The statistics for the most watched YouTube videos of 2011 are out. While most are self-explanatory, there was one that had me somewhat stumped. Most of you might have come across a music video sung by Rebecca Black called “Friday”. Now, I’m not usually one to watch music videos but this had me intrigued.
Rebecca Black became an overnight sensation with this video yet media outlets across the world have named it “excruciatingly bad”. I have watched the video myself and I have to say that I wasn’t not all that impressed by what I saw. So, the question remains – how does a video showing such little substance become so popular?
I was with a musician friend when I watched the video and we decided to do a bit of research to try and ascertain what was wrong with the video itself. The music was okay. It appeared cheerful enough. So, we viewed a seperate YouTube video that showcased Rebecca’s singing. The conclusion we made from that venture was that she could actually hold a tune without difficulty so it wasn’t her voice.
Then it hit us. The song was about a schoolgirl living through Friday, waiting for the weekend to come. Pretty boring really. It wasn’t the music or the singing that made us shrudder but the song’s lyrics. I’ll spare you the horrors of the song by not posting it here but if you are interested in listening to it, you can search for it on YouTube.
It just goes to show that if you want your YouTube video to be popular, you don’t have to have much talent. It just has to be unique. It doesn’t seem to matter how bad it is these days …
Sadly true. The big thing that seems to exist a lot within modern popular music is that, it doesn’t really matter who much talent you have, you have to be commercially viable. It’s where a lot of newcomers come unstuck. They have the talent, no doubt (well, most of them do), but they don’t know how to properly harness it (mostly courtesy of inexperience). Hence, they become the puppet of the songwriter, who could write any damn thing they like.