Quality Control
You could have had some consideration for your readers (and a more curmudgeonly lot you'd be hard-pressed to find) and just, y'know, kept it to your damned selves!
Interwebs stunned by musical atrocity
I'd really like to thank the Beeb this afternoon for flagging up Rebecca Black's Friday, which has become a bit of a hit down at iTunes despite provoking the desire to tear your ears off with pliers. "Fun, loving, 13 year old" Rebecca has proved that you can sell just about anything if you get a net buzz going, even if that …
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Monday 21st March 2011 15:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
and now the wikipedia entry
There's been resistance on the grounds that she/the rendition just weren't "notable" though I suspect a few editors thought it was just plain crap idea to put her in the encyclopaedia-anyone-can-etc .
That a certain high-waisted musical impressario thinks it is in anyway a good thing (the rendition not they wikipedia artticle) should be a warning shot across society's bows.
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Tuesday 22nd March 2011 10:15 GMT Robert Carnegie
Does being famous for fifteen minutes qualify you for Wikipedia?
Anyway if the condition of entry is to be "not able", then......
I still haven't heard this song. I agree that it isn't dignified for adults to sneer at children.
The radio version of [Dead Ringers] once had a sketch that imagined Anne Robinson from the [Weakest Link] game show judging the pictures her children had drawn that day at primary school and dismissing "The Weakest Child" from the family. The message was that it's a horrible thing to do.
Then again, many years ago, possibly on the [Red Dwarf] writers' radio show [Son of Cliché], there was a sketch of an archaeologist viciously verbally ripping apart cave paintings, that at the time I thought I was brilliant. "This is cack. This is worse than that Egyptian cack..."
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Monday 21st March 2011 15:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Another reason to rejoice at my separation...
...is that I no longer share a home with a teenager who will insist on playing crap like this on endless loop at high volume.
This shit would give Bieber a toothache.
Okay, I know I'm sounding a little like my Dad here, but the youth of today really don't seem to understand decent music; it's just whatever is cynically pushed at them as the next big thing, and they pass it on and play it as if it had any kind of merit...
I despair, really I do...
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Monday 21st March 2011 16:40 GMT James Hughes 1
it's not all bad out there
Was in a pub on Sat night - band playing - lots of good rock, drummer did an amazing solo.
Lead guitar was about 18, drummer was 13. Awesome.
None of this pansy flapping shite in my local let me tell you. Until the band went off, and the yoof got hold of the juke box. Had to drink heavily from that point onwards.
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Monday 21st March 2011 17:49 GMT serviceWithASmile
doubleplus
it really isn't all that bad out there, it just seems that any music that ever required any kind of talent (or a real musical instrument - no autotune doesnt count) is being sidelined.
it's not really, it's just that the talentless, vapid tools simon cowell keeps hiring make more noise and get more coverage - learn not to listen and you will hear the real and talented bands out there whose bond is not about money but about love for what they do. Not just talking about rock, the same is true for most if not all genres. pubs are generally the best place to find these people.
If you too want quality music and have an innate distrust for the words "protools" and "MIDI" then follow my 3 easy steps for musical nirvana:
1. don't watch x-factor
a. avoid tv in general (optional but recommended)
2. listen to internet radio
3. go to small venues for gigs often
a. have a pint (optional but recommended)
follow these simple rules and a musically rich life shall be yours!
is anybody running a rage-against-the-machine-for-christmas-number-one this year?
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Monday 21st March 2011 17:49 GMT HFoster
Thing is...
Every generation says that, but the fact of the matter is, we're all prone to rose tinting our youth. My mum often bangs on about songs from her day having good lyrics. I pointed out Toots & The Maytals "Bam Bam". Conversation over.
I know for a fact that, in among all the screw-faced Jungle I listened to as a teen, was more than a few cheesily bad songs.
