AFP Perverts Rebecca Black

Amanda Palmer - "Friday (From the Point of View of a Truck-Stop Hooker) - 2011

Amanda Palmer’s take on the innocuous and contagious hit from 2011, “Friday,” by 14-year-old Rebecca Black is pretty horrible. It’s a great parody, but listening to it leaves a horrible taste in the mouth, but you can’t deny it’s pretty funny. This traditional parody – taking the exact same form and simply replacing the content – is successful in several different ways. It is a perversion of a song that is meant for young teenagers who are intoxicated by pop music, a song by a 14-year-old girl manufactured by a music industry. Palmer also uses a technique that Louis CK has also perfected: creating a horrible situation and making it worse and worse until the audience cannot fathom it getting more worse until yes, it does.

Palmer’s version of “Friday,” which is called “Friday (From the Point of View of a Truck-Stop Hooker),” aims to shock the listener with its content. Her use of ukulele, a traditionally either happy or slightly melancholy instrument already clashes with the content of the song. The upbeat, catchy tune of Rebecca Black’s song starts out in a pretty similar way to the actual song, and then Palmer employs some classic violation of expectation: “gotta find my bowl, where’s my bowl, who took my f***ing bowl” incurrs the first wave of laughs.

After this first set-up joke combination, the questions arises of how Palmer is going to fit “Friday” into the song. The obvious assumption would be that it is a Friday, and this girl has to work, but the best joke of this entire song comes from the chorus section of the song. The best lyric is of course: “It’s Friday, Friday/His name is Friday/And I am not looking forward to the outcome.” This is the ultimate perversion of the Black song...so we think. The best aspect of Palmer’s cover is that she keeps upping the amount of violence and the ennui in the song. Her tone of boredom, of uselessness, of empty hope, and of no possible uplifting spirit, is complimented strongly by the happy-go-lucky ukulele that keeps on going despite the desperate content of the song.

The most representative lyric of the entire song is “Not fun at all/But he’ll beat me if I don’t pretend.” The song really is not fun at all, and after a few choruses and stanzas, the content does start to wear down on the listener, who really does question why this is a comedic song. In this case of comedy, the violence and the comedy really do not work together, and Palmer knows it. It is a sad song, and the comedy of the act comes from the song’s origin of this happy pop song and the fact that Palmer has to sing about these horrible events in this happy tune because “he’ll beat me if I don’t pretend.” I think the act of violence she is representing is taken seriously and it is only because of the comedy that it is so sad. The ironic and oxymoronic juxtaposition of the content and the constrictions of the form really highlight the endlessness of the violence, and the only way to end the song is by petering out after a slew of horrible events that happen to the main character.

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