Process notes:
I think to understand why I did this, and my intentions with the piece, we need a bit of historical context. Friday by Rebbeca Black is a song that was published in 2011, with lyrics by Clarence Jey and Patrice Wilson. And they’re not actually bad songwriters, but this song has all the earmarks of a “Write a song about this one very narrow thing,” prompt. Which, considering it was a song designed to be performed by a fourteen year old, makes perfect sense. It was never designed to be the legendary piece of pop music that it is.
Lyrically, it’s not great, full of imprecise words, cliches, and filler, which is sad. The fact that it’s a good song, which I think it is, is more due to the fact of Rebecca’s performance of it and the production values on the original track, which, if we decide to look at it objectively, are good. There’s no arguing that.
Friday was part of the first batch of ironic meme songs that went truly viral. If memory serves, it came out at about the same time Hot Problems did, and it was enjoyable for many of the same reasons. Friday occupies this place in my heart that’s hard to explain. And I think it goes past the actual song itself.
Black was trolled mercilessly over this thing, something I can appreciate. I understand what that’s like. Lynn Cole as a personality in the art and music spaces didn’t really start until I received 250,000 angry dm’s over the space of three months, related to artistic tools and choices that I wasn’t even involved with at the time.
What happened for me was three years of punching back and winning the argument.
By now, you probably know the rest of it.
But I’m an adult. An adult who has faced a lot of adversity in life, and honestly, I’m an adult that enjoys a good fight. I do intentionally put myself in the way of criticism. And I have decades of training in art theory that makes it difficult to impossible to challenge the way I see the world.
Black was fifteen when the army of bullshit came for her. And she handled it in a way that was both defiant and heroic. She survived the ordeal with grace and dignity. And in the biggest most punky fuck you of them all, she’s still around today, and still making music.
That makes her an inspirational figure in my book.
I have this friend who sarcastically talks about this song constantly. It’s a running joke. Also, exactly what you would expect from the greatest potato influencer of our times. But the more I thought about it, whether he’s kidding or not, it seemed like something I wanted to take a look at, study, and take apart.
And when I did, I had this incredible idea.
It was time for a writing assignment!!!
See, my beef with the piece, I think isn’t Rebecca, or the performance, which are both awesome, but rather, how incredibly lazy the lyrics are. And the guys who write it were adults, and should have known better. Of course, if they had, it’s unlikely that we would be talking about it today.
But what does that world look like? And how weird can it be?
Also, for the sake of brevity, let’s assume that the song were written today, and designed to be performed by an adult.
So what I did was imagine the lyrics as a first draft. The kind of thing I would get out of the least talented songwriting ai that’s ever been devised. Frequently, I use ai lyrics as a starting part after weird prompting to death, and while I don’t usually deal with lyrics this bad, I could. Machines are pretty bad at this.
At the same time, I wanted to preserve the narrative beats of the song, and pieces of it, like the chorus, that I thought worked well.
So I pulled the profile for one of my past songs that worked this way, and took a shower.
Showers are great songwriting tools, especially when you use the particular methods I do. A little bit of shower singing and slamming my vape on my desk, I had new lyrics for the first verse, and melting it down, we ended up with this groovy little arrangement.
For some reason, my brain went straight to something offbeat and jazzy with interesting timing. The original lyrics actually work better in jazz timing than 4/4, so that was the first thing I decided to mess with.
Results were virtually instantaneous this time. I had it! I knew it! That was exactly the groovy dancy thing I wanted to do.
Now, all I had to do was write the second verse. The problem there is that the second verse of the original basically just restated the first verse without contributing to the narrative, and the parameters were such that I couldn’t add any completely new thoughts that didn’t involve old rhymes to our schema.
So getting a workable second verse that didn’t restate the first verse took some doing. I decided to take a jab at the way the original second verse was written. And I also made the command decision to leave the “what day is it?” section of the final bridge completely out. Instead moving the end of the original chorus down, and extrapolating on it.
By the end of it, I realized that there was no larger artistic point to be made.
But I had a ton of fun working on it and putting the whole arrangement together.
Feel free to listen to it at: https://soundcloud.com/lynncolemusic/a-reimagining-of-friday