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Monday 21st March 2011 16:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
real life rating
When smartphones with object recognition get integrated into glasses some bright spark will create software for it that will enable you to comment on and "thumb up" or "thumb down" real world objects - such as places, buildings and people.
Watching tv and looking at famous people/places/events will never be the same with those glasses. Can't wait to to read the comments!
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Monday 21st March 2011 16:35 GMT Mostor Astrakan
Oh come on...
It isn't that bad when you turn down the volume as low as it will go. It's a cute girl imitating a goldfish. I bet you, if Beethoven had been around at the time, it would have cheered him up no end, and convinced him that his ironic condition could be a source of joy as well as sadness. And she got the days of the week in their proper order too, producing a work of chronological excellence. After all, even the Mamas and the Papas didn't dare go beyond monday, the Bangles famously put "Sunday" *behind* "Monday", to universal ridicule. All you haters simply don't understand the deeper meaning of this piece. The passing of time. The reflection upon the fragility of existence. Philistines!
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Monday 21st March 2011 16:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Youtube
I think a lot of this song has taken inspiration from Youtube spoof videos.
The lyrics do follow the form of quite a lot of the parodies that are around, same aswell for the type of video.
What surprises/confuses me is that she is friends with people who can drive and at one point drives off in a car. She is 13. Also a lot of this seems to go around about "partying" on the weekend.
Partying at the age of 13 is quite a lot different...
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Monday 21st March 2011 16:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Really that bad?
Is it really that bad when compared to the rubbish that fills the British music charts week after week. How many 'guest' rap fillers are dropped into songs to fill them these days, how many endless self-named 'stars' do we have chanting their way through a 'song' consisting of not more than a clap machine, a snare and a bit of auto-tune?
When the British music industry votes the likes of Tiny Talent as best song when half of it is cut because of foul content can we really be that hard on this?
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Monday 21st March 2011 18:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
re: Really that bad?
too true... but...
has anyone made as far as the inspired "bridge" :-
yesterday was thursday (thursday)
today it is friday (friday)
we we we so excited
we so excited
we going to have a ball today
tomorrow is saturday
sunday comes afterwards
i dont want this weekend to end
even the regular chart trash can't match that for lyrical excellence...
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Monday 21st March 2011 17:49 GMT The Beer Monster
There's only 3 sorts of music
1) The stuff you like
2) The stuff you don't
3) The stuff you haven't heard yet.
On the back of other's comments, I have decided that this particular track should stay as a 3 for me. I shall desist from clicking on any links, watching TV, listening to the radio, going out...
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Monday 21st March 2011 17:50 GMT Peter Gathercole
Come on. It's really not monotone
I found most of a single scale in the 'song', at least seven notes, although most of the song stays on the three notes of a major chord.
I think many of the readers here ought to listen to the 'singles' chart nowadays, because they will be appalled by what is counted as music by the people who actually buy it in volume. I must admit, however, that I was intrigued yesterday to hear two versions of Adele's Someone like you (the normal version and the Brits version - both head and shoulders better than much of the rest) on the chart at the same time.
Autotune, whether it is required or not, is added to the vocal in it's most intrusive, buzzy manner for effect on so many songs now. I hesitate to say this, but JLS who obviously can sing a bit (no autotune allowed on X-factor live performances after all) have it on most of their songs now.
I do wonder what a 13 year old girl will be doing while "gettin it down" and which makes "we so excited" (sic) while "partying" which is legal! Sex and drugs and alcohol should all be out.
Anyway, I have to decide whether to listen to Planet Rock or Radio 3 on my way home to flush this meaningless and annoying fluff from my mental musical cache.
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Tuesday 22nd March 2011 11:57 GMT Munchausen By Taxi
But No...
That's definitely auto-tune (or pitch correction). Apart from the superhuman levels of hitting the right note exactly, the timbre quality still sounds like a human voice (although there's probably some post-pitch correction filtering in there).
Even the best vocoders out there couldn't get that right.
