
-The video is easy on the eyes. Black is attractive (No, I’m not a dirty old man for thinking that about a 13-year-old!) and there’s nothing garish or disgusting about the video–unlike a Lady Gaga video.
-The lighting is good.
-It looks like someone who went to film school shot the thing. I’m not saying that the director was an auteur, but the camera work and cinematography are better than what we saw in “Werewolf” and many other MST3K films.
-Black is enjoying herself in the video, even if she is a bit nervous on camera.
If her parents are smart, they’ll try to get her booked on John Stewart’s show or a similar outlet… maybe even a few daytime syndicated shows or Fox News/CNN/MSNBC. They can probably squeeze a few bucks for her college fund out of her 15 minutes of fame. I just wonder what kind of contract the “record label” has her on. Hopefully it gives her a cut of the royalties (the song is in Billboard’s Top 100, which means people ARE paying to download it) and that it frees her up to get a good professional agent.
Mike Nelson has a God-given instinct for sniffing out bad media. It’s his blessing. Asking him not to do this is like asking a rabbit not to eat greens and poop little pellets.
Do we have any way of knowing if #26 was written by the Frank Conniff?
Wait, let me get this straight- the 13-year-old girl DIDN’T write the song? Some brilliant ADULT musical mind came up with, “Gotta go downstairs/gotta get my bowl/gotta get my cereal” and “Yesterday was Thursday/Today is Friday/Tomorrow is Saturday”? WOW. And the whole thing reeks of, “Daddy, can I have a music video?” “Sure thing sweetheart. Is ten grand enough?”
Rich @26: Mike Nelson has a God-given instinct for sniffing out bad media. It’s his blessing. Asking him not to do this is like asking a rabbit not to eat greens and poop little pellets.
…and eat the pellets (http://www.threelittleladiesrabbitry.com/cecotropes.php).
I know I’ve already spoken on this but I have one more thing to say to that brat who made the video:
Mike Nelson is a MILLION times cooler than you will ever be. Now go away and go back to obessessing over that other nontalented pain in the rear Justin Bieber.
Y’know if you have to use autotune fora song that has no pitch range whatsoever …. that’s not good.
Oh man…that thing is now running through my head!! Thanks for the earwig warning Sampo!! LOL!!
Maybe because it’s Friday, but I’m going back in for another listen!! We, we we so excited!
Mike, Mike…use your talents for good! Not for evil!
(watch the girl on the right of Black in the back of the car when they sing the chorus. A true example of some embarassed just to be alive)
Like a chorus of mosquitoes in the night as I’m trying to sleep…complete with distant rap music from my neighbor with the Dodge Neon with $8000 worth of stereo equipment in it.
@ #28 Steve Vil: I was actually thinking that perhaps this girl was being pushed into a singing career by an over-zealous, talentless parent who somehow had connections to the music industry. As an example of a conversation in the Black home:
Rebecca: “Mom, I hate singing, and I don’t want to be any dumb music video!”
Rebecca’s mom or dad: “Now dear, you have a wonderful voice, and we just put thousands of dollars into making a music video for this great song called ‘Friday’. It’s a can’t-miss – everybody loves Fridays! Now go make me afew million!!”
I’m just speculating, of course.
I finally had to watch this because Mike Nelson was involved, otherwise I usually ignore viral videos.
To me, Black’s music is on par with, and just as reprehensible as:
“Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday – do it,
Friday, Saturday, Saturday to Sunday -do it, feel”
Those powerful lyrics are, of course, from the Black Eyed Peas song “I gotta feeling.”
Next stop for Ms. Black – ruin the superbowl halftime show.
” I mean I despise about 99.999999% of modern music, but this is WAY worse”
“despise about 99.999999% of modern music”
So you’ve heard 100% of modern music?
So you’ve heard EVERY artist, EVERY album, EVERY song?
So you’ve heard and passed judgment ALL of the 250 or so songs/artists I’ve got on my playlist of music from the last ten years or so?
Well, obviously, in order to obtain an incredibly accurate statistic like that.
