Rebecca Black's "Friday" as Radical Text

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If you think that 13-year old Rebecca Black's song "Friday" is an insipid, bubblegum pop expression of the teenage mind, you'd be wrong. Dana Vachon argues that it's actually a complex rebuttal to the artificiality of modern life:

Her cultural debt is less to Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles than Evie Vicki the robot girl from Small Wonder, we realize, as in a voice controlled by Auto-Tune she enumerates the banalities of an anti-existence: “Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs, gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal… gotta get down to the bus stop.”

She offers the camera a hostage's smile, forced, false. Her smoky eyes suggest chaos witnessed: tear gas, rock missiles and gasoline flames. They paint her as a refugee of a teen culture whose capacity for real subversion was bludgeoned away somewhere between the atrocities of Kent State and those of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the start of a creeping zombification that would see youthful dissent packaged and sold alongside Pez and Doritos.

“Look and listen deeply,” she challenges. An onanistic recursion, at once Siren and Cassandra, she heralds a new chapter in the Homeric tradition. With a slight grin, she calls out to us: “I sing of the death of the individual, the dire plight of free will and the awful barricades daily built inside the minds of all who endure what lately passes for American life. And here I shall tell you of what I have done in order to feel alive again.”

Link via Ace of Spades HQ

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Congratulations Ryan S on your most condescending post yet! Do you always refer to people who don't agree with you as foolish, mindless couch potatos? You seem to have completely missed the point that the article is satire. Do you always use inappropriate platforms to vent your philosophical whinings?

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"Punishment as punishment is not admissible unless the offender has had the free will to select his course."
- Clarence Darrow

http://www.determinism.com/quotes.shtml

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Yea, I tend to take things too seriously. Like, metaphysical assumptions about our autonomy that underscore millennia of erroneous criminal justice systems, which incorporate punitive-retributive punishment techniques. Yea, I maintain that the vast majority of humans are foolish, they chase after good-times and buzzes, and ignore the infinite consequences of their actions. So yea, a bit of a buzzkill. If this were Nazi Germany, I'd be criticizing the Nazis. But it's not, so I'm criticizing the next best thing; mindless couch-potatos who inadvertently allow injustices through their ignorant and complacent consent.

"A nation that continues to produce weak-minded men purchases it's enslavement on the installment plan." - Martin Luthor King Jr.

"The world is made up for the most part of morons and natural tyrants, sure of themselves, strong in their own opinions, never doubting anything."
Clarence Darrow

Except today's Tyranny hides behind bids for congeniality. Like the Rolling Stones song "Sympathy for the Devil"; So, if you meet me, have some courtesy. Have sympathy and some taste. Use all your well-learned politesse (nicities) or I'll lay your soul to waste." Don't step on anyone's dreams, fantasies, delusions, or try to challenge anyone's cherised points of view. Aim to have smooth relations with everyone, let no one be offended or hurt. And hell will truly be on its way.

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"If anyone here claims they knew what good music was when they were 13 thirteen is lying."

When I was thirteen, I adored They Might be Giants and Sting (Dream of the Blue Turtles, Nothing Like the Sun variety of Sting). I loathed New Kids on the Block and thought they were unbearably bad, and actually got some serious dislike from some classmates who thought I was dumb for hating them.

So yeah, actually, I think was pretty good at knowing what good music was at 13.