The Unbreakable Rebecca Black
Rebecca Black just turned 18 and she’s forgotten how to flirt. It’s a problem. She might be at a party in a circle of friends, all of them egging her on, with an attractive and available-seeming (but not too available) guy standing just across the room, almost within earshot, occasionally stealing glances at her between sips from a perspiring Solo cup. But if Black actually tries to talk to this guy, even if he’s perfectly nice and funny, even if he compliments her wavy brown mermaid hair and natural California-king smile, she will inevitably freeze or, worse, say something that will make her want to bury her head in her hands and vanish into a pillowy wisp of smoke, Harry Potter-style.
It’s not that she’s not used to attention from guys — she is. They come up to her at the flea market or sometimes on the street, decent and smiling in a way that makes her daydream. But it’s what happens shortly after, once the small talk has gone limp, or maybe a few days later over text, that has caused her to put a moratorium on engaging with strange men altogether. “You look really familiar,” they’ll say, just like you would if you were in their shoes. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
“And then it will click and that will be it,” Black says, venting in a cheap French bistro in West L.A. “It sucks.” Her usually sunny demeanor dims slightly and she averts her big brown eyes, hesitating momentarily as if fondling the keys that launch the nukes. “Their whole attitude will change, or they’ll get really shy. I think it’s really intimidating for a lot of people, but I don’t know why. It’s not like I’m Selena Gomez or something. I’m a pretty nice, normal person.”
Nice? Totally. But normal? That’s more complicated. Everyone remembers Rebecca Black. More than four years ago, when she was 13 and zealously Auto-Tuned, beaming directly into the camera and sing-talking a diabolically mindless and improbably innocent ode to the weekend, she was inescapable. The video for her song “Friday,” which was written and produced for Black by the now-defunct vanity production company ARK Music Factory as a gift from her mother, became the fastest-spreading amateur viral video of all time when it was released in 2011, drawing more than 100 million views in just over 30 days.
You remember it. Girl wakes up in bed with comically out-of-control frizz, girl has manic craving for cereal, girl faces an unexpectedly crippling dilemma over “kickin’ in the front seat” or “sittin’ in the backseat,” girl climactically lists the days of the week. The lyrics of the song, staged in the video with fanatical literalism, took pop music’s tendency to amplify only the most common human experiences to brazen extremes, until their content bore all the conceptual nuance of a Fisher-Price See ’N Say. Patrice Wilson, the founder of ARK, who delivers a bewildering rap verse in the video, said at the time that he wanted to write a song that “was really simple but something that sticks in people’s head. To have people say, ‘I hate this song, but I’m still singing it.’” The successful result sounds like someone having a really fun stroke.
“Gettin’ down on Friday.”
Rebecca Black / Via youtube.com
Black and her mother, Georgina Marquez, say the video for “Friday” was never supposed to be made public, and instead was meant for sharing among friends and family, like glamour shots or a wedding video. But ARK posted “Friday” to its YouTube page, where it was eventually picked up by early viral content portal The Daily What and the blog of comedian Daniel Tosh’s Comedy Central show Tosh.0 (the latter headlining its post simply “Songwriting Isn’t For Everyone”).
Reaction was swift and predictably ruthless. As the view count ticked into the millions, laughing at “Friday” became a national pastime, an instant mood-booster for restless cubicle dwellers, and the perfect foil for armchair music critics bemoaning the downfall of songcraft in the Auto-Tune era. Dubbed “The Worst Song Ever” by a rare consensus of people with two ears and a broadband connection, it was covered by Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert on Late Night, and by the kids of Glee. Black herself, then in eighth grade, went on a major talk show tour, appearing on Good Morning America, MTV, On Air With Ryan Seacrest, and The Tonight Show, where she wore a cardigan with hearts on it and commiserated about bad reviews with Bradley Cooper.
Maybe more than any other 18-year-old alive, Black is all of our anxieties about oversharing online made flesh: the fact that more than 350 million photos are shared to Facebook each day and 300-plus hours of video hit YouTube every minute; the nagging sense that kids born into a world where social networking exists are worse off — when it comes to college applications, job prospects, romantic relationships. For most of us, these fears are as vague as they are persistent, a concern filed somewhere in the back of the brain near jury duty and gum disease. But for Black they’re reality. And, as luck would have it, her overexposure came just moments too soon in the history of the viral video industrial complex to translate into anything resembling a sustainable career. When it comes to making traumatic first impressions on the internet, Black is patient zero.
