Friday On My Mind

Like 42.5million other people, my curiosity got the better of me the other day and I watched the video for Rebecca Black's Friday on Youtube.

I was typically reluctant at first as I had decided the song was going to be an atrocity. It was a purely instinctive reaction, but then I thought why not see how bad it actually is? Maybe its the masochist in me, he who writhes and squirms ecstatically in the horror, but I have always found terrible music highly comedic, no matter how earnest the performer is.

My opinion didn't change once I had heard it. Yes, it is a sorry piece of music, the aural equivalent of watching a dog with no legs trying to stand up, but is it really worse than anything else in the charts?

The top 40 has always been smattered with shit and as I write this it is no different. The Black Eyed Peas have their perennial place in there, this week with Just Can't Get Enough. Its as irritating and auto-tuned as Black's single. Another pot shot leads us to Tinie Tempah's Wonderman (featuring Ellie Goulding), which is as banal and monotone as listening to an old person talk about something which you simply do not care about.

What do we have here? Olly Murs' Heart On My Sleeve, a terminal ballad of euthanasian proportions; Alexis Jordan's Good Girl, one of the worst songs to enter the chart this year, yet it reached number six; and George Michael's butchering of True Faith, calling into question whether it is worth saving children in Africa.

Friday certainly isn't better than anything in the charts but with all the commotion surrounding it one could be forgiven for thinking that it was a recitation of the Nazi Party manifesto produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman. With it's insistence on repetition and auto-tuning it is no different to the majority of the music in the charts right now. Take this as a warning: we haven't heard the last of Rebecca Black.