Roastin' toastin'

You've got to hand it to President Obama - the man knows how to make a point. With his approval rating shrinking faster than Jennifer Hudson, he needed to pull something out of the bag to reignite the enthusiasm of his base. In the space of one long weekend, he vanquished two formidable foes without breaking a sweat. And he did it with impeccable timing.

On the eighth anniversary of Bush's premature propagandist 'Mission Accomplished' speech, Obama revealed that the world's most wanted man had been terminated by a crack team operating under the Commander-in-Chief's direct orders. If this was the movies, rather than real life, Obama would probably have ended up on the Pakistan borders due to some technical malfunction aboard Air Force One. With a hunting knife clenched between his teeth, he could have taken out Osama himself, slitting his throat and whispering one last bon mot, as he dispatched the terrorist mastermind to the great hereafter.

Instead, he was stuck in Washington D.C, at the White House Correspondents' dinner, where he delivered his own killshot by way of a twenty-minute monologue. For a man often criticised for over-reliance on autocue, Obama came across as a Comedy Store natural - all that was missing was the brick wall backdrop. His target was Donald Trump, who's been using America's hunger for ignorance and misinformation to promote his own electoral agenda.

He'd seized on a ridiculous conspiracy theory around Obama's citizenship, and spread it as thinly as his own Shredded Wheat barnet. When Obama finally relented and made his Hawaii-issued birth certificate public, Trump managed to turn it into a self-congratulatory acknowledgment of his own awesomeness. So it was great to see Obama take of the gloves and give him the verbal bitch-slap he so richly deserved.

Of course, Obama's Rodney Dangerfield schtick was really just the warm-up. Today we got the headline act, as it was announced that the world's second most wanted man (after Tom Hardy) had been taken out. As the public danced in the street yelling "USA, USA", Fox News kept accidentally writing 'Obama Bin Laden is dead'. This may have raised the eyebrows of a few conspiracy theorists, but it's worth noting that the BBC also made the same mistake.

I guess, when the pressure's on, typos and other simple errors can occur. After all, today can reasonably be considered a 'big news' day. Which is probably why even the celebrity tattle websites tried to get in on the act, by reporting the reactions of our favourite tweeters to the fast-breaking story. Who cares about Rupert Murdoch's spin on Bin Laden's death when you can read Khloe Kardashian's thoughts on the matter: "Wow!!! "@CNN: Congressional and administration officials tell CNN Osama bin Laden is dead. He was reportedly killed in Afghanistan."

Also weighing in on the big news were Phillip Schofield, Rebecca Black, Katy Perry and Nancy Sinatra. It's like I'm A Celebrity... taking over Question Time. There are two schools of thought here - either this weakens journalism by giving airtime to uninformed celebrity opinion, or it encourages people who only ever read People and E! to take an interest in current affairs. Either way, I think we can all be thankful for Rochelle from The Saturdays' insight into international diplomacy: "This Bank Holiday weekend has been a very historic one to say the least... It's like a Disney film...The Prince marries the Princess and the villain dies #justice". Amen to that Rochelle.

But is it art?

I once attended a meeting for all the 'creatives' in my agency, where the moderator asked us to go around the table and talk about what inspired us. The responses from most of the group were somewhat predictable - Tate Modern, Charles Bukowski, Hunter S Thompson.

By the time it was my turn to answer, I felt a little intimidated by my esteemed colleagues. But I took a deep breath and said that I find inspiration in popular culture. I argued that it provides us with a universal lexicon of references; a shared framework of recognisable touchpoints. So that even those who missed out on the musical wonders of Geri Halliwell's difficult second album, know enough about the ex-Spice Wench to at least have an opinion.

Over the years I've managed to come to terms with my sense of shame, and embrace my love of the tacky, trashy and tawdry. I get a warm buzz from shitty movies, revel in reality TV and turn up my pop music even when the car roof is down and I'm sitting at the lights. If pedestrians don't like it, they can just walk a little faster.

This may be a controversial opinion, but I believe that art can be anything which generates an interpretive response. When it comes to creative expression, there's no such thing as good or bad. Just varying tastes. And it's those differences that I try to celebrate every day.

Last night, BBC Four broadcast a performance of the new Royal Opera House production of Anna Nicole - a fictionalised account of the troubled life of everyone's favourite drug-addled gold digger. The fusion of celebrity and art raised a number of immaculately sculpted eyebrows when it was first announced, even though ROH's music director Antonio Pappano argued that "librettists have long used female characters to challenge prejudices and attitudes."

