00:00 Paula Harper One of the reasons that I do the work that I do, which is writing about music and sound on the internet, is in part because I am fascinated and delighted by objects that are frequently obnoxious. 00:12 So a lot of the things that I'm engaging with are things that occupy this weird liminal or ambivalent space between something that gives people delight and something that makes people want to throw their computer off. 00:27 off of a tall building, right? 00:29 So just like right in the middle space between those two emotions or having those two emotions at the same time is how I've engaged with a lot of stuff on the internet, including but certainly not limited to the Rebecca Black Friday video. 01:05 Will Robin Welcome back to Sound Expertise. 01:09 I'm your host, Will Robin, and I'm a musicologist, and this is a podcast where I talk with my fellow music scholars about their research and why it matters. 01:18 You probably remember Rebecca Black's Friday, and if not, you almost certainly heard it. 01:24 It was absolutely ubiquitous about a decade ago. 01:27 A music video by an amateur teen musician, which went viral because it was widely trashed as one of the worst songs of all time. 01:35 Friday went from YouTube to Tosh.0 to parodies and covers on late-night TV, racking up tens of millions of views in the process. 01:44 It was 2011. 01:45 It was a more innocent time, when our expectations for what kinds of internet content would go viral were not yet fully formed, and when Facebook and Twitter seemed like fun places for have-you-seen-this sharing and cutesy parodies, rather than platforms for spreading conspiracy theories and undermining democracy. 02:07 Everything about Friday would suggest that it is not traditional fodder for analysis by musicologists. 02:13 Historically, music scholars have tended to study great music and how it has endured in the canon. 02:18 Friday, however, is both very bad and very ephemeral, vanishing into the internet ether soon after it became a sensation. 02:28 But those two traits are also what make Friday a potentially rich case study in contemporary musicological practices. 02:35 Its ephemerality can help us understand what it means for music to go viral. 02:39 The cultural expectations in 2011 and today for how music is created and consumed in a fast-paced internet culture. 02:46 And its quote-unquote badness, and in particular how that badness was understood and framed in its time, revealed deep and entrenched anxieties about amateurism, girlhood, and technology that stretch back through the history of popular music in the United States. 03:03 As far as I'm concerned, there is only one scholar to talk to about this topic, and that is Paula Harper, who is a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. 03:14 Dr. Harper specializes in music and virality and has published some really fascinating work on the sound of internet culture from Friday to Beyonce to TikTok. 03:23 I really hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation today on sound expertise. 03:40 So let's start with an infamously loathed viral music video that you've written about extensively, which is Rebecca Black's Friday. 03:55 You write in this great article that, which I hadn't realized it was at one time the most disliked video on YouTube. 04:01 How did you find yourself interested in Friday as an object of musicological analysis? 04:08 Paula Harper This is a great question. 04:12 So this was Friday came out back in 2011, which was before I was writing my dissertation. 04:21 In fact, I wasn't even in my PhD program yet. 04:25 I was in a master's program at the University of Washington in Seattle. 04:30 And I was teaching a class on writing about music. 04:39 So I was helping undergraduate students kind of develop strategies for writing about music. 04:45 And kind of as a gag, I would begin each Friday's class with a different concept. 04:53 version of friday so you know i was i was on the internet i was listening to rebecca black's friday people kept sending it to me um and i was you know i was i was a netizen i was hanging out on the internet and kind of consuming viral internet culture and so i was consuming a lot of these remixes and mashups of rebecca black's friday as well and i was um 05:18 I was making my students listen to them as I began each week's class. 05:24 And so that kind of trolling practice of mine as a teacher stuck with me. 05:32 The fact that I could go for an entire quarter of Fridays and not run out of remixed material for this video, right? 05:40 The fact that people were producing so much and so many different versions of this one object that 05:47 purportedly we all hated, and yet there was such a proliferation of enthusiastic content production around this object. 05:56 So it kind of stuck in my head, right? 05:58 And I had already sort of done some of the research in putting together this catalogue of things with which to menace my writing about music students. 06:11 So when I was putting together my dissertation, when I was thinking about virality and musical production and musical circulation on the internet, there are a number of different reasons why Rebecca Black's Friday video 06:27 fit neatly into the kinds of arguments that I was making. 06:31 But one of the standout reasons, certainly, and one of the things that I wrote about, focused on in this article that I wrote in a special issue of the journal American Music, is the fact of these arguments 06:46 Remixes the fact of just the kind of massive amount of enthusiastic amateur production that went on around this supposedly loathsome, obnoxious internet object. 07:01 Will Robin Right. 07:02 Yeah, I want to come back to the remix stuff. 07:04 Like when you were back in 2011, when you were watching this and consuming its virality, like... 07:10 were you self-reflective about how much it was hated or were you at the point of like everyone else just being like this sucks and like how how funny is it that this sucks or were you more like oh like there's a reason why the people are saying this sucks that's revealing of something 07:25 Paula Harper I certainly didn't have the argument that I formulate in the article, which is that there are kind of genre and connectedly gendered implications to what was going on there in terms of the kind of reviling of the original object and its rehabilitation in different kinds of viral remix productivity. 07:49 But I was also, I mean, I, I'm one of the reasons that I do the work that I do, which is writing about music and sound on the internet is in part because I am fascinated and delighted by objects that are frequently obnoxious. 08:05 So a lot of the things that I'm engaging with are things that occupy this weird liminal or ambivalent space between something that gives people delight and something that makes, makes people want to like throw their 08:19 computer off of a tall building right so just like right in the middle space between those two emotions or having those two emotions at the same time um is how I've engaged with a lot of stuff on the internet including but certainly not limited to the Rebecca Black Friday video uh and so yeah so I'm I'm interested in um 08:42 you know, thinking about recording, writing a history of other people having those same shared reactions. 08:51 Will Robin Before we kind of jump into what about Friday was kind of so hateable, can you talk a little bit about how Friday became a viral phenomenon from this kind of random YouTube video to you talk about the aggregator website, the daily what, that was the first kind of thing that jumped on it. 09:08 And what are the pathways that it moved through to achieve the kind of viral status that it achieved?