Rebecca Black’s single “Sing It” drops Tuesday; however, thirty-second lo-fi previews — does “preview” make any sense for audio? — abound, and Thursday RB dropped in on Radio Disney’s Candice to cohost the Dot Com Top 3, and not incidentally to play the whole song. (Which may explain the lo-fi nature of the previews, since your local Radio Disney affiliate is very likely on AM radio; certainly mine is.)

A full review will have to wait until I can hear this thing in some semblance of high fidelity. (RD’s satellite feed comes through here in stunningly bad sound.) It is, as I would expect, catchy, a bit repetitious, and while I didn’t hold a stopwatch on it, I’m thinking 3:15, on the dubious basis that her three previous singles ran 3:30, 3:25, and 3:20. At this rate, by the time she reaches her twenties, she’ll be doing songs on the Wire scale. (Pink Flag, with twenty-one tracks, runs less than 36 minutes.)

While you check on that, here’s this week’s Rebecca Black update.

A firm called Visual Measures has developed an algorithm for determining a video’s, um, virulence; “Friday,” they say, is the third most successful viral video ever, beaten out only by Susan Boyle’s appearance on Britain’s Got Talent and the “Kony 2012″ promotion.

Seemingly tangential: In 1997, I put up the very first Web fan page for singer/songwriter Carolyne Mas, now retired and living in Arizona. She’s still communicating with the fanbase, though, and recently she turned up a box of tapes, which she’s busily sending up to her YouTube channel. Recently, she reported on a batch:

These are demos I did in 1987 with Charlton Pettus who is currently with Tears for Fears, and who went on to produce Reason Street in 1992, while he was playing with Sinead O’Connor. He was the acoustic guitar player who sat behind her when she was booed off the stage at MSG … remember that? He flew to Germany to meet me right after that.

Which gave me an excuse to dig out Reason Street myself. Like all her European recordings, it’s worth hunting down. Inexplicably, Pettus doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, though I will tell you here that he produced the “My Moment” and “Person of Interest” singles — he also cowrote “POI” — for Rebecca Black. The fellow’s tastes evidently run fairly close to my own.

In the past few days, Rebecca Black has noted that going zip lining did not actually kill her, and displayed just a hint of hipsterism:

I can’t wait to see her reaction to this mess, about which a YouTube commenter said: “‘Friday’ by Rebecca Black sounds like Beethoven compared to this.” I posted it on Facebook yesterday and have already been defriended once.

Fond as I am of bashing Tinseltown, I must admit that even if you’re on the periphery of The Industry, you get to meet some pretty remarkable people.

Hence this shot — Instagrammed by her manager — of Rebecca Black and Ryan Bingham, arguably the two most dissimilar voices in all of southern California at that moment, enough to make me wonder what it would take to get these two into a duet:

This was titled “RB Squared,” because, well, why wouldn’t it be?

But OMG, Becky!

This has been floating around Tumblr for a while (50,000 notes!); I snagged it from Rebecca Black.

One of the delights of being somewhat above the bare-subsistence level is being able to do wondrous things that don’t have any practical value at all.

The ever-genial Neil Patrick Harris wanted to do something nice for his three-millionth Twitter follower. He’d asked earlier in the week: “How would one quantify that? Is there some sort of log?”

Here’s how it was done:

First, we had to determine if the Twitter API would reliably return a list of NPH’s last 5,000 followers in reverse chronological order. We used three separate twitter accounts to follow @actuallynph at specific times, taking a screen grab of NPH’s follower counts at that time.

We then called the API multiple times over the course of an hour or so, to determine if the follower number remained constant for each test account, and that the distance in followers between the two also remained constant. They did.

Finally:

[W]e called the API for NPH’s last 5,000 followers, and counted backwards.

And number 3,000,000 is Sarah Bates (@sarahbeep). Harris hasn’t yet announced the prize, though he’s hinted at a “ducky tie,” which would certainly be in character.

If anyone cares, I was somewhere around the 900,000th, which is why I was paying attention to this. For comparison purposes: Presidential candidate Mitt Romney (@mittromney) has about 400,000 followers; singer Rebecca Black (@MsRebeccaBlack) has about 600,000. I have been known to mention this statistic whenever someone shows up in my stream with a Mitt-eating grin.

Well, so much for my capacity for prediction. Last week in this space I speculated that the new Rebecca Black video, being shot that week in Malibu, was for the oft-rumored remake of “Friday.”

BZZZZZZZT! Wrong. I managed to overlook this tweet which identifies the new song as “Sing It.” The video has wrapped and will be up, she says, “pretty soon.” And while I don’t have the key to the Wikipedia lock, someone’s already updated her Wiki page with the new title.