At the peak of “Friday”-mania, however, a frenzied few weeks in the spring of 2011, Black was almost surprisingly good-humored and cheerful about her notoriety in interviews. In a GMA segment, she smiled while recounting death threats and gamely sang the national anthem in support of a modest claim that, sans Auto-Tune, she did actually have “talent on some level.” If she was a laughingstock, she seemed in on the joke, later filming a Funny or Die video in which she explained that “Friday” was really a veiled critique of America’s foreign and economic policies.
Black on Good Morning America.
ABC.
Black hired a high-powered manager, on recommendation from Seacrest and others, but a handful of follow-up songs and videos debuted to diminishing returns. Eventually, the country’s fascination with her and “Friday” fizzled, as it was destined to even before it began. By the time she was offered a dream cameo as Katy Perry’s BFF in the video for Perry’s hit “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” that June, Black already felt like a dated pop culture reference. She took her place on the Mount Rushmore of weird internet stars: Tay Zonday, Chris Crocker, Double Rainbow guy, Rebecca Black. She was 14.
Joyce Lee for BuzzFeed News
On a golden recent afternoon in Culver City, Black is furniture shopping in one of those dimly lit, cavernous galleries that make $475 fur dining chairs seem like a good idea. Wearing an oversize blue-and-white patchwork plaid button-down, shredded denim shorts with the pocket pouches exposed, and white sneakers, she’s more mature than you remember her, with a noticeably deeper, lisp-free voice and emerging bone structure where a baby face used to be. With olive skin, long dark hair, and the kind of lips that start flame wars on celebrity gossip blogs, she could be a Kardashian who failed to inherit the vamp gene.
In a week, Black will move out of her mother’s house in Orange County and into her first apartment in Brentwood, most known as the affluent neighborhood where O.J. used to live, but now, thanks in part to its adjacency to the multichannel network AwesomenessTV, is earning a reputation as home to a growing number of YouTube stars too young to remember the Bronco. Three weeks ago, she graduated from Villa Park High School, where she transferred after two tumultuous years of being homeschooled as collateral for pursuing music. And just two days ago, she celebrated her 18th birthday with sushi at Nobu, chasing a night out with a pair of miraculously tasteful tattoos the morning after — three vertical dots on both middle fingers — her first.
Bold manicure, modest tattoos.
Joyce Lee for BuzzFeed News
Black spies an angular wooden dining table she likes and flings extravagant, forest-green nails at her cell phone to send a pic to her friend and future roommate Andrew Lowe, whom she met through YouTube. Today Black has over a million subscribers on the platform, almost all of them her age and younger, where she posts silly weekly videos and answers questions about how to navigate school drama, how to be a better friend, and what to do about bullying.
“Even with my friends, I’ve always been the one that will help them out with situations,” Black says. “People can vent to me all day; I’ll listen to it.”
When “Friday” exploded, the YouTube community was a dubious ally — a source of more snark and vitriol than moral support; but now it’s home. Black’s life revolves around the platform — her entire friend group, amassed online and at annual gatherings like VidCon, consists of fellow YouTube stars, including ThatSoJack (1.2 million subscribers) and JennxPenn (2 million subscribers, a book deal, and a new movie) — where she’s regarded as something of a grizzled veteran. In Black’s story, middle and high school–age kids enmeshed in the unlovely “before” phase of life see a survivor and a role model, someone who lived through a social media nightmare of epic proportions and managed to emerge unbroken.
She almost didn’t make it through. When Black was in eighth grade and the fastest-rising search term in the world, the highs were so dizzying and surreal that she could scarcely wrap her head around them. For a girl like her — a dancer and singer from the time she was 3 years old, a ham in the local youth choir and school plays who could sit in front of the TV watching Hannah Montana and American Idol for hours — “Friday” had all the markers of a godsend. Suddenly Justin Bieber and the Jonas Brothers knew her name. Lady Gaga — then at the height of her incendiary powers — called her a genius.
But, like a wish granted by dark forces, what should have been a dream world had been warped from its inception. In school, Black became radioactive and lost almost all of her friends due to “Friday.” “I couldn’t really relate to what my friends were going through anymore, and they couldn’t really relate to me, either,” she says. When requests for appearances and interviews started to overwhelm her schedule and sink her grades, she pulled out of school entirely and switched to online courses at home, just weeks before the end of the school year.
“All of a sudden, I had to grow up really fast.”
instagram.com
Part of the reason Black was able to smile on camera through the “Friday” debacle was because she had learned previously how cruel people could be, and how that cruelty always said more about the afflicters than the afflicted. Near her 12th birthday, two years before she would become the butt of a million jokes on the internet, she had been forced to change schools due to what her mom describes as severe bullying from “mean girls.”
