29toLIFE

In 1999, with the help of the highly-talented Sean Klitzner, I became something of a local — very local — celebrity. I was seventeen. Sean and I, along with three other counselors at summer camp decided to form a fake boy band and perform at the end-of-the-year talent show. At the height of *NSync and Backstreet Boys’ popularity. It blew up. For the last three days of that summer — and subsequent summers, as well — we were rock stars. We signed autographs and took pictures and little girls would scream our names whenever we walked through the halls. One girl in particular would break down in tears. All of this over our fake, crappy celebrity.

After that first summer, Sean went ahead and sent our video to MTV, where they decided to air it just before the number one song on TRL, “Larger Than Life”. Ho. Ly. Shit. There I was, my face plastered on MTV, Carson Daly calling me by name.

Again, I was seventeen years old. Up until that point, the coolest thing that had ever happened to me was getting to play roller hockey with Ed Jovanovski. But, now, here I was walking around with girls from summer camp fawning over me like I was Justin Bieber. I was even recognized in the mall. Once.

I’m now twenty-nine, I have a loving girlfriend, a fairly successful career and zero regrets about my past, and I still look back on that brief moment of minor celebrity like it was one of the most amazing times of my life. Because, really, it was. Go ahead, tell me all of the crazy cool shit you did when you were that age. It probably doesn’t involve being on MTV or having girls bawl their eyes out at the mere sight of you.

The point is this…

“Friday” is an awful, awful piece of music. Or something closely resembling music. Its simplistic lyrics seem to have been written by an illiterate third grader, there’s a suspicious black man who appears way too excited to be following around a school bus in the middle of the night and there’s enough Auto-Tune throughout the whole thing to make T-Pain cringe, but remember this:

Rebecca Black is thirteen years old.

At thirteen, what would you have given to have your song recorded in a real music studio, with real producers? To have a semi-elaborate music video created just for you? To watch as your video racked up almost ten million views on YouTube in the first week? To be the kind of minor celebrity that Rebecca Black is right now? I don’t care how much her parents had to pay for that. It’s their money to burn and that’s an awesome gift for your thirteen year old daughter.

Maybe in 2017, Rebecca Black will turn out to be a talented musician and we’ll all laugh about this song when VH1 mocks it on their hit new TV show, The Return of Pop Up Video! Or maybe she’ll wind up being an accountant who despises her job, just like the rest of us average folk. Either way, the worst thing that will come from this dreadful piece of music is that, somewhere down the road, years from now, she’ll think back to this moment, watch the video and get a little embarrassed. But, should she be? She’s a thirteen year old girl singing a bad song. Is that really all that surprising?

Rebecca, if you’re reading this, know that you shouldn’t be embarrassed. Ever. Because you’re living the dream of every thirteen year old in America. The whole world is talking about you. You’re a celebrity. And even if you wind up a thirty-two year old single mom, living in a trailer park, you’ll still be able to think back and remember how great it was to be you all those years ago. That, for a brief period of time, you were the biggest thing on the internet. That you had almost 18,000 Twitter followers. That your life, at one point, was completely fucking awesome.

You should soak it up. You should enjoy it. No matter how much an internet full of cynical assholes tries to make you feel otherwise.