What Hath YouTube Wrought? The Exciting Conclusion
More troubling, aesthetic hating seems, according to a logic that eludes me, to beget personal hating. Comments on the “Friday” YouTube page resemble a kind of gang violence, which is being perpetrated against a 13-year-old girl:
I could just about forgive the mind numbing lyrics, god awfull video and the dull ass music, if she actually had a decent voice. As it is i wish to punch her in the face.—4MSuperAwesomeSquad
Hatee THIS F***ING BULLS*** R.B GO KILL YOUR SELF YOUR VOICE IS STUPID MY EARS ARE BLEEDING HOW DARE YOU PUT THIS B.S. UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!—TaylorGangOrDiee
f****n whore slag bitch—ayyb13
And this symbolic violence has now crossed the line into actual violence: Anaheim, California, police are investigating death threats against Black.
When the video cleared the 100-million barrier recently, Black posted on Twitter:
WE REACHED 100 MILLION VIEWS!! THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! (LOVE OR HATE, IT DOESN’T MATTER TO ME!) <3 <3 <3 <3.
Love or hate: Black says it doesn’t matter to her, but surely it does matter. It may be safest to weigh in only on the songs we hate, but our full humanity requires that we also acknowledge and publicly embrace the songs we love. Although getting in touch with one’s hatred for a bad song is an important part of aesthetic judgment, so too is the ability to articulate one’s aesthetic pleasure—to respond with both skepticism and empathy. In the original version of my syllabus, I’d planned for my students to read “James Taylor Marked for Death,” the late rock critic Lester Bangs’s paean to garage rockers The Troggs. The title gestures to Bangs’s “comically” violent reaction to the “relentlessly involutedly egocentric” stylings of singers like Taylor: “Matter of fact, if I ever get down to Carolina I’m gonna try to figure out a way to off James Taylor. Hate to come on like a Nazi, but if I hear one more Jesus-walking-the-boys-and-girls-down-a-Carolina-path-while-the-dilemma-of-existence-crashes-like-a-slab-of-hod-on-J.T.’s-shoulders song, I will drop everything . . . and hop on the first Greyhound to Carolina for the signal satisfaction of breaking off a bottle of Ripple . . . and twisting it into James Taylor’s guts until he expires in a spasm of adenoidal poesy.” In the writings of Lester Bangs, which I’ve always despised, this is supposed to count as “passion”: but it’s just a half-step from the truly alarming flow of bile directed at Rebecca Black.
I’m glad, now, that I dropped the essay. As “Friday” makes clear, we’ve got other work to do.
Hmm, clearly we have to have a discussion about Lester sometime soon.
I saw ‘Chocolate Rain’ once and wondered what the fuss was all about. I heard about this Rebecca Black Friday thing but have never seen/heard it and was a little confused about what it had to do with the day after Thanksgiving. I have read Sh*t My Dad Says and laughed heartily at many parts of it – maybe because I have a smelly son and can appreciate the directness with which this man addresses his son’s refusal to shower regularly.
When it comes down to it, I like it here under my rock but it would be nice if people could just hate the creation and not the creator. Except for Frankenstein because it wasn’t his fault.
Yes, I’m taking cold medicine. Why do you ask?