Still... AUUUUUU TOOOOOO BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHNNNNNNNNNNNNNN.....
(Ooh. Think I'll listen to that now. Classic.)
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Monday 21st March 2011 18:49 GMT Ally J
For $2,000, you can have a go, too
No, at making your own song. This has been churned out as a vanity project by some outfit that specialises in, well, churning out songs featuring the children of the people prepared to pay them money. It's a sign of the perverseness of the universe that this song has become a 'hit' despite having nothing to recommend it.
(I'm told there is an acoustic version available for all us haters who think it's all been autotuned to excess and that Rebecca Black can't sing. Hoorah.)
Paris, because money doesn't buy talent.
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Monday 21st March 2011 18:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
I don't listen to pop music radio...
... but when I go to the jobcentre/agency this week I probably will. They like that sort of thing. Until I had a while of listening to pop radio *solely because I was there*, I hadn't even become aware of the autotune fad. This looks to be twenty time worse :(
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Monday 21st March 2011 21:19 GMT Will Godfrey
Fortunately
I had sufficient warning and avoided this completely, but seeing as these days I avoid all commercially promoted air vibrating that wasn't difficult..
If I want to hear music I go to a venue dedicated to the process, or alternatively fetch some very high quality Creative Commons compositions from the 'net.
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Monday 21st March 2011 21:31 GMT tom 24
Why oh why did I click Play?
I may never forgive El Reg for posting this video, or myself for clicking on it.
Calling this track "derivative" would be like calling the music it copies "derivative." In fact, trying to describe the lameness of this track is as pointless as the track itself.
Oh man, that one stung.
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Monday 21st March 2011 23:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Hmm...
I find adults queuing up to slag off young teenagers one of the more distasteful aspects of the Internet and it's been vastly increased by You Tube.
She's 13, she wrote a song, five or ten years ago maybe a few friends would hear it at school, maybe she'd get to perform it once in a talent show. Now, she writes a tune, it gets picked up from you tube and 'goes viral' with lots of oh-so-smart people who probably couldn't do as well themselves laughing at how bad it is. GROW UP!
If the global slagging-off doesn't crush her spirit, she may be actually turn out to be quite good. Everyone has to start somewhere and it's pretty much unheard of for someone to start off being excellent. Have any of you played a musical instrument or been in a band? Did you start good? No, thought not.
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Tuesday 22nd March 2011 04:09 GMT Sean Baggaley 1
"If the global slagging-off doesn't crush her spirit..."
... I'd be more than happy to finish the job.
Sorry, but it's just not very good from an objective standpoint. There *are* objective metrics one can use to discuss someone's skills in a craft, and the craft of musical performance is no exception.
In this case, the singer's skills are difficult to analyse due to the heavy processing—a technique popular in current popular music, so this shouldn't really count against it. (Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. This decision, at least, is subjective.)
The video is nothing to write home about. Editing and directing choices play a large part in how she is portrayed, so the most one can say about the singer's performance is that far worse examples of the genre exist. However, it is clear that this video was produced by a team, not by a typical amateur individual. There's motion graphics, match-cuts and so on. This is, technically at least, competent. This is hardly a big surprise given how far desktop video has come, but the resulting video is monotonous and derivative stylistically. Whoever directed this tired cliché is certainly no Ridley Scott or Edgar Wright.
The lyrics are truly awful. Their subject matter, as others have pointed out, is also downright disturbing: she's singing the kinds of lyrics one would expect to hear from some of the more promiscuous rappers twice her age. It certainly isn't the kind of thing you'd expect to hear from a 13-year-old girl. Her judgement seems rather lacking. (As does that of her parent(s) or guardian(s).)
On the other hand, I've heard worse music.
