Friday (song)

• Main
• YMMV
• Fridge
• Headscratchers
• WMG
• Wikipedia
• All Subpages
• Create New

"Friday", performed by Rebecca Black, is a pop song which went viral in March of 2011. The song is about a girl celebrating the fact that it's Friday. And eating cereal. And choosing between the front and back seats of her friends' car when there's only a seat in the back open. And listing the days of the week, before some random guy starts rapping about passing a school bus.

We'd say It Makes Sense in Context, but it doesn't.

Originally the obscure product of a Vanity Studio called Ark Music Factory, the song became viral due to its infectious beat, gratuitous abuse of Auto-Tune that isn't enough to hide an insanely nasal singing voice, and amusing lyrics, all Ark Music Factory's own fault.

In 2021, Rebecca Black released a remake of this iconic theme.

Not to be confused with the several other things called Friday.

Tropes used in Friday include:

• Aborted Arc: Enforced: Rebecca's quest to catch the bus ends around 2 seconds in, when her friends show up in a car. She later said that there wasn't enough money to rent a bus for the video.
• Actually Pretty Catchy: Although Friday has an infamous reputation for abusing Auto-Tune and having horrible lyrics, a few reviewers have begrudgingly admitted that they found the song actually pretty catchy.
• AcCENT Upon the Wrong SylLABle: Happens with a few words, in particular "Par-tee-ing"
  • "Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereAL"
  • Also: "Tomorrow is Sat-UR-day, and Sunday comes afterWAAAAAARDS"
• Adorkable: The girls dancing either side of Black in the car. Rapper "Pato" Patrice Wilson has more than a touch of it in interviews, since he's clearly trying to help people with ARK Music, despite all the trashing he gets in the media.
• Auto-Tune: extensively.
• A Wild Rapper Appears: Patrice Wilson's bridge that comes out of nowhere.
• Captain Obvious: "Tomorrow is Saturday... And Sunday comes after...wards."
• Colbert Bump: The video went viral after tweets from comedians such as Mike Nelson, followed by a spotlight on Tosh.0.
  • Stephen Colbert himself sang "Friday" on Jimmy Fallon's show after losing a bet.
• Conflicting Loyalty: The back seat, or the front seat? Which seat will she take? Which group of friends will she align herself with? She picks the back seat.
  • Made redundant when you realise that all the front seats are full - the only seat she can actually take is in the back.
  • The video for the remake solves this neatly: she is in the driver seat now
• Dancing on a Car
• Dawson Casting: Inverted. The video seems to portray Rebecca as a high schooler, despite the fact that she's thirteen. Let alone her male friend, who appears to be even younger. This did not go unnoticed.
• Days of the Week Song: "Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday, to-day it is Friday, Friday [...] Tomorrow is Saturday, and Sunday comes afterwards..."
• Disproportionate Retribution: OK, the song's moronic. That doesn't really merit a bunch of people on Twitter and YouTube telling Rebecca Black to get an eating disorder and/or kill herself.
• Epileptic Flashing Lights: Happens near the end at the "rave party".
• Follow the Leader:
  • The label that produced it, Ark Music Group, is attempting to find the next Justin Bieber à la YouTube.
  • Also, it has already had a series of covers and dramatic readings, as well as several Shoddy Knockoff Products such as this one.
• Gag Dub: Bad Lip Reading did a Gag Dub of "Friday" called "Gang Fight" which made it less about fun and more about gang warfare... and chicken.
• In the Style Of:
  • The rap remix.
  • And the Bob Dylan cover.
  • Similarly, The Doors' version.
  • Can't forget the Meat Loaf cover.
  • Done by Rebecca herself with the acoustic version, which is basically "Friday" as an inspirational ballad.
  • The Midnight Beast did an acoustic cover as well. They did it as a straight cover, but called it a parody anyway, because in Stefan's words, "the lyrics are funny enough."
  • This Darker and Edgier take.
  • The "In Hell" Cynical Mass Remix.
  • This redux, with Stephen Colbert's best Johnny Cash impression, Jimmy Fallon on autotune, and generally soaked in What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?. Oh, and Taylor Hicks.
  • The Crash City version.
  • Apparently, Fanny Goldberg sang this in 1932.
  • The orchestral version.
  • The screamo version, as well as the death metal.
  • A contemplative ballad by a guy with a(n epic) mullet.
  • The aptly named EPIC EDITION.
  • The Christopher Walken version.
  • There's also a version that only edited the music video but it's still extremely funny.
  • Amanda Palmer's "Friday, told from the viewpoint of a truck-stop hooker."
  • Katy Perry's cover.
  • Glee's version
  • And, in order to celebrate the Rapture, we present Doomsday [1]!
  • The Chriddof Edition.
  • The Big Al version.
  • Alex Carpenter's cover.
  • Now slowed 5x.
  • The 8-Bit version.
  • That Guy With The Glasses version
  • This acoustic mash-up with Justin Bieber's "Baby".
  • In honor of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, the Harry Potter version
    • A Ravenclaw-specific version.
  • Polka version, first heard in the My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic Abridged Series "Friendship Is Witchcraft".
  • The obligatory Team Fortress 2 version. Complete with its own Music Video.
  • The Slender Man Version
  • Richard Cheese did a cover. FUN. FUN. FFUN. FFUN.[2]
  • Now used in a commercial for Kohl's.
  • MTV Live's Wednesday.
  • YukkuReimu's version.
• Literal Music Video: This one, although the original music video is pretty damn close to a literal music video on its own.
• Missed the Bus: This appears to create the main source of tension in the narrative, before Rebecca's friends arrive in their car.
• Morning Routine: "7am, waking up in the morning/ Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs/ Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal."
• My Friends and Zoidberg: When she says "my friend is by my right," she's sitting between two girls. Sorry, girl on the left.
• Pop: This song is possibly the purest distillation of late '00s/early '10s pop ever created.
• Poe's Law: No less than Rolling Stone opined, "If the video was intended to be a parody of teen pop convention, it would be on par with some of the best SNL Digital Shorts by Lonely Island."
• Random Events Plot: Of the more mundane variety. A daily morning routine followed by missing the bus, getting a ride from her friends, then throwing a party. With a random rapper interrupting to talk about cruising and how a school bus is passing him by.
• Shout-Out: The calendar in the opening has a few references to other songs associated with days of the week, such as "Pleasant Valley Sunday" and "Manic Monday".
• Show, Don't Tell: There is no bowl, cereal or school bus to be found, despite being mentioned.
• Similarly Named Works: With the movie starring Chris Tucker and Ice Cube. The connection HAS been made, of course.
  • And then there are horror fans who couldn't help but put it together with Friday the 13th. It was bound to happen.
• Stealth Parody:
  • According to some.
  • The humor with the comments for this Friday Song parody tends to get lost on quite a lot of people.
• TV Teen
• Wakeup Makeup
• Weird Moon: What is with that moon? It almost doesn't look real. Oh yeah, it's upside down!
  • Mayhap the video was filmed in the southern hemisphere?
• What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?: It's FRIDAY!!!
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Her male friends mysteriously disappear from the car and are replaced in a later shot by two females.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: ARK Music Factor co-founder Patrice Wilson, thanks to growing up in Africa, moving to Eastern Europe as a teenager, and moving to the US as an adult.
• Wild Teen Party: Averted, despite what the song promises.
• Word Salad Lyrics: The interpretation of the song by Bad Lip Reading. It's basically a Deaf Idiot Translation.

"I'm grabbing a routine vaccination, with chicken and sweet carp on the side."

• Wraparound Background: In all three driving sequences, the background keeps repeating.