Is Awful the New Cool?

If you haven't heard of Rebecca Black yet, now would be a good time to jump on the bandwagon and watch her video, "Friday", which has already garnered over 100 million hits on YouTube.

If your response after watching "Friday" ran along the lines of "What the.....??", then you are like the majority of viewers who've seen this video. The song is, honestly, pretty awful, and the music video is not only campy, but is also rather ridiculous. So why has it gone viral in such a short time?

The answer is that it's just so unbelievably AWFUL, you can't help but to take notice, and realize it's actually hilarious. Some have called it "the worst video ever made". Time Magazine says "Friday" takes online music videos to "a whole new level of bad". Rolling Stone claims: "The fascination with the video mainly comes down to its subpar production values, grating hooks and extraordinarily stupid lyrics."

And yet Black's video is so bad that it's become the new cool (as evidenced by the astronomical number of hits the video has received, the countless parodies it has inspired, and Black's numerous appearance on TV shows like Good Morning America). Of course, she got some help from the magical powers of social media -- "Friday" was shared, posted, and re-posted many, many times across Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc., all of which helped catapult her to YouTube fame. As an added plus, Black's video feels like an unintentional parody of the entire pop music scene, which makes it all the more fascinating to watch.

Rebecca Black got people talking in a powerful way across the web because she managed to catch people's attention with something completely new: being earnestly, unintentionally and fabulously awful!