From a commercial perspective, it's much better to have a star who can sing tolerably well and is willing to give up having anything resembling a social life in order to go on endless tours, interviews, photo shoots and the like, than to have someone who has an awesome voice, but who gets travel-sick at the mere sight of a road, let alone a tour bus and hates going more than 50 yards from his home studio. This is just business. The music labels invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing alone, all at their own risk. There are no guarantees that their future star will earn that investment back, let alone make a profit. And the one thing they do know is marketing.
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Tuesday 22nd March 2011 10:32 GMT The Fuzzy Wotnot
I think you're right, yes it;s great she's putting in some time but...
Many moons ago you would learn to play or sing, get some mates together, then play a few gigs, see if it worked out. If it started happening you'd get serious start organising yourselves, get around to more clubs start bugging record companies and finally get a load of fans. Finally after a year or two you might get some attention, back on the circuit, bigger clubs more hard graft. After 3-4 years you might be playing 1,000+ places and selling loads of records. If your record company is OK they will keep fronting cash up, even see you through that tragic second album that is always pants. One day you will have earned the fame and fortune, swimming pool full of drugs or blue M&Ms!
These days, you write a crap song, sing it in a crap way, over process it. Appear on YouTube/X-Factor and have a career in 2 months flat! After 6 months your career is fucked and you're dreams are dead in the water 'cos something better comes along that's cuter and nicer that you, as you are now considered a has-been!
OK?
Real music is made by real mucisians who graft, playing shitty dives to 10 people on Friday night for maybe enough to cover the petrol to get there. You work and work to build up a following and a reputation, spending 9 months of the year stuck in a transit all the time learning how much you want to be a professional mucisian and how badly you want your dream. I support rock and metal bands, by going to those shitty clubs and buying CD's and shirts from the band's girlfriends at the door of the gig, making sure they know they are being supported by people who genuinely care about them making music they want to hear.
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Monday 21st March 2011 23:11 GMT FozzyBear
I do have to share
My son 10 years old enjoys differing music from AC/DC to a little classical. Over the weekend whilst watching TV beiber came on. With as much seriousness he could muster he turned to me and said quote unquote
“Dad turn it over this silly bitch can’t sing!”
It was one of the proudest moments ever, It also took me about 5 minutes to pick myself off the floor and chastise him for his use of bad language
Honestly I have no fuckin’ idea where he picks up that sort of language
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Tuesday 22nd March 2011 10:26 GMT The Fuzzy Wotnot
Well said!
There is hope for some of the new generation, with people who care about real music teaching kids that there is something more than being spoon-fed chart drivel or one-hit wonders from YouTube! Well done sir!
I went to a club the other day and there was a prog death-metal band on, combined age of all 5 of them must have been about the same age as my old 70 year olf dad! On keyboards was this young girl who looked all of 14 or 15 years old, she looked absolutely terrified to be up there while a bunch of metal heads stared at her and her band, but she was still up there and still playing with her mates, with passion for the music she obviously loves. She was not looking for an easy way to make it, writing crap and getting an instant career, these kids were grafting in dingy dives as the bottom end of the support band list, as it should be done by real mucisians.
So there is hope!
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Tuesday 22nd March 2011 10:15 GMT Sarah Bee
Re: Managed 30 seconds before hitting the mute
Ah but you don't realise the songwriting craft that goes into the stuff that offends your ears. Just as The Sun is written and put together by very clever people, so the kind of pop you find incredibly dumb is made by very musical people. Honest. This is a cut below.
But it is essentially the musical equivalent of a Moonpig card, so in some ways it's unfair to compare it to 'proper' pop made by real pros. The poor kid certainly isn't a pro, and as such I think she did OK, mind-bogglingly awful as the song is. Apparently she can sing pretty well - they just autotuned her to hell.
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Tuesday 22nd March 2011 10:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Ringing in my ears
I'd rather sit in an acoustically dampened room and listen to my tinnitus (which sounds amplified when there are no other sounds around to hear) than listen to that atrocity ever again in my entire life.
Someone needs to put a hit out on the autotune software writers and users - or at least lock them in a room and force them to listen to trash like Rebecca Black, Aqua etc. on a loop 24hours a day for a couple of years.
