“It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday.”
Nearly three years ago, this song echoed off the walls of every middle and high school, everyone who heard the song infected by the catchy tune and poorly written yet contagious lyrics. No teenager will deny they know the song “Friday”, made famous by then 13 year old Rebecca Black. The song went viral, with over 62 million views on the music video posted on Youtube, and yet, there are over a million “dislikes” on the clip. “I think she got a lot of hate because of the autotune. It was a bad song,” sophomore Vivian Ngo explains. “It was just a random song that made no sense to write,” junior Jennifer Saldana adds. After the large amount of negative criticism about the internet sensation sometimes referred to as the “worst song ever”, many people thought Black would never enter the music world again. However, on December 3, Black released a new single, and yes, it’s called “Saturday”.
From the song’s release around two weeks ago, the music video for “Saturday” has already garnered around 16 million views, and news about the song has been travelling around Aragon. “Rebecca Black has a bad reputation already, so your expectations for the song are already low. Why is she making another song about the days of the week?” sophomore Tina Petello says about her first reaction to the song. “People already hate her. Why’s she putting herself in the spotlight?” “I feel like she’s trying too hard to recover from her bad song,” sophomore Parisa Kabiri tells. Ngo agrees, “Everything was over, everyone forgot about it and she brought it back with Saturday.”
In an interview with Toronto radio station KISS 92.5’s Roz & Mocha, Black releases her intentions behind making the song. While most people know that “Saturday” is an obvious spoof of “Friday”, some don’t realize that Black intentionally wanted to mock her younger self. “I was toying around with the idea because one of my favorite things to do is make fun of myself and I’ve gotten to the point where I just wanted to do something fun,” Black says. “I just kind of took it and ran with it.”
Although the responses to “Saturday” haven’t been much different from the reactions to the prequel, some students have expressed that they did find it better than “Friday”. “It sounds better, and the lyrics make more sense,” Saldana says. “It’s decent. It’s not horrible, but it’s not amazing.” A larger majority of students also revealed their opinions not toward the song, but toward’s Black’s voice. In the past couple of years, Black started releasing covers of songs on her Youtube account, and most of the comments were positive. “I listened to her sing ‘We Can’t Stop’ by Miley Cyrus, and I thought she sounded good. I didn’t even realize it was her,” Petello tells. “When she sang acoustically, I thought she might have a chance.” Sophomore Arianna Palmiery concurs, “I watched videos of her singing normally, without anything, and it’s really good.” “If she wrote better songs she’d be more well liked,” Saldana adds. “I like her voice now; it’s more mature than when she did ‘Friday’.”
Whether you love or hate “Friday” or “Saturday”, Black’s comeback after all the hate is brave. “I just got to the point where I just didn’t care what anyone thought,” Black says in the same radio interview. “I don’t care about the hate, it’s going to be there no matter what I do.” Although Black says that she has no plans for further songs in the weekend duo, there is a single question posed on everyone’s lips: Is “Sunday” next?
