Black Friday
Traditionally it is assumed that subjectivity is great when it comes to art. Take any artistic debate: One opinion cannot be proved objectively wrong, no matter how pretentious, uninformed and ignorant the opposition might be, or right, no matter how worldly, educated and insightful you might be. Someone gets mouthy about how Mr. Bungle is better than Faith No More, just go “hey man, it’s all subjective”. Argument legitimized, fuck you. I’m right but so are you. Subjectivity is the pillar of liberal arts and I like and promote it, as everyone should. But, as I have started to discover, it isn’t such a great thing all the time. Given the direction of popular culture, is it also a cheap get-out clause that grants autonomy to flawed rationale, or, and this is what I will focus on, really bad art? Is an objective, rather than subjective, approach to art acceptable in extreme cases?
Case-in-point, Rebecca Black’s “Friday”. Firstly, I must note that I use the possessive pluralisation (Rebecca Black’s “Friday”) in its loosest sense. I emphasise this because the phrasing of how we link artist to song can be misleading: It presents an image of an artist and his/her created work that implicitly links it to the general musical canon of The Beatles, Dylan, Bowie et al, legitimising the song in the process. It is her song, she sings it, she created it, just like “All Along the Watchtower” is Dylan’s. Elle est une artiste, dude. Song and artist are simultanesouly granted autonomy, thrown into the sweet, untouchable realm of the subjective. Obvious problem is, it isn’t her song. I think it’s a safe enough assumption to make that everything in “Friday”, down to the smallest detail, has been approved and reapproved by some sort of record company/producer/whatever. Point being, they’re not her beats: they’re not her melodies; they’re not her incredibly bad lyrics (“gotta get my cereal”); the autotune mangled excuse for a voice isn’t even hers. “Well she at least she sings the song” is readily applicable in many arguments about the contemporary pop star, and if the song in question carries with it the indelible artistic stamp of a human voice, or even a faint trace of it, I can sometimes accept this. I mean Rihanna is grand. Cool, natural, half-human, half-autotune robot voice. I can accept, and like, Rihanna. But Rebecca Black’s fucking inhuman, cyborg voice is mangled by autotune so badly, almost more than any other contemporary song I can think of, that any natural timbre is squeezed out to leave a hollow, robotic shell of an “artist”. Fuck that.
Obviously, it’s a shit song. The melody is shit. The video of hilarious little privileged white kids acting ghetto in a top-down, and the incredibly badly animated calendar section, is shit. That misplaced yet hilarious rap section (nice attempt to make the song “current” and “urban”, Mr. Producer) is… Kind of… Decent??? NO IT’S FUCKING SHIT. Every single person I’ve talked to recognises the undeniably poor quality of this song. Yet when it comes on in a club, you know it’ll have one of the biggest crowds down on the floor on a Friday night. This, of course, is a strange juxtaposition. Massive song, yet most of the people who listen to it don’t like it. What bridges the gap between hated art and popularity?
“Ok I see what you’re saying, I mean the way music is created nowadays doesn’t appeal to me either, and the song is really bad, but I mean it is funny and catchy. Ironically.” Ironically. IRONICALLY. This is what postmodern culture, for all its positives in terms of scepticism and questioning of the absolutes that structure our lives, has ultimately created: The ironic appreciation of art. Is there not something very fucking weird that the way in which we listen to (some) contemporary music relies upon irony, not that instinctive and immediate, yet indefinable and inexpressible feeling of a true passion for a song? People around the world (42 million views on Youtube at time of writing) are watching her instead of something more original, important, or funny, because of irony. She is making money from “Friday”, because of irony. Irony, more than anything else, is fuelling the listenership of this shit. We will hate this song, we will watch it drag our culture further and further down the sewer, and we will dance “ironically” to the tune of it.
Conclusion: In the face of Rebecca Black, subjectivity is wasting our time. In these circumstances, an “art as objective approach” isn’t such a bad thing. Desperate times, desperate measures. If you get into an argument with someone over this piece of trash, don’t let them use their “it’s all subjective”, “I’m dancing ironically” get-out-of-jail free card. Get pissed off and let them know you disagree with what it’s doing to culture and music; that with every minute someone spends listening to this song you could be discovering an incredible new artist who needs your support a hell of a lot more; that with every 1000th view you are promoting an industry that takes advantage of young, naive teens and their delusions of fame in the name of profit; that with the increasing attention we give these artists, the increased likelihood that similiar ones will appear. Tell them it all ultimately comes down to the principle of “if we ignore them, they will go away”. Then put on some MJ and dance to some real pop tunes.