Roger Green plays the “old fogey” card, musically speaking:

I’m trying to figure out that moment when I stopped following current music.

In my case, it was somewhere in the middle 1980s, about the time Top 40 radio as we know it ceased to exist, replaced by a bewildering panoply of niche formats, each trying to squeeze out an Arbitron rating point or three. I managed to avoid it for almost twenty years, which no doubt explains why my 6700-track iTunes install on the work box has fewer recordings from the 1990s than from any other decade during which I was actually alive, excluding the current one, which has a few years to go yet. (Not that it matters, but the earliest track is from 1918.)

A few years back, I dialed back in. Radio obviously hadn’t improved in the interim, but my environment had changed: I had a coworker not quite half my age who was conversant with at least some of the current stuff, and she was happy to pass along suggestions, based on what sort of noises she’d heard me playing. And perhaps more to the point, the retail market had changed back to the way it was when I grew up: iTunes and other Internet music sources might officially be promoting albums, but they’d happily sell you the two or three tracks you wanted without making you take the seven or eight you didn’t.

Which is not to say that I quit buying albums. Mostly, though, they’re either from relatively recent acts or reissues of stuff I missed the first time around. (Examples of the latter: Rudy Van Gelder’s remastered editions of John Coltrane’s Blue Train and Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool.) I have mentioned my fondness for She & Him, the duo of Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward, and for Trent Reznor’s recent soundtrack work with Atticus Ross. And yes, I have all three Rebecca Black singles: she has yet to release an actual album.

The last Rebecca Black report of 2011 mentioned that she was planning a remake — a re-imaging, if you prefer — of “Friday,” the very song that made her semi-famous, and said that she wanted it “to sound we’re on the beach with friends, someone’s got a guitar, there’s drums.”

So when the above shot of Malibu showed up in her tweetstream with a reference to “filming the new video,” well, I can put two and Tuesday together. Maybe.

Outside of, um, work, she reports that she tried her hand at archery, and, “well, let’s just say Katniss would be disappointed.”

Along those lines, there exists a Hunger Games District 12 Bow, probably not suitable for actual archery, and bearing a California Prop 65 warning. Evidently it causes cancer or something.

“Everybody in the world really hates my ringtone,” sang Weird Al, and I of course have no idea what that’s like.

Maybe. I was at Target last night picking up a couple of prescriptions — $4 generics plus cute pharmacists, so don’t judge me — and as I slid the trusty Amex through the reader, a random Seattle-area (maybe) cold-calling clod dialed in, and out pops, at 8 out of 10 volume, “It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday…”

Now I’ve admitted to having this as a ringtone before, though I don’t get so many phone calls that it’s an issue or anything. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the stares of disbelief from behind the counter. Finally, someone broke through with a variation on Minnesota Nice: “Well, that’s certainly different.”

I probably ought to supplement it with some of the unearthly shrieks RB emits during this impromptu video. As for whoever that was from the 425, he/she/it left a blank voicemail.

Addendum: From the Rebecca Black Kitchens:

[M]y favorite burger is on a brioche bun with a beef patty, with 1000 island dressing, sauerkraut, grilled onion, and dill pickles.

Sounds plausible enough.

Well, it’s evidently not the best day to buy Swedish furniture.

We are apparently never going to run out of variations on “Friday.” A Pentecostal church in Texas has wrought the inevitable “Sunday” version, and while it’s not the first such, this is the first time I’ve ever seen Rebecca Black mentioned from the pulpit.

And you know, I’d almost be more likely to believe this fabricated Nintendo-related product announcement if it came out on the first of April:

Ubisoft has just announced a new addition for their “The Experience” line, centered around the unmistakable sounds of Rebecca Black! After the massive success of Michael Jackson The Experience, Ubisoft created The Black Eyed Peas Experience and are rumored to be making Lady Gaga The Experience. It only makes sense for them to continue the trend of huge artists and hit music with Rebecca Black The Experience!

Wii so excited, indeed.

Haters, as the phrase goes, gonna hate. This point-blank question showed up on Yahoo! Answers: “Can someone tell me why the **** Rebecca Black was in the Grammy Awards?” This surprises someone? Whether anyone believes it or not, she is part of the music industry these days, and one of the less exasperating parts at that; it’s not at all hard to believe that someone got her added to the invitation list. And besides, by now she does red-carpet stuff pretty well. I’m not expecting the ten points for Best Answer, but I call ‘em the way I see ‘em. (Photo at right by Andrew Evans/PR Photos, shrunk and cropped to fit this format. Larger version here.)