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Tuesday 22nd March 2011 10:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Mall-rat!
Puts me in mind of the late, great Bill Hicks and his little skit about Tiffany and Debbie Gibson being locked in a studio with Jimmy Hendrix!
" 'Shake my love.' yeah Debbie, what love you going to shake, yer only just finished puberty?! Go anywhere near Jimmy and he'll shake your love right off. "Mountain...chop it down with the back 'o my hand! *wheee...buuzzzz...wanger...shoooom*, 'MOMMY! LET ME OUT!!!!'. Fucking mall-rat, foetus, get back to yer baby-sitting stint, come back you've got something worth hearing! "
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Tuesday 22nd March 2011 10:26 GMT Dinky Carter
Dreadful though it is...
... at least she got off her arse and tried to create something. And now she's famous and coining it in on iTunes! And it's really not so much worse that the unbelievable poppy / "R'n'B" dross that's been excreted in recent years by music industry professionals. *They* at least should know better.
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Tuesday 22nd March 2011 10:31 GMT squilookle
It;'s bad
But it's nothing new. Crap like this has been produce in every decade since records could be mass produced. When you look back, you don't realise it, because that crap gets forgotten. We only play the good stuff from the 60's/70's/80's, thinking it was some kind of golden age for music that only spawned great stuff like the Beatles and Queen.
Also, as stupid as the lyrics might be, the whole thing smacks of marketing genius. I nearly fell for it myself by posting it on Facebook, because I thought my friends wouldn't believe how bad it is, they would have to hear it for themselves. Then I realised that posting it on Facebook is what the people who released the song *want* me to do, because that is how it spreads.
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Tuesday 22nd March 2011 12:12 GMT bugalugs
Dear Sarah,
thankyou for defending the warbler. And for the MC Hawking link, which was awesome. As the father of a girl Miss Black's age I must concur with those of my fellow commentards noting that this um piece and its accompanying video may be quite inappropriate as an ouvré for her career. She may be able to hold A Note but it's a bit like The Beatles starting off with " Rain " as a smash hit instead of " Love Me Do ". Six months and we'll see anyway, eh ?
Frankly, both " Friday " and " Rain " are a bit dirge-ish, though the latter has many more notes, some nice harmony and live drumming, all of which are conspicuously absent in Miss Black's effort. I freely confess to having Once written and performed a number even more boring and tedious than either, which I had forgotten all about till now. I hope my audience has as well. I apologise also for the very small part I may have played in the development of tune-able synthetic drumming in the late 60's - I had no idea it would come to this. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the nice people at adobe who included " stop download " in the right-click context menu for the flash player. Some band-width saved at least. Rock on sister.
kind regards, bugs
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Tuesday 22nd March 2011 12:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Popular? Really? Like David Cameron's popular?
A lot of people have seen the video, but that doesn't mean it's popular.
Of the 281,603 people who could be bothered to vote only 10.5% (29,576 people) said they liked it. And it's been confirmed using science that that 10.5% had all taken a wide variety of hallucinogens before watching the video and didn't know what they were doing.
Anyway this is more like my morning. And it doesn't involve "gotta get my bowl, gotta have cereal" which is surely the worst lyric I have ever read in my life.
7am waking up in the morning
Gotta have a piss, better go downstairs
There was that time where I pissed in the wardrobe
But we try to avoid talking about that incident
Tinkly sounds relieve the darkness
And my bladder feels less full
Better feed the cat and empty the cat shit
Now I've missed the bus and it's pissing down
Waving at the driver
Yes, you're a wanker
Yes that's right
You saw me and drove off
It's Friday, Friday
And that's just a work day
It might be the last day of the week
But it's not the weekend yet
It's not like my boss is going to allow me to dick around
Just because I get a day off tomorrow.
...
I'd write more but I can't be arsed.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
