{"id":731,"date":"2011-03-25T13:57:41","date_gmt":"2011-03-25T18:57:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/?p=731"},"modified":"2011-04-17T02:06:30","modified_gmt":"2011-04-17T07:06:30","slug":"keep-your-pencils-handy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/?p=731","title":{"rendered":"Keep your pencils handy"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may want to use them to puncture your eardrums during parts of this ABC News clip<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s a report on the viral phenomenon known as Rebecca Black’s song “Friday” and how people think it may be the worst song ever<\/i>. I’m not cruel enough to post a link to the actual video—you’ll have to subject yourself to that. Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t, but I can pretty much guarantee you’ll never hear the word “Friday” in your head the same way again.<\/p>\n

The biggest reason I found the news report interesting is because during the interview, they asked her to sing the first part of the National Anthem. It wasn’t great—she wasn’t always on-key—but at least she got all the words right. (I’m looking at you, Christina Aguilera<\/a>!)<\/p>\n

And when she was singing the anthem, it didn’t feel like she was scraping her vocal fingernails across a chalkboard. I cringed a little when she hit the wrong notes, but I didn’t have to stop partway through the song. (Seriously, I’ve tried watching “Friday” a couple times and I still have no idea how it ends.)<\/p>\n

You may be asking yourself, “Why should I care?” Well, there’s really no good reason to care, but I think it’s odd that she intentionally<\/i> sounds bad. Her voice was fine during the news report, but that grating, nasal tone in the song\/video… why?<\/p>\n

Did someone convince her to do it because everyone loves a train wreck? Is that going to be her “trademark” that no one will want to copy? Or maybe she just wants to set herself apart from Christina Aguilera. I don’t know, but I recommend you keep a couple pencils nearby for when the inevitable happens: she releases an album.<\/p>\n

[She seemed nice during the interview and I don’t want to be a total hater, but I came up with a joke that some of you might like: “Let’s hope the release date is scheduled for 2013 and that the Mayans were right.”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may want to use them to puncture your eardrums during parts of this ABC News clip. It’s a report on the viral phenomenon known as Rebecca Black’s song “Friday” and how people think it may be the worst song ever. I’m not cruel enough to post a link to the actual video—you’ll have to … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Keep your pencils handy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[222,221,223],"class_list":["post-731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-arts-media","tag-friday","tag-rebecca-black","tag-singing"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1muBs-bN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=731"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1237,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions\/1237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}