Rebecca Black and pop music under late capitalism
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When I first wrote about the new “teen sensation” Rebecca Black a few days ago I said that “for her next 15 minutes of fame, the young singer and her ‘career’ open up a discussion about popular culture and late capitalist society that will be explored in future articles.” this article is intended to start that exploration. First, lets get to know Rebecca a little better and watch her interview on Good Morning America;
So she has a brain, and is in her own words “not the best singer but not the worst singer”. Rebecca Black doesn't deserve a lot of the hateful comments she receives, but its not untrue that 'Friday' is a uninspired song totally empty of any meaning beyond 'lets go have fun' that said, Rebecca Black is taking the heat for being at the tail end of popular music's steady decline. At the end of 2009 Michael Swaim of Cracked.com wrote that that My Humps was the most significant song of the decade;
Proving everything Borat set out to imply, "My Humps" represents, in my mind, the moment at which a large sector of society decided to say, "You know what? We don't care about ideas, or thought, and we're not ashamed of that. We just want to dance and take E and buy ices and you can shut the hell up about it. Now let us LITERALLY GET RETARDED IN HERE."
Just a few weeks later Peter Fenzel of Overthinkingit.com wrote that “Ke$ha is the next evolution of pop.” clarifying that evolution does not mean progress but simply the ability to survive and adapt to hostile envrionments.
Popular music faces a very hostile environment these days – sales are way down, noise is way up, and getting a single anything to last in the popular conscious for more than an afternoon is a herculean feat.
Rebecca Black is the next adaptation in the late capitalist environment of popular music. If you take all the adult themes- binge drinking and attempted groping- out of Ke$ha's 'Tik Tok you end up with a song about a young woman who gives us some inane trivia about her morning routine (“Wake up in the morning...grab my glasses...brush my teeth”) and then sings for another few minutes about how fun it is to be out partying. In other words, you get Rebecca Black's 'Friday'. When I wrote about the role of commercial radio in our society I said that with “the massive individualisation of music taste through the internet and the portable MP3 player” more popular music was being made with the night club in mind, hence the dancing/partying them of so much of todays music. I wrote that “The night club is one place where popular music gains a ‘mass’ audience, the others are the shopping mall and the workplace.” that article looked at the workplace, 'Friday' is music for the mall.
With 'Tik Tok' glorifying drinking, the “Explicit” tracks of Katy Perry's Teenage Dream, and Lady Gaga taking controversial political positions, Rebecca Black has came out with a song that couldn't offend any shopper (except those offended by banality, and hey, those people don't shop at the mall anyway) its no coincidence that next move in Black's career is a 'mall tour'. What we're seeing in music is what we've already seen in sculpture, the genre of 'corporate minimalism' so lacking in any depth that no one could possibly determine any meaning, meanings could be offensive, or put us off our shopping.
Corporate minimalism: ascetically pleasing, but so so vacuous
