01:01 Rebecca Black Wayfair, every style, every home. 01:06 Willa Paskin Hi, before we get started today, I wanted to talk to you about something. 01:10 Slate, like so many media outlets right now, is contending with the dire economic effects of COVID-19. 01:17 My colleagues are working tirelessly to bring you news about the pandemic and also working tirelessly to bring you news and entertainment, distraction, laughter about everything else, too. 01:28 If you have gotten anything out of our work, 01:57 Please become a member. 01:58 Please support Slate directly by going to slate.com slash decodering plus. 02:04 Thank you. 02:05 Now on to the show. 02:12 In 2011, Eleanor Kagan, an audio producer, was working at a job where she had a little too much time on her hands. 02:18 Eleanor Kagan I would literally spend all day scrolling the internet and just like refreshing, refreshing, waiting for a new post. 02:26 Like there wasn't enough internet for me to read. 02:28 Willa Paskin And then one day in March, something interesting happened. 02:32 Eleanor Kagan All of a sudden, I started hearing people around my office giggle. 02:37 Willa Paskin She immediately started looking around online, trying to figure out what they were laughing at. 02:41 Eleanor Kagan Everybody was posting the lyrics to a song called Friday. 02:55 Willa Paskin Just a few days before, this song and the then 13-year-old girl who performed it, Rebecca Black, had been completely unknown. 03:03 But now that was changing in real time. 03:06 Eleanor was discovering this video alongside tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, eventually millions of other people. 03:14 Friday was on its way to becoming one of the biggest viral phenomena of the 21st century. 03:20 In the video, Black, who has long dark hair and looks as young as her age, reenacts the very detailed, very straightforward lyrics of the song. 03:37 She wakes up, she goes downstairs, eats her cereal, she obsesses about what seat to take on the ride to school, and eventually she winds up at a house party. 03:46 At first glance, the whole thing sounds and looks passably professional. 03:50 But then you start to notice all sorts of weird things about it. 03:53 There's the monotone affect of Black's voice and the robotic effects layered over it. 03:57 The rap verse that comes in just when you think the song is winding down. 04:01 There's the way everyone in the video is trying unnaturally hard to have fun. 04:06 Soundbite And most of all, there are the lyrics. 04:16 Eleanor Kagan It was incomprehensible. 04:19 I could not process what I was watching. 04:21 I could not process what I was hearing. 04:23 I couldn't tell if it was a joke or not. 04:26 I wasn't sure if this was somebody's earnest creation or if this was something being put out there to troll us. 04:36 I think, like, going back to 2011, like, that is truly how I felt was Bafflement. 04:50 Willa Paskin Bafflement was a common response to this song, but it was also a gentle one. 04:54 In its heyday, Friday was teased, mocked, parodied, ripped apart. 04:58 It was a meme that brought the whole internet together in a kind of astonishment that ranged from furious to amused. 05:04 Eleanor Kagan Even though it was so bad, I personally couldn't find it in my heart to actually like hate it. 05:14 At the end of the day, in my head, I was singing Yesterday Was Thursday to Ooh Day Is Friday. 05:21 Willa Paskin The idiocy of those words was just bringing me so much joy and laughter. 05:27 In Eleanor's reaction, you can hear the seeds of something, an ironic enjoyment that in the years to come would stop being ironic. 05:36 She and her partner have a ritual in which they wake up every Friday morning to Friday. 05:41 It started as a troll, a way to get Eleanor out of bed, but it turned into a tradition. 05:46 Eleanor Kagan I would put on the front like I was very annoyed that he was playing this song in the morning. 05:51 And then, but then, you know, I do love it. 05:55 Willa Paskin As Eleanor's relationship to Friday suggests, in less than a decade on this earth, the song has been on quite a rollercoaster ride. 06:03 It's been an object of hate and an object of love and everything in between. 06:07 And if you think it's been bumpy for the song and its listeners, buckle up. 06:12 Rebecca Black My name is Rebecca Black. 06:15 And when I was 13, I sang a song called Friday. 06:26 Willa Paskin This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries. 06:30 I'm Willa Paskin. 06:31 Every episode, we take on a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open, and try to figure out what it means and why it matters. 06:39 In a three-month period in 2011, Rebecca Black's Friday was viewed 167 million times, making it the most watched YouTube video of that year. 06:50 But Friday was not popular because people liked it so much. 06:54 Dubbed the worst video ever made, it became the most disliked song to that point in YouTube's history, and it turned Black into a maligned viral sensation, the object of online abuse, disdain, and bullying. 07:06 Nine years after Friday arrived, we're going to try and understand why it caused such a hullabaloo. 07:12 The story of Friday is one about the messy swirl of feelings and assumptions that shape how we value music. 07:18 It's about how suspicious we are of change and how weird the present looks on its way to becoming the future. 07:25 It's about the end of something and the beginning of something else. 07:28 And that something else was not just the weekend. 07:31 So today on Decodering, was Rebecca Black's Friday... 07:35 really so bad.