Thank God Its Fifteen Minutes Are Nearly Up...

In a spasm of culture, tens of millions of people (this author included) have now viewed a synthesized Auto-Tuned sequence about a day of the week, masquerading as a pop song sung by a perky and unflappable Middle Schooler named Rebecca.

Hipster irony has long feasted on performance offerings that are so bad, they're good. That this sensibility has gone viral—a kind of smug rubber-necking, slowing our critical-thinking highways to a dismal, numbed crawl—is what's taken the actual video viral, and encouraged the attendant virtual stoning of its innocent-bystander star. As Meaghan Daum writes in the (where else?) Los Angeles Times, "Whereas it used to be that the forum for anonymous public opinion was the high school bathroom wall, now the whole world is essentially a bathroom wall."

And so, we are Pavlov's dogs reacting as if we were Zsa Zsa Gabor's dogs—we bite through that jewel-encusted leash and run to the food dish of fame and celebrity, gratefully lapping up the slop du jour. But we eat too fast and then we throw up.

In other words, the reaction to an item in question has become more important than the item itself. Or is it? Perhaps we're missing a profound message here by denigrating its messenger. Perhaps the message is as deceptively composed as, say, the perfectly rendered paintings of the Dutch Masters...

image courtesy of Anthony Falbo

Rather than debate who's to blame for the phenomenon of all our attention focused on a phenomenon, let's just look at The Thing itself and see what can be gleaned. I think the diabolically clever lyricists at Ark Music Factory know exactly what they're doing. And we all should be scared. Here's why:

To start with, the "record label" responsible for "Friday," Ark Music, contains an ancient Biblical reference in its title that could bely the organization's true motives: Gathering all the notes audible to humans, two by two, and cleverly storing them in plain sight, constructing songs like "Friday" as a hedge against an ongoing deluge/war against music, as evidenced by the work of John Cage ("4:33," the Silent Symphony for Piano and Lost Patience, for example, or an organ piece that began a performance in 2001 and will go on for 639 years.) See also, the music of any alleged atonal composer, or Hootie and the Blowfish, whose melody lines seldom reach beyond two or three tones anyway, and are therefor ideal for Ark-like storage. Note uncoincidental aquatic reference in this group's name, and its leader, Darius Rucker, named for the third "King of Kings" in the Achaemenid Empire, who lived from 550—486 BCE, generally agreed upon by Christian Fundamentalists as the exact timing of the Great Flood, or at the very least, sometime during the Old Testatment.

So, right off, we can easily understand that this is not simply a case of sleaze-bag talent-free college drop-outs in Southern California taking advantage of parents with shallow guilt and deep pockets, and their vapid, privileged children. That's simply what they WANT us to think while they wage a mystically informed, prophesy-driven, fanatical crusade against everything music, and by extension, everything Free Americans hold dear: BUT MOST OF ALL GUNS. That's right, THEY'RE GOING TO TAKE AWAY OUR GUNS!! Here's further proof, if you can't see past your own bubble-gum blindness yet:

To the knowledgable, independent thinker, it's all there in the cynical, ironic title of the song: "Friday." But I'm way ahead of myself. Let's take this one step at a time:

The stage is set for this brilliant deception right from the first lines. Ms. Black sings:

Oo-ooh-ooh, hoo yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah, yeah, yeah

Thoughtful, right? And rightly so. These words are designed to be soothing—in REALITY, what they're distracting us from is a male voice superimposed over Ms. Black's, which ominously intones the foreshadowing code: Yeah, Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ark. Ending the line with "Ark," is an unmistakeable directive to the trained ear, that informs the listener who's in charge here (Ark Music Factory), who's delivering the REAL message and what's REALLY going to be revealed in subsequent stanzas.

But, of course, that's cleverly hidden also, for what we get instead, is a list of actions followed by a puzzle facing the singer, all of which can only be designed to confuse and obfuscate, for they bring up many more questions than they answer. I'll break it down for you:

Seven a.m., waking up in the morning
Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs
Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal
Seein' everything, the time is goin'
Tickin' on and on, everybody's rushin'
Gotta get down to the bus stop
Gotta catch my bus, I see my friends (My friends)

Forget the simple logistical problems presented by waking up and immediately attempting to "be fresh," before either going "downstairs" (a Dante-esque metaphor for Hell), or addressing the agrarian implications of the importance placed upon a "bowl," where one might sustain oneself with "cereal." Cereal is clearly meant to mean something else entirely, for in the video, there's a clear LACK of even a SPOON, much less even a TABLE. Obviously, it's because if the camera zoomed out, what we'd see would be the singer's "PARENTS," sitting at this TABLE drafting secret plans and/or legislation to TAKE AWAY OUR GUNS.

