Rebecca Black: She's not even good! Why did she go viral?! Not everything that goes viral is "good," child. Think of that poor kid who thought he was fighting Darth Vader all by himself with no one watching? Not exactly Jet Li, that kid. But his video sure went viral. Image source, Jesse Dacri. Rebecca said it was difficult to ignore the abuse after Friday went viral. Moving on. Related Topics. Internet trolls Music.
Published 6 February Published 21 August Published 19 July Now, we have reality TV shows about people who were internet famous first. Given that young girls — a historically mistreated and misunderstood demographic — had never been taken seriously in the analog world, it should have been obvious that we weren't prepared to take care of them in the digital future.
This misunderstanding isn't just a risk to the mental health and well-being of girls, but to their creativity, too. Black and several of her peers, pre-teens with innocent dreams of pop stardom exemplified by the likes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, were the pawns of adults seeking easy money and fame with little to no risk. The very same women we're now re-examining through a post- MeToo lens were then praised by society as being fun but still wholesome and sexy but not too sexy.
They were the kind of attractive we were meant to aspire to, and yet make look effortless — the Hot Girl catch When, as tweens, these girls had the audacity to chase the pop star ideal, they were ridiculed, unable to shake their internet infamy as they grew up, all while lining the pockets of those who had encouraged them to take the leap to begin with, providing no safety net to catch them when they fell.
A decade later, many things about being famous online have changed, but the consequences for young girls, sadly, have not. When Jenna Rose Swerdlow's "My Jeans" music video first went viral in , the thenyear-old wasn't old enough to own a computer.
So, when cruel comments began rolling in on the video, which took off in the wake of "Friday" due to the similarly over-the-top music video production, emphasis on auto-tuned vocals, and rudimentary lyrics, Swerdlow was largely shielded from the onslaught of vitriol.
Her parents, however, were not. It was just doing my own thing. It was never her intention for the video to blow up in the way that it did. After a talent showcase near her home in New York, where Swerdlow participated in community theater and the local music scene as an amateur, she was approached by the father of another wannabe star, Baby Triggy, who raps on "My Jeans," to collaborate on a song. We'll send it to our family and that's it,'" explains Swerdlow of accepting the offer.
It was so hard because I was so young. I wasn't trying to piss anyone off. I was just doing my own thing. Swerdlow's haters, like Black's, called her talentless, an embarrassment, an entitled rich kid.
To counter the narrative, she and her parents decided to create a new video. Two years after filming "My Jeans," they teamed with a new production team for "O. Swerdlow never worked with ARK, though her work is often mistaken for theirs. However, because the song's producers owned the rights, she says, it stayed online. In a post-"Friday" world, it's difficult to imagine that any producer working with a child would be unaware of the potential to go viral for all the wrong reasons.
In fact, while Black never worked with ARK Music Factory again, the company's next few releases seemed to intentionally draw on absurdly elementary themes in an effort to recreate the elements that drew hundreds of millions of people to Black's video.
Because of this precedent, Swerdlow went home from school crying "three times a week. No production company was more prolific in the internet music video business in the early s than ARK Music Factory, founded by songwriter Patrice Wilson and producer Clarence Jey. Wilson, who did not return a request for comment for this piece, told the L. Times in that he grew up a track star with dreams of competing in the Olympics for his home country of Nigeria.
However, he soon left the sports world for music, moving to Los Angeles after a stint touring as a backup singer for an Eastern European pop star, and attempting to launch a music career of his own. When he failed to make it in the notoriously cutthroat business, he pivoted, launching ARK Music in with Jey.
One of the recurring critiques of Wilson is that he and his partner preyed upon wealthy teenagers and their parents in the L. However, many families, including Swerdlow's and Black's, saw costs associated with the videos as an investment in their children's futures.
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