The Hour

Rebecca Black is a 13 year old girl. She’s pretty and she can sing. Her parents, both vets, are proud and encouraging.

They’re so proud and encouraging that they paid $2,000 for her to record a song and make a video to go with it.

The school girl chose a catchy little number called Friday which starts: “7am, waking up in the morning, gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs, gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal.”

She chose the song because “even for a person that doesn't like it, it's gonna be stuck in their head. That's the point of it”.

So far, so much the tale of a little girl who loves showing off (though, it may say performing in her biography) and some parents who indulged her (once again it’ll record this as giving her an opportunity in the official blurb).

Then the Internet got involved. Before she could blink, Rebecca was derided as having recorded the “worst song in the world”, millions of people had seen her video and her name was on the lips of the rich and famous.

Or at least, her name was on the lips of those who know what everyone is talking about at the moment. Simon Cowell thinks she’s a genius and wants to meet her. Lady Gaga insists she isn’t cheesy. And Justin Beiber’s squeeze Selena Gomez is said to be furious with comparisons to her.

Utter strangers started talking about her on Twitter and commenting on YouTube, making intensely unpleasant, anatomical and personal comments that no singer, no matter how execrable, deserves.

I’ll bet this is nothing like what Rebecca’s parents had in mind when they bought their little girl the present of pretending to be a pop star. They probably thought she’d show her friends and maybe a few aunties would smile indulgently at it and that would be that.

Rebecca said the nasty comments made her cry. I’m not surprised, they’d make me cry too and I’m a grown up with quite a lot of experience with this online thing.

She told US TV network ABC: “I thought this was all my fault. I thought it was all because of me.”

Poor thing. She’s far too young to learn the lesson that the more people know you, without actually meeting you, the easier they find it to hate you. And there is absolutely nothing she can do to affect this, however likeable she is.

But I wonder how Rebecca’s mum’s feeling now. Worse than tearful, I’ll bet. She set off trying to give her little girl a bit of harmless fun, something to enjoy and remember before going back to school work. But she ended up shoving her child into the glare of some of the most merciless attention there is.

OK, there’ll be a few quid in it. But it doesn’t sound to me that the family are short of a bob or two, if they can find $2,000 for a bit of vanity recording.

And in any case, perhaps in a misguided attempt to have the world like her, Rebecca has said she’ll donate the profits from Friday to the people of Japan. The poor kid even feels responsible for the victims there. She told Jay Leno: “I feel bad. Japan happened so close to mine, and I feel like I’m taking away attention from it. I really just want to give back.”

It’s a very worthy gesture, but one that’ll doubtless be wasted.

I’d say that by now the damage is done and Mummy and Daddy Black should be grabbing all the money they can and stashing it away for Rebecca’s future. She’ll need a whole load of help when everyone else has forgotten about her

There is the tiniest chance that this will be the start of a long, stable and respectable recording career, but I doubt it. The best outcome will be another viral sensation along next week to take the heat off Rebecca and within a year no one will remember her name. Then she’ll go on to finish college, get a job and settle down. Once in a while someone will find her in a “where are they now?” investigation but mostly no one will care.

The real danger is she starts to think that the world is really interested in her and what she does, and that it’ll stay interested. If she believes that she’ll be on a hiding to nothing and the fast track to some real trouble.

The truth is Rebecca was in the right place at the right time with a video just annoying enough to capture the grasshopper attention-span of the web-surfing world. You could argue the same thing happened to Susan Boyle but she has a great set of pipes and an interesting enough back story to keep afloat, just.

It’s not really anyone’s fault, but from now it’s up to Rebecca’s family to make sure she survives the deep, but inevitably short-lived, storm of attention she’s at the centre of.

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