Gotta Get Down on Friday
Decoder Ring
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 11 May 2020
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rebecca Black's music video for Friday was Youtube's most watched video of 2011, thrusting the thirteen-year-old Rebecca into a very harsh spotlight. Dubbed "The Worst Music Video Ever Made" Friday was an almost universal object of derision. This is the story of how Friday came to be, and how nearly a decade after it went viral, it sounds so different than it did back then.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, before I get started today, I wanted to talk to you about something. |
| 0:04.6 | Slate, like so many media outlets right now, is contending with the dire economic effects of COVID-19. |
| 0:10.9 | My colleagues are working tirelessly to bring you news about the pandemic, |
| 0:15.2 | and also working tirelessly to bring you news and entertainment, distraction, laughter about everything else, too. |
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| 0:51.1 | Please become a member. Please support Slate directly by going to slate.com slash decodering |
| 0:56.9 | plus. Thank you. Now on to the show. In 2011, Eleanor Kagan, an audio producer, was working at a job |
| 1:10.1 | where she had a little too much time on her hands. |
| 1:12.4 | I would literally spend all day scrolling the internet and just like refreshing, refreshing, |
| 1:18.0 | waiting for a new post. Like there wasn't enough internet for me to read. |
| 1:23.1 | And then one day in March, something interesting happened. |
| 1:26.0 | All of the sudden, I started hearing people around my office giggle. |
| 1:31.2 | She immediately started looking around online, trying to figure out what they were laughing at. |
| 1:35.7 | Everybody was posting the lyrics to a song called Friday. |
| 1:39.1 | It's Friday, Friday. |
| 1:42.3 | Gotta get down on Friday. |
| 1:45.1 | Everybody's looking for a word to the weekend, weekend Friday. |
| 1:49.3 | Just a few days before, this song, and the then 13-year-old girl who performed it, Rebecca Black, had been completely unknown. |
| 1:57.4 | But now that was changing in real time. |
... |
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