"Rebecca Black borrows from one of hip-hop's more powerful narrative-engines, the presupposition that everyone is against you:

Weren't you the one who said that I would be nothing? Well I'm about to prove you wrong. I'm not the only one who believes in something. Which works, if you grew up as a musical prodigy in the Marcy Projects. But Ms. Black didn't — she is the daughter of Orange County veterinarians whose spayedings and neuterings paid for the "Friday" video — and so she has a problem. The grand cause separating her from the nihilism of the day is in fact merely her own dank puddle of that [...]

On Fridays, we take requests. A reader writes: "It's sad that I rely on your blog so much in order to have relevant things to say in conversations about recent viral videos. And I understand—one day is pretty quick to come up with something to say about this amazing tome of teen angst that picked up seven million views yesterday. But come on."

Well, that email was from 30 hours ago, and now it has 16 million views on YouTube. So here is what we know. 13-year-old amateur Rebecca Black's song "Friday," which was a song purchased and recorded for two grand from a vanity label, is about [...]

Huh. I guess we were right?

Rebecca Black wakes somewhat too perfectly in the early scenes of her viral video, "Friday." Her eyes open exactly as the clock beside her bed flashes seven. She wears full make-up. Rare for a teen, she isn’t tired, longs not for any receding dreams.

Her cultural debt is less to Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles than Evie Vicki the robot girl from Small Wonder, we realize, as in a voice controlled by Auto-Tune she enumerates the banalities of an anti-existence: “Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs, gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal… gotta get down to the bus stop.”

She offers the camera a hostage's smile, forced, [...]