Did I say “part of the music industry”? William Patry’s book How to Fix Copyright (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) acknowledges her existence and proclaims her outsider status:

Creativity by the Great Unwashed is said not to be creativity at all, and if permitted, the large corporations who manufacture superstars argue, such platforms will crowd out quality works — that is, superstars’ products. Superstars themselves come to believe in the marketing hype. In a statement that defines irony, the Walt Disney-created product Miley Cyrus dismissed thirteen-year-old songwriter and performer Rebecca Black (whose song “Friday” achieved a worldwide audience thanks to YouTube) by claiming, “It should be harder to be an artist. You shouldn’t just be able to put a song on YouTube and go out on tour.”

Inasmuch as RB has exactly one-third of a writing credit (for “Person of Interest”), I think it’s probably too early to characterize her as a songwriter, though I’m willing to bet it’s just a matter of time. (She’ll be 15 in June.) And anyway, whatever Miley said seems to have been taken completely out of context. Still, Patry is quite correct: if there’s anything any industry hates, it’s outside competition.

What have we here? It’s time for the weekly Rebecca Black sampler, and we open with, well, a sampler:

The original has actually been sold, but you can get the pattern from Etsy. (Via Steotch.)

Not everyone, however, is having fun, fun, fun, fun:

Students at Kingsville District High School are trying to keep Rebecca Black’s lyrics out of their head by raising funds for the pediatric ward at Leamington Hospital. Every day between classes, and non-stop during lunch, Black’s pop-song “Friday” plays throughout the school. The only way to make it stop is for the student body to hit $1,000 in their fundraising. The money will be used to buy toys for children undergoing surgical procedures at the hospital.

Oh, those wacky Canadians.

One year has gone by since “Friday” was first sneaked onto YouTube, eleven months since its transition from Just Another Video to cultural buzzword. Not the least bit in response to the chronology of it all, Virgin Mobile Live sent an interviewer to talk to Rebecca Black, and the following High Truths were revealed:

• “Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal”: What cereal? She prefers Cocoa Pebbles;
• She hopes to be in the studio in a couple of weeks to cut the next single.

And oh, she gets tongue-tied, even today, when you bring up the Biebs.

Meanwhile, this week’s nominee for The Next Rebecca Black is Lexi Sullivan, who’s recorded a track for Patrice Wilson, whose name you’ll remember from the credits for “Friday.” “Hot Stuff,” despite its so-Seventies title, isn’t particularly awful, and Lexi can sing, but I don’t see it becoming an anthem.

I found this vehicle-related tweet to be unusually cryptic, even by Rebecca Black’s standards:

Then again, if she is looking for a car, I’ve got to assume that she’s already decided which seat she’s going to take.

(Presented in lieu of actual news.)

Bill Genereux of TechIntersect put together this little montage of the short (so far) history of Rebecca Black:

YouTube, however, apparently found nothing to laugh at in Genereux’s video compilation:

It includes around a minute of Rebecca’s famous “Friday” song before moving into the parodies & spoofs and the YouTube copyright algorithms tagged it as infringing. I filed a counter-claim that it was an educational fair-use, it doesn’t use the entire video, and provides a commentary on the work. Ultimately, they restored my video online.

Note that this was an automated takedown, not a DMCA request from a copyright owner. Still:

In the digital world, you are already presumed guilty until proven innocent.

Expect things not to improve after the election.

Of late, the best thing about The Village Voice has been the annual Pazz & Jopp poll of critics, which has been going on since the Seventies, for most of that time presided over by the eminent Robert Christgau. Singles are ranked by number of mentions by the 700 contributors; hop of the teep — um, top of the heap — was Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” and deservedly so. (She probably couldn’t have had them all, but she did get 116.)

A total of 604 singles from 2011 rated at least one mention. Today being Friday, you know where this is going, so: yes, Rebecca Black’s debut single did make the poll. In fact, it tied for 51st with 11 mentions, alongside Beyoncé’s “Love On Top” and Drake’s “Take Care.” One of the mentioners was Marc Gilman, who opined: “Never mind the kitsch factor. ‘Friday’ had a hook that stuck like a talon.” Exactly so.

Although I must mention this singular mention, for “Anything but ‘Friday’” by “Anyone but Rebecca Black”:

Fun Is Fun (Fun Fun Fun), but Enough Is Also Enough. Let This Serve As A -1 Vote to Counteract Somebody’s Winking Support of It.

As Eric Hilliard Nelson would say, “You can’t please everyone.”

