Rebecca Black wants us to take her seriously...

"I don't want to be known as the 'Friday' girl," says Rebecca Black in an interview with The AP. I'm afraid it's probably a little late for that, love, but I hear you. Put yourself in her shoes for a moment, and imagine that for the rest of your life you would be known solely for Friday. It's enough to make you nauseous. So as unlikely as it seems, you can kind of emphasise with Rebecca when she says  "I want to be a performing artist - that's what I've always wanted to do."
I'm still not really quite sure how best to approach Friday as a song. I really don't like the whole 'It's so crap it's amazing, ha ha ha, I'm being super-ironic and cool' thing. Distinctly, Not Cool. But you know, the more I listened to the song, the more it started to grow on me. Obviously the lyrics still are, and always will be, absolute drivel. But the melody is actually half-decent, a solid bit of pop. Because the way Friday was created, coming from a factory-like production system, they follow pop formulas - they know the chords that work, the notes that sound great.

You have to remember that despite everything else, Rebecca Black remains an extremely young girl who has been thrust extremely prematurely into the harsh intensity of the media and public spotlight. Some of the abuse she's received has without a doubt gone beyond any kind of rationality. Death threats? That's sick. This poor girl was only trying to follow her passion for music. At that age, who is to deny someone from giving anything a try? It's a testament to the Internet age that a something like Friday can instantly explode into world-wide recognition - with an equally expansive host of 'haters' at the ready to target individuals with a stream of bile and insults.

"I want to see everyone's opinion of my actual voice… I don't care if they love it. I don't care if they hate it. Well, I'd like it if they loved it, but I just want to hear their opinion," continues Rebecca in the interview. She seems very eager to invite criticism in; I'd be far more wary if I was her. As the whole Friday saga has already shown, 'hate' is oh so quick to raise its head.

Of course, we could fast-forward five/ten years and see Rebecca as an aspiring American Idol contestant or something like that. And if she actually puts aside the colossal circus that Friday has become, puts her head down and works hard at what she's clearly passionate about; you never know, she might, just might, be half-decent.