But forget that for now. The "song" continues to bob and weave with its intentions by presenting the listener with the following inconsistencies and unavoidable questions: WHY wouldn't the singer take the bus, which is to say WHAT's different about this day? WHO tipped off her friends so that they would pick her up? WHAT was dicussed about breakfast at THEIR houses, and most important, WHO is the driver, when in all liklihood all occupants are too young to have licenses? (kudos to the LA Times article for picking up on this first). The whole question is "conveniently" sidestepped—as is the whereabouts of the actual BUS—and instead we're presented with an unsolvable riddle:

Kickin' in the front seat
Sittin' in the back seat
Gotta make my mind up
Which seat can I take?

Which seat indeed? Reinforced by its hypnotizing backbeats and synthesized vocals, this question is obviously much larger and impossible to answer: it's the old immovable object and irresistible force all over again, simply stoping the progression of logic dead in its tracks. It's enough to make one download the song and listen over and over and over—just like I did—to garner the information necessary to clearly establish a direction in which one would have to go concerning this decision of which seat might better one's chances at an enjoyable commute to Middle School. I mean, seriously, I took the better part of today to grapple with all of this.

So then I took the question deeper. One the one hand, the back seat is traditionally where the "cool" kids hang out. It's an attractive place to be, and God knows what's ACTUALLY going on back there, because other passengers have to turn around and USE THEIR EYES, when thousands of years of genetically refined instincts—handed down from Biblical Times, just like the Second Amendment—are telling us to keep our eyes FORWARD, where we might not only avoid danger in the form of, say, predatory Upper Classmen, but also so that we are better situated to acquire items to help us survive, like a bowl of cereal. Remember, we never saw the bowl of cereal consumed, DID WE? That's because it's NOT ABOUT THE CEREAL AT ALL! Sadly, at this point, this game of symbology chess has already been won, and the fiendish, freedom-hating tyrants of Ark Music Factory have you right where they want you. And where is that? WITHOUT YOUR GUNS!!! You can be sure of THAT!

It's Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend, weekend
Friday, Friday
Gettin' down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend
Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Fun, fun, fun, fun
Lookin' forward to the weekend
7:45, we're drivin' on the highway
Cruisin' so fast, I want time to fly
Fun, fun, think about fun
You know what it is
I got this, you got this
My friend is by my right, ay
I got this, you got this
Now you know it

Incredibly, these three stanzas are calculated throw-aways that you've heard a thousand times before and that mean exactly what they ACTUALLY say: Nothing. It's been done by every group from The Beatles to Loverboy to the Backstreet Boys to Nirvana to Insane Clown Posse—discussing the weekend, partaking in enjoyable activities and concurring with one's friends regarding an equitable distribution of labor, all set against the backdrop of journey in a convertible. If you STRETCH your imagination a LITTLE, it ALMOST sounds just like a pop song.

And that would be a MISTAKE, because we've almost made it to the business end of this "song." BUT NOT YET!!. Not ones to take any chances, the heartless bastards at Ark Music have thrown in a reprise of the Scylla-and-Charybdis-like dilemma of the convertible's seating arrangement, followed by the dazzling repetition of the words "weekend" (three times); "partying" (four times"; and the eponymous "Friday" (six times), just to ensure the listener's synapses are thoroughly stewed into a simmering gourd of Quaker five-minute oats:

Kickin' in the front seat
Sittin' in the back seat
Gotta make my mind up
Which seat can I take?


It's Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend, weekend
Friday, Friday
Gettin' down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend


Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Fun, fun, fun, fun
Lookin' forward to the weekend

It's all so diabolical, and presages the arrival of the real message, the crucial sequence—the one that the song was constructed to mask, and the one that CANNOT be mistaken for anything else: PLEASE pay attention here, if you've taken nothing else from this analysis. As the section begins, we notice something's "up" when the video breaks from live action to animation—a CLEAR comment on a MYSTICAL, OTHERWORLDLY, kind of mystical world, that's other: AND it begins with 2:06 elapsed. If I have to eplain the significance of THOSE numbers to you, you may as well just get hopped up on Nyquil, watch The DaVinci Code and march up to your nearest jack-booted governement agency and HAND-DELIVER those Second-Amendment-protected, beared arms.... Don't get me started....

Anyway -- here's the crux of the whole cheese enchilada:

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today i-is Friday, Friday (Partyin')

It begins innocently enough, with a rational accounting of the present and the past, two things that cannot be changed, and the one-word endorsement of the supremacy of the present, or Friday: (Partyin').

However:

We-we-we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today

It's so plain, they didn't even bother to hide their exuberance: Of COURSE "we so excited." We so excited 'cause we about to subconsciously HAMMER the FREE WORLD with BRAINWASHING—it's both the coup de grâce and the Coupe de Ville, the alpha and the omega, the smoking gun and the Grassy Knoll, the Dick York and the Dick Sargent.

Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes after ... wards
I don't want this weekend to end

Do you see what I mean? It's all so elegant and simple and clearly obvious: It was never Friday. It was ALWAYS Saturday and Sunday. Those are the days whose outcomes we can influence, and those are the days in which the message of Ark Music Factory is embedded. It's as if our Best Days are meant to be before us. Days in which THEY'LL COME TO YOUR DOOR AND DEMAND YOUR GUNS!! But more on that, later.

Having delivered its rhetorical, precision-guided prophesy, the song continues with its only Red Herring, the spoken-word section, a juxtaposition within a double-entendre rapped up by (DUH) the same ominous intoner of "ark" in the Very Beginning: It all comes full circle, except it doesn't:

R-B, Rebecca Black
So chillin' in the front seat (In the front seat)
In the back seat (In the back seat)
I'm drivin', cruisin' (Yeah, yeah)
Fast lanes, switchin' lanes
Wit' a car up on my side (Woo!)
(C'mon) Passin' by is a school bus in front of me
Makes tick tock, tick tock, wanna scream
Check my time, it's Friday, it's a weekend
We gonna have fun, c'mon, c'mon, y'all

This guy's just thowing us off the trail left, right and center. I mean, he's in the back seat, he's in the front seat, he's having it both ways. AND HE DOES ALL THIS WITHOUT CEREAL!!! IT MAKES NO SENSE WHATEVER!

But finally, a coded denoument in which "Friday," gets its closest yet to an ACTUAL pop song, with the singer performing in front a mass of wriggling, dancing peers, a recapitulation of themes (fun, weekend, partying, yeah) to a quick, merciful ending, for its secret seed has already been expertly planted.

It's Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend, weekend
Friday, Friday
Gettin' down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend

Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Fun, fun, fun, fun
Lookin' forward to the weekend


It's Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend, weekend
Friday, Friday
Gettin' down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend

Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Fun, fun, fun, fun
Lookin' forward to the weekend

And, by 3:48, it's all over. And with it, so are your chances to KEEP YOUR GUNS AND LIBERTY SAFE from the forces of LIBERALS, Jay Leno, the ghost of John Lennon, and RACHEL MADDOW!

Tune in next week when we will ILLUMINATE the significance of Saturday and Sunday, as hidden for centuries (IN PLAIN SIGHT) within the texts of William Shakespeare's plays. One of those days of the week appears ELEVEN times in FIVE plays. The other ONLY appears in the comedies As You Like It and Loves Labours Lost, but NO ONE'S LAUGHING!!! For therein begins the REAL message that makes "Friday," so subversive and dangerous. Please read the texts of all SEVEN plays before reading ANYTHING ELSE, or watching ANYTHING on You Tube!!

In future symposia, we'll disuss troubling questions like:

• HOW the Left stirred up riots at the Democratic Convention in '68, by promoting the song "Build Me Up, Buttercup."

• WHY the secret of Sonny Bono's whereabouts on November 22, 1963, died with him in a "mysterious" ski accident.

• WHO stands to gain the most control over your lives (and sidearms!) from a re-release of Musical Youth's seminal early-80s single "Pass the Dutchie"? (Hint: WHICH side do they pass it to? I'll give you ONE GUESS!!!)

Thanks for reading, and remember to ALWAYS keep your powder dry, while you keep REACHING FOR THE STARS!

Reaching Out and Returning...

Rocketry has fascinated me, and I have always felt a neonatal connection--having emerged into the world as Neil, Buzz and Michael were on their way back from the Moon in Apollo 11's Command Module, Columbia--to astronauts and the space program. These formerly nonplussed test pilots splashed down in the Pacific--my second day of life--and were reborn as living legends, whisked off to quarantine, like alien infants headed to a NASA incubator for a few weeks.

As a kid, my friends grooved on Evel Kenieval toy motorcycles and cars, but my favorite toy was a Steve Austin rocket that opened up into an operating table, where one Could Rebuild Him--just like Oscar Goldman intoned in the most iconic opening sequences in 70s television. Now that I think about it, that life-saving, $6 million-dollar-man-creating operation, which grafted bionics into Steve's arm, his eye, his legs, was the fictional reincarnation--and a more perfect outcome--of Apollo I's Gus, Roger and Ed, who died in the flames of a pre-flight test in which the engineers hadn't surmised one might need to open a space hatch quickly.

Despite the Bionic Man's great fortune, there are no actual fender-benders when launchpads are involved. In my 17th year, when my classmates and I had returned from lunch for the second half of English, our notoriously irreverent and subversive teacher delivered the somber news that Challenger had exploded shortly after liftoff--my generation's Kennedy moment, in which we'll never forget our whereabouts when we heard. They traced the loss of those seven souls to a number of factors, the most significant of which were temperature-sensitive 37-foot rubber O-rings, miniatures of which were worn on the wrists of million American teenagers, in the style of Madonna. This writer was one of them. In that tragedy, we lost seven: Ellison, Michael, Dick, Gregory, Ron, Judith, and of course Christa, a teacher-astronaut from Concord, New Hampshire, who beat out hundred of applicants to represent the non-space faring public.