Once in a while, I will answer Rebecca Black-related questions on Yahoo! Answers, on the (mostly) honorable basis that I’ve already looked all this stuff up myself, and hey, why shouldn’t I share? Besides, the amount of misinformation being circulated is positively (or negatively) staggering; there was a brief flurry of suicide references earlier this month.

I was not, however, prepared for this: What does God think of Rebecca Black?

Several answers came in, but I seemed to be wandering in the desert. Then, just as I was about to give up in despair, a book arrived at my desk. The Last Testament: A Memoir by God [with David Javerbaum] (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) actually addresses the question. From 1,400 Years of Sanctitude 22:14:

I have gleaned much from Numa Numa Guy; I have rolled my eyes at “Double Rainbow” (though I appreciated its numerous shout-outs); I have reeled in horror at 2 Girls 1 Cup, and I have seen Rebecca Black do her level best to help remove the phrase “Thank God It’s Friday” from the popular lexicon.

Which, you may be certain, He approves. Same book, 3:8-9:

The worst is Friday, for that is the day I am forced to hear myself endlessly and mistakenly thanked. Thank not me; thank Frigg, the Norse goddess of love, ye unwitting pagans.

It’s official: Rebecca Black is doing the Lord’s work. Expect a harp arrangement of “Friday” some time in the next millennium.

And by “the next millennium,” I mean last year sometime:

Peter Larsen of the Orange County Register (via Mediabistro), from the Friday before Christmas, on the subject of, you guessed it, Rebecca Black:

In the spring, she’ll star as one of the lead voice actors in the English-language version of Bunny Fu, which reportedly is the most successful Chinese animated movie ever. [Her manager Debra] Baum says there are also talks about doing a feature film based on Black’s unlikely Cinderella story of success.

For two weeks, I’d had no luck trying to track down Bunny Fu, not to be confused with “Bunny Fu Fu,” bopper of field mice. With Friday approaching, I was about to give up, and then:

The $18-million Legend of a Rabbit, which was made at a smaller animation facility in Tianjin, is China’s most expensive animated feature to date. The movie, which arrived in theaters in July and took in $2.4 million in its first two weeks, centers on a hare because 2011 is the year of the rabbit in the Chinese zodiac; in all, a dozen films are planned over 12 years to celebrate each zodiac animal.

So this year they’ll do a dragon, I presume. Unlike Bunny Fu, Legend of a Rabbit was listed in IMDb, “also known as: Kung Fu Rabbit.” And there’s this little detail:

China’s Tianjin North Film Studio has signed a breakthrough deal with Cartoon Network, giving the cabler TV rights to the stereoscopic 3-D effort Legend of a Rabbit for Australia, New Zealand, India and Taiwan, Variety reports. This is the first Chinese animated film acquired by the network.

Rabbit will have a day-and-date theatrical launch in major Asian territories in late July, with Cartoon Network air dates to follow six to eight months later.

No mention of a US appearance. Still, I find it utterly delicious that Rebecca Black, so often derided for the alleged deficiencies of her voice, has been hired as a voice actor.

When songwriter Lee Pockriss died, I made mention of it with a link to a New York Times story, about which a contributor to the Spectropop mailing list says:

It’s not normal for the New York Times to write about the passing of a songwriter. In order for it to happen, the songwriter either had to have had a boatload of big hits OR only one hit that had a HUGE impact on popular culture.

This article about Pockriss would not be there if it weren’t for “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” Just like the recent article on Paul Leka wouldn’t have appeared if it weren’t for “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye).”

I remember being surprised to see Irwin Levine, one of my favorite songwriters, get an obituary in the New York Times, but realized that with all the great songs he had written, he was ONLY in there because he co-wrote “Tie A Yellow Ribbon ‘Round The Old Oak Tree”.

With that in mind, let me drop a few titles on behalf of these guys: “Johnny Angel,” “Calcutta” (Pockriss); “Green Tambourine”, “Will You Be Staying After Sunday” [production only] (Leka); “This Diamond Ring” [with Al Kooper], “Knock Three Times” (Levine).

And this, alas, is true:

I guess we should be grateful when songwriters get any recognition at all. I would say that 99% of people think that songs fall out of the sky, but the truth is that 99% of people don’t even think at all about where songs come from. Nor do they care. This is stunning to people like us, but it’s the truth. Try asking the average person what the little names in parentheses under the song titles are, on CDs or records. Seriously, if you haven’t tried this, do it. You’ll be amazed.

I was gratified to see a one-percenter show up in the search logs last week looking for the appropriate credits for Rebecca Black’s “Person of Interest,” which, having never been released on a CD, doesn’t even have the little names in parentheses.