Letters from the Editor - To Rebecca Black

Other news organizations print letters to the editor. How boring. The Fake News will instead write letters from the editor. Sometimes these will be to famous people, other times to random normal, unimportant people.

An Open Letter to Rebecca Black

[caption id="attachment_974" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="By P. Tony Garry - Guest Editor"][/caption]

Rebecca,

Is it ok if I call you Rebecca? It seems a little bit personal, but, if you recall, I have already seen you in bed, in formalwear, dancing awkwardly both inside and outside of moving cars – It’s almost like we’ve been married for years.

I awaited the “dropping” of your new video with hopeful trepidation. Would I be treated to another three-and-a-half minutes of a glorious trainwreck in which the conductor is gleefully oblivious of the impending crash, more concerned with how much fun it is to be speeding on a quickly coddled together train on tracks hastily constructed out of hubris and duct tape?

Sadly, no.

It seems, Rebecca, that you have forgotten the reason your first video was so popular. The lyrics were not bad. They were so bad that they made J.K. Rowling look like Charles Dickens. Therein lies the secret. Nobody watches bad creative endeavors. They only watch creations that are very good or so awfully bad that they offset the scale of goodness so far that they push Gigli several steps closer to “mediocre.”

Then there was the video. Ah, the video that launched a thousand parodies. Of course the artistic director of the video was a bit hamstrung by the previously mentioned lyrics. That doesn’t entirely let him or her off the hook. If you were wondering which seat you should take, why was there someone in the front seat? As every first year law student knows, one cannot kick someone out of the front seat once said person has already established a claim to said territory.

Fast-forward to yesterday, when the world received your latest creation. From the opening seconds of the track, we learned that you had not only kept the auto-tune so

[caption id="attachment_976" align="alignright" width="249" caption="Not since "To Catch a Predator" have we gotten such an intimate look at a 13-year-old girl's bedroom"][/caption]

synonymous with the Black sound, but you had even pushed it further to the forefront, filling me with breathless anticipation that you had embraced the glorious trash of your first song.

But it was not to be.

In your first video, viewers were transported into a world they could see themselves inhabiting, a world in which their only cares were ensuring their nutritional needs were met through cereal and partying all night like everyone remembers doing when they were thirteen.

Your new video, “My Moment,” opens in a recording studio, a far, elitist, cry from a teenager’s bedroom. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be able to spend time in a fancy recording studio. Of course, I can’t imagine what it’s like to wake up in a teenager’s bedroom, either. (Lawyers, you had that arrest expunged, right?)

Even the title of the song is telling. “My Moment?” What about the millions of people who got you where you are by endlessly talking about how terrible your song and video were? This should be “Our Moment,” a triumph of the collective unconscious’ disdain for anything that is below its standard of quality.

The new video shows us just how far you’ve come in the period of time since you rocketed to mediocre-dom. You now appear on television, ride around in limos, and record in a real studio with two teenagers pretending to know how to play instruments. That’s a huge step up from riding around in the back of a car with two teenagers pretending to know how to dance.

But, lets come back to your fatal flaw. In a tragedy, the hero is brought down by his or her hamartia, or tragic mistake. Hamlet was done in by his inability to act, Oedipus fell because of his failure to read Freud, and Jesus didn’t heed repeated warnings to avoid large pieces of wood.

Yours is your inability to realize that, since you don’t have the talent to do anything really good, if you want to succeed in the entertainment business, you have to be really bad. Don’t hire a big production company to make a shiny video, hire a crackhead and give him creative carte blanche. Go to your local grocery store and ask a random cashier to write a song for you.

In your song, you call out the “haters.” It isn’t nice to lash out at the people who put you where you are today.

You can follow P. Tony Garry on Twitter at @BellyoftheSoul.