Over time, the news of Shuttle launches--and astro-scientists populating a chunky, burgeoning space station--once again became part of our cultural white noise, as they had before Challenger's demise. We had other things to distract us: the Internet, a youthful Kennedy-esque president, Ivy-League graduates making a killing on tech start-ups that did nothing but hemmorage their backers' millions...

So by the one-hundred-and-seventh Shuttle launch, on a cold January morning of 2003, I imagine no one other than die-hard NASA enthusiasts and the crew's loved ones followed Columbia's mission with much interest. Columbia was the oldest of the fleet, and the first to launch into low-earth orbit, during STS-1 on April 12, 1981. She had 27 safe launch-and-landings under her fuselage. Sadly--and like the Challenger, involving a seemingly innocuous part of Shuttle design--a chunk of insulating spray foam broke from the external fuel tank as Columbia rocketed past the "Throttle up" sequence, about 81 seconds into its flight, blowing a hole in the orbiter's left wing.

Fifteen days later, mission goals met, as Columbia streaked homeward, the hellish temperatures generated by re-entry seeped into that wing and ate up the orbiter, only 16 minutes from a safe landing at the Kennedy Space Center. She broke up over the Southwestern United States, killing the crew and destroying their craft. Again, seven souls were lost, including Rick, Michael, Willie, Dave, Kalparia, Laurel and Ilan.

Since then, an additional 22 shuttle missions have safely launched and returned, and NASA has wound down the program, amassing trillions of mothballs in big-ass closets, for our surviving three snub-nosed rocketplanes.

Which brings us to today, and the now: STS-133, the final mission of the shuttle Discovey, is in its final minutes. As I type this, the orbiter is about to re-enter Earth's atmosphere at a zippy 17,000 miles per hour. They're 400,000 feet up perking the shuttle's nose, in anticipation of shunting off 3,000 degrees of atmospheric friction. The crew on this mission includes Steve L., Eric, Alvin, Mike, Steve B. and Nicole.

What makes this mission special for myself is that my son and my mother and I were lucky enough to travel to Titusville, Fla. on February 24th, and watch them blast off from Cape Canaveral. It was stunning, even from a few miles away. Discovery, a white tube with a flaming dragon's tail, flew an ever-swifter arc over the Atlantic. The roar of the solid rocket boosters enveloped all of us, gathered in Sand Point Park, spectator/picnic-goers. Red, white and blue on a green lawn. Sunhats. Lawnchairs.

About a minute into the launch, my stomach tightened, for this was the time we lost Challenger, but Discovery smoothly powered its way up and up. As it became a tiny dot, I was pretty sure I saw the separation of the two solid rocket boosters. A perfect launch, executed apparently with only seconds to spare due to a last-second hold from one of the launch-control teams.

Just a few minutes later, the smoky residue began to dissipate, turning memory into cloud. Even humankind's most powerful machines are but fleeting against the wind.

I told myself I'd monitor this mission more than any other--and I've checked in on the Internet, watching video of their two space walks. Mission Specialists Al and Steve B. suited up twice. Here's a shot of one guy using a drillgun to fasten something to the hull of the International Space Station. A drillgun! More or less just like a DeWalt or Makita I would use backstage in a theatre, except, you know, in space!

Know what else? The guy was a last-second replacement when another guy wrecked his bike. Life works like that, even for astronauts. They are like us, except that they are more perfect versions of us. Or perhaps more apt, they have demonstrated an elastic tenacity and believed in themselves and their goals. Their talents--and great fortune--have delivered them to this moment--returning to the present--as they are now 19 minutes from touchdown, slowed to a more sedate 14,000 mph, rolling Discovery's wings slowly from right to left, waving at the stars, the clouds, the commuters locked on the LIE.

I'm going to publish this post now and watch a live video stream of the landing. I like their chances. Later, I'll adorn this post with some artwork -- photos of the launch, and the mission insignias. But for now, I'm thinking just of the crew and their fallen colleagues, memorialized with a simple monument in Titusville, with plaques for the 17 of them. They were, quite simply, the best of humans.

One last thought. As Discovery's crew made their fiery ascent into low orbit that Thursday afternoon, it occurred to me that a rocket launch is a metaphor for life: burning fast and quick against awful and yet beautiful possibilities. Our lives will all burn out eventually. We all can make the best of our fuel, our motivations, our loves and our dreams. It's all we have.

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for Endeavour, which is scheduled for a final launch on April 19, and Atlantis, set for its swan song in late June.