#20 “How rich can she possibly get from a lot of people watching her video for free on Youtube, and having them almost universally making fun of it?”
As I type this, Friday is #45 on iTunes’ top selling singles chart. It apparently hit #19 yesterday. Rolling Stone notes that she’s donating her proceeds to the Japan relief effort, so yeah, she’s not going to get rich from iTunes, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she got a recording contract out of this.
My wife had the best take of all — after I made her watch this (trust me guys, after you’re married a couple of decades torturing your soulmate will come naturally :>) she honestly thought it was a spoof. “This is a sendup, right? A teenager whose biggest angst is deciding whether to ride in the back seat or the front? With a black rapper coming out of nowhere? And making the keen observation that, truly, Sunday comes after Saturday?” (Holy ****! I completely forgot the calendar works that way!).
The more I think about it the more I think she’s right — there’s too much money spent here. We’re going to find out, guys, that the folks over at the Onion News Network produced this. This is the 10’s decade version of Spinal Tap. It’s absolutely brilliant.
Oh, and I can’t help but make a couple more observations (this is bordering on obsessive now — thanks a lot, Mike Nelson!).
1) Anyone here remember Dana Carvey’s brilliant take on pop songwriting with his “Chopping Broccoli” riff on SNL? That’s *exactly* what this reminds me of. This is just a sort of stream-of-consciousness verbal diarrhea that is easy to mimic (my wife and I were both doing it all night long — “Walking down the hall, putting laundry away, tomorrow is Monday, gotta go to work, etc. etc.” Sung to a beat it was actually much better than Black’s entries, so look for us on YouTube shortly).
2) The rapper who makes a brief appearance is fairly obviously a teen predator — adds a really nice, creepy touch. I suspect the followup video will be him parked at the school waiting for Rebecca’s last class (I would quote some appropriate lyrics for him in the next song here, but I suspect your fertile imaginations can do just as good, if not better. But do remember how Ms. Black obsessed over whether she should choose the front or rear seats).
After I read the line about The Shaggs in the mashable.com article, instead of torturing myself with Rebecca Black’s video (which I haven’t & probably never will watch), I decided to torture myself with every Shaggs song I could find on YouTube. I’m going to go out on a limb here, but between Black and The Shaggs, I’m thinking I made the right choice.
This song is terrible, but I’ve never understood how upset people get about [latest dumb song/performer that people will forget in less than five years]. It’s almost to the point where I think I would rather talk about politics or religion than someone’s taste in music.
The song is no worse than all the other dribble out there. “WORST VIDEO EVER?!?” Have you seen some of the crap that’s being made in all seriousness? These lyrics are only marginally stupid in comparison to all the songs about:
-How fly someone is
-How someone rolls
-How many bikini clad booty shaking woman are at his yacht party
-How drunk they were last night
-The amount of bling they own and wear
-Their favourite smartphone
I think this song/video is way better than most top 40 music because it shows real kids acting like real kids (well apart from the 13 year old driving a convertible). No scantily clad women. No drinking. No swearing (or bleeping).
And the apparent $2000 it cost to make . . . most top 40 videos wouldn’t even consider a budget so small. You couldn’t even get one mountain of coke for $2000.
And I can’t believe people won’t watch this video, but they’ll sit through Catalina Caper.
I feel a little conflicted about this. On one hand, yeah, the song and video are awful. But she’s a kid! And she’s not talentless – looks to me like she can sing a little, at least. And I think it’s pretty gross how lots of Internet tough guys have come out of the woodwork to be particularly cruel to her.
I wonder how Mike feels about it now. I love Mike and consider him a truly great comedian and writer, but sometimes he can cross the line into meanness. I’m not sure that he did here, but he definitely opened the door for millions of others. Either way, maybe when there’s a 13-year-old who’s the butt of the joke, it’s best to lay off?
You’ll all be pleased to know that ms Black will be a guest on Jay Leno’s tonight show on tuesday, tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday….I’m disabling my satellite dish at this moment….think I’ll dig out my Daniel Johnston cds :-))