Rebecca Black’s “Friday” Just Turned Five And It’s Already Back In Your Head, Isn’t It?

It may only be Tuesday, but we’re calling it ‘Friday’ in honour of the Internet’s greatest ever moment.

Yesterday marked the fifth birthday of Rebecca Black’s absurdly catchy, dead-voiced ode to the third best day of the week, “Friday”.

As you can imagine, we we we so excited.

The 'so-bad-its-incredible' song was first posted to YouTube in February of 2011, but went viral in March and was officially released to iTunes on the 14th. That's the day we're honouring; not the day it debuted to anonymity, but the moment in which the the entire Internet, having uncovered this auto-tuned gem, acted as one and turned "Friday" into a phenomenon that not even Apple could deny. Initially viewed more than 167 million times, it was later taken down following a legal dispute and re-uploaded in September of 2011. (The current upload has 91 million views, which ain’t nothing.)

For a time, "Friday" held the distinction of being YouTube's most disliked video, but that accolade doesn’t quite convey how we all felt about it in the heat of the moment (or even today). In 2011, an unsuspecting Internet was not prepared for the ambush of its profound banality (which seat should she take?!), nor could it wait to share and spread this new contagion. It was great fun... for a while.

What followed were weeks, if not months, of replays and parodies, as latecomers to the fad attempted to jolt the joke back to life. And yet, despite our collective exhaustion over the song-that-wouldn't-die, "Friday" has now been added to that great earworm catalogue in the back of each of our heads, where "Mambo No.5", "Baby Hit Me One More Time" and "Bye Bye Bye" all reside. (On occasion, Black’s monotone refrain of “Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday” will re-emerge, apropos of nothing, to brighten/ ruin my afternoon.)

It annoyed the hell out of us, and yet we all loved it. It was the Kanye West of shareable web content.

There’s no denying the soulless vapidity of the tune. (ARK Music Factory, who wrote and produced it, basically made paint-by-numbers singles and videos for any parent willing to part with $4000, in an attempt to make their tone-deaf kids' misguided dreams come true). And it’s not as if Black, who is probably a super nice person, really redeemed herself on the ol’ musical creativity front. (In 2013, she released “Saturday”, and… yeaaaah. Don't call it a comeback. No, seriously.)

But “Friday” is a perfect piece of our Internet history; a time capsule of the “viral video” experience. Five years later, we think back to the joy we felt upon its discovery, the delight we felt inflicting it upon others and the excruciating agony that came when someone sang it at you for the 8400th consecutive time.

Oh, and if you somehow have never heard it before, boy are you in for a treat. One more time!

Photo: YouTube.