When she first saw the callous tenor of the response to “Friday” online (sample comment: “I hope you cut yourself and die”), Black’s mom, understandably, asked Black if she wanted to take the video down and withdraw from the unsparing scrutiny of the web. But Black surprised her by protesting the suggestion, calling it insulting.
“She said, ‘No, it’s my right to have my video up there. Why should I have to take my video down?’” Marquez recalls. “And that was the moment that did it for me. From that point on I was like, You go, girl. We got this.“
“I’ve always had a pretty thick skin — that’s just how I am,” Black adds. “When I get nervous, or uncomfortable or sad, I just try and make light out of it and laugh.”
Even more intractable than haters online were the machinations of the popular music industry. Black’s mother paid $4,000 in two installments to ARK Music Factory to produce “Friday” (she says claims in the media about her family’s wealth are overblown), hoping the experience would give her only daughter a sampling of what it would be like to pursue her dreams of pop stardom. When, incredibly, that sampling turned into a gorge, Black and her family reoriented themselves to try to make the most out of the opportunity.
Black’s parents, both veterinarians, knew little of the entertainment business, so they hired veteran talent manager Debra Baum, whose previous clients had included Paula Abdul and Tears for Fears. Baum immediately set out to capitalize on the momentum of “Friday,” fielding press and business inquiries and pursuing a deal to record an album. On the latter front, meeting Perry proved instrumental: The pop superstar introduced Black to key industry contacts after they worked together on the set of “Last Friday Night.” In the spring and summer of 2011, Black says she entered into serious discussions with several major labels.
Meanwhile, the relationship between Black and ARK began to sour. She and her mother got into a legal dispute with Patrice Wilson and his partner Clarence Jey over control of the master recordings of “Friday” and its video, which, having just crossed 165 million views on YouTube, was generating large sums in royalties. After ARK put up a paywall in June 2011 requiring users to pay a $2.99 rental fee to view “Friday” in lieu of standard preroll ads, Black’s family successfully petitioned to have the video pulled from the platform altogether. Wilson didn’t respond to requests to comment for this story, but Jey, via email, denied the accusations that ARK illegally withheld the “Friday” masters and said he wasn’t involved in imposing the rental fee.
“I have no idea why or who [put up the paywall], as I was not managing the YouTube channel,” Jey said. “It was very random, perhaps experimental, and, in my opinion, silly.”
Eventually, the two parties reached an agreement in which Black owns both the video and the song recording, and Wilson and Jey receive a minority percentage of royalties from both as the songwriters. Black reposted “Friday” to her own channel in September 2011, where it was once again free to view, with the caveat that the view count had to be reset to zero. By YouTube’s estimate, cumulative views for “Friday” today would be upwards of 250 million.
By the time the video resurfaced, however, Black had other problems. After months of promising negotiations with a major label she declines to name, she was just a day away from an in-person meeting to sign papers when she got a call that the label was choosing not to move forward. She felt the wind go out of her. “We didn’t know how volatile the entertainment industry is,” Black’s mother says now. “That people can just pull the plug on things last minute.” To this day, Black isn’t sure exactly why things fell apart (the official excuse was executive turnover), but at the time viral stars — even those without baggage like hers — were still considered to occupy a lower caste than those produced by the industry.
Had it been released today, “Friday” almost certainly would have gone to No. 1 on Billboard’s flagship singles chart the Hot 100 (which began counting YouTube streams in its formula in 2013), a distinction that, for an unsigned artist, would have made a recording contract a foregone conclusion. Black’s status as a previous unknown with a catchy but readily mocked hit would be far less anomalous in a mainstream that has stretched to accommodate songs like Psy’s “Gangnam Style” and Baauer’s “Harlem Shake.” But in 2011, YouTube was still widely regarded as a sideshow in the industry. Even Miley Cyrus, Hannah Montana herself, found the idea that a YouTube star could be mistaken for a serious artist beyond the pale.
“It should be harder to be an artist,” Cyrus spat in an interview with Australia’s Daily Telegraph two weeks after “Friday” went viral. “You shouldn’t just be able to put a song on YouTube and go out on tour.”
Joyce Lee for BuzzFeed News
via BuzzFeed http://ift.tt/1IRxFTL
The post The Unbreakable Rebecca Black appeared first on ViralShizznat.
http://ift.tt/1hpjxaa