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.

Rebecca Black... No thank-you, please

Rebecca Black does nothing for me. This great article from The Guardian pretty much fills you in on all you need to know about her and takes the right sort of angle too, the actual facts rather than the head-over-heels obsession the rest of the internet seems to have gone for in regards to her.

Ok, fair enough if she floats your boat. We all have to get our laughs somewhere. But for me, Rebecca Black holds no merit. She's a poor singer, the song is awful and most importantly of all, she isn't funny. I see nothing funny in a bad singer. Some might say 'But what about The X Factor?' - but that's different. There, the bad singers are presented as part of a mixed palate; the good with the bad. Also, the bad singers are given their 15 seconds, then swiftly ushered off-stage, whereas Rebecca Black has achieved worldwide fame.

I guess what I find so frustrating is partly that she has achieved fame for being bad. In the ever-competitive music industry, there's incredibly talented singers out there that'd kill for the kind of hyper-fame Rebecca has. Yet, defying logic, it is the bad singer with the awful song that is handed fame on a plate.

Also, it's the 'OMG she's hilarious!' attitude people seem to be approaching her with that annoys me. Really, is a bad singer that funny? Rebecca is hardly the first. It seems part of a cruel world that so much 'comedy' can stem for a young girl who probably doesn't know what the hell is going on. This is comedy of the dumbest kind; there's no wit or clever-ness to it, not even the charm of lad-ish toilet humour. No, this is just cheap laughs at the expense of another person.

The other thing I don't like is that Rebecca gives the ever-present rock music mafia additional ammo to hurl at pop music. They'll say 'Look at this cheap, awful track. It shows the state of music today. Pop sucks!' - But of course, Rebecca isn't pop - Friday is purely a novelty song. I'd even hesitate at calling it 'music'. It cannot be approached seriously. And as all true pop fans know, good pop tracks are worth ten-billion Friday's... any-day of the week.

Ultimately, Rebecca Black just represents another flash-in-the-pan internet trend, but it is frustrating to see something so fundamentally bad getting so many laughs.