In part because I can’t stop watching this video for Friday, by Rebecca Black, much as I could not stop watching the honey badger video, in part because it is actually Friday, and also because I was once thirteen, I bring you another nostalgic post.
Back in my day, if a kid wanted to make a music video, she had to be Debbie Gibson. There was no such thing as The Ark Music Factory, and I won’t lie, had there been, I would have saved up my allowance, my babysitting money, and maybe learned to hustle just to gather up the funds to star in my own production. And if I had been offered the song Friday, you can bet your favorite pair of legwarmers I’d have been smacking the honey badger shiz out of those lyrics and imploring you to help me choose a seat in the car, like Celine Dion telling you her heart will go on.
I started writing music pretty early. My father writes music, so it was just a natural part of life that I would write melodies and lyrics. Now, I can’t score for peanuts, but I’ve written some okay tunes that sounded pretty fantastic with a choir behind them. Those came in my 20s, though. The songs I wrote in my tweens and teens? Ha! I fancied myself the wee version of Tammy Wynette and Billie Holiday, so I concentrated my efforts on overwrought Country or Blues songs about my man cheating on me.
I was ten years old when I penned this chorus of a particularly twangalicious ditty:
You been doing Odd Jobs
in her neighborhood.
Odd Jobs
I should’a known that you would
You got tired of me, but I was too blind to see
that you were doing Odd Jobs.
Yeah. It would be seven more years before I got my first proper kiss, but I was writing about my man going up the block to help out the super hot, newly divorced neighbor. I’m not sure what it says about me that even at that age I knew “mowing her lawn” could be a euphamism.
By the time I hit high school, I had decided Country music was for morons, and I was going to write like Morrisey. That’s when I got sent to the counselor’s office because a teacher thought one of my tone poems (later turned lyric) was a suicide note. No. I was just emo before Gerard Way’s parents had met (I just learned his name, by the by.)
As a junior, I wrote this:
Once, I was someone’s everything
And tore it all apart
the words did not mean anything
I’d eaten out my heart
Where once there was “I love you”
now it’s “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye”
The hole in me is howling
To kiss
To touch
To die
Again, yeah. Funnily enough, by high school, I had forgotten euphamism and double entendre or I’d never have written that chorus!
But, I never took my music for a walk, so it never went anywhere. I do have a couple of writing credits on a couple of dusty songs from a kid’s show I did, but outside of that, I had no real interest in pursuing my “art”. What I did have an interest in doing was going to 6 Flags and getting in the recording booth to belt out my version of Gloria Estefan and Kim Carnes songs. And later, when they added the video booth…Oh Em Gee! My little heart was full!
What I’m saying is I can’t knock Rebecca Black or her funny little song. She’s a kiddo who got a chance at fulfilling a fantasy, and it’s working out for her.
And honestly, how can you not love a song that tells you half the days of the week? I can’t get enough of this song. It’s like comedy crack. Much like mine would have been.
The Outside Lane 