But this intriguing blurring of the boundaries between high and low culture is nothing new. It simply demonstrates that the two schools of thought are not so diametrically opposed. This is something that Walt Ribeiro clearly feels strongly about. As the founder of For Orchestra, he's cleverly rearranged a wide range of pop songs for a full orchestra and turned his ambitious experiment into a fairly successful musical venture.

His latest opus is the now legendary Friday, by internet ingenue Rebecca Black. Since its discovery three weeks ago, this ridiculous piece of pop ephemera has been elevated to world-beating meme, turning its thirteen year-old singer into a household name. Despite its 'written on a Post-It' level of sophistication, the song has moved beyond being a target for lazy cyberbullies, and inspired a number of genuinely entertaining and witty pastiches, parodies and spoofs.

There's the Bob Dylan remake, which actually sounds like an authentic studio outtake by the folksy king of mumble music:



Friday's video has also been repurposed by the team at Bad Lip-Reading, giving the song an entirely new meaning (as well as lyrics and melody):



And then there's Ribeiro's 'classical' reinterpretation, which simply celebrates the song's unapologetic joy.



In his introduction to the performance, he says: "To me, it’s a successful piece of music because it got people talking, it got people emotional. The piece is incredibly happy in it’s emotion, and I wanted to capture that with the violins, so I had them play triumphantly in the beginning and in the ending. I love the honesty of this piece, and really wanted to transcend the feeling of 'fun fun fun fun'."

Although I originally criticised the team at Ark Music Factory for missing the point of pop music, I'm prepared to eat my lyrics sheet. And I hereby pledge never again to apologise for enjoying my guilty pleasures. Because, as these performances suggest, there's really nothing to feel guilty about.

Bully for you

Am I a bully? I'm asking rhetorically, so don't feel the need to write in and answer. But it's a question I've been asking myself in light of a number of related stories which have been dominating YouTube traffic in the last seven days.

One clip that quickly became an overnight sensation, saw an overweight Australian fifteen year-old called Casey Heynes getting all Howard Beale on his pint-sized tormentor. After three years of relentless bullying and harassment, Casey said to himself "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!". Pushed over the edge by a schoolmate, he gave the spiteful little shit the kind of smack-down that used to be a Saturday afternoon staple, back when Shirley Crabtree was still a household name. Although both boys were subsequently suspended from Chifley College in Sydney, four Facebook pages have already been set up in honour of the beleaguered battler, with 200,000 fans signing up in support.

Students in California also found themselves on the receiving end of verbal sticks and stones last week, when Alexandra Wallace took to YouTube to berate all the Asian students at UCLA for talking on their mobile phones in the college library. Every time the hard-working undergraduate was about to reach an "epiphany" in her preparations for finals week, she was disturbed by the sound of “Ooooh Ching Chong Ling Long Ting Tong, Ooohhhhh.” The phone users in question were, of course, waiting for news from Japan about their friends and family.

As Alexandra explained in her video, "So being the polite, nice American girl that my momma raised me to be, I kinda just gave him what anybody else would do that kinda like, [puts finger up to lips in a "shh" motion]. 'You know it’s a library, like, we’re trying to study, thanks!' And then it’s the same thing five minutes later. But it’s somebody else, you know — I swear they’re going through their whole families, just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing." The inconsiderate shits. Several hundred thousand views, and a bunch of angry videoed replies later, Wallace issued a formal mea culpa (which translates into Californian as "My bad") and announced that she was leaving the university.

But the biggest bullying story in the online world this week, concerned a wannabe popstar and a song that comes dangerously close to breaching the Geneva convention. In just seven days, Rebecca Black's 'Friday' scored an astonishing 25 million views on YouTube and rocketed the thirteen year-old into the top 20 in several territories. But they say fame comes at a price, and for Rebecca, that meant having the world's scorn heaped upon her. Like everyone else with access to a keyboard and an internet connection, I went off on one about the horrors of a song that made St Winifred's School Choir sound like Radiohead. The main focus of my ire was the awfulness of the record itself, but I couldn't stop myself from chucking a few underarm blows in Rebecca's direction.

A week after its debut, the conspiracy theories were finally put to rest, as the story behind the song was finally revealed. As many of us suspected, it was a vanity project bankrolled by an overindulgent parent, with little thought for the consequences. Apparently, $2,000 buys you an original song, studio and post-production, plus a video shoot, courtesy of the cut-price Svengalis at Ark Music Factory. Speaking exclusively to Good Morning America, Black seemed conflicted by the bittersweet nature of her success. In particular, she spoke about the fact that one commenter had advised her to start cutting herself and develop an eating disorder to make her prettier.

Now, just to play devil's advocate for a moment, Rebecca was happy enough for her Mum to spend $2,000 on something that must have seemed about as sound an investment as a Ponzi scheme. I'm guessing she figured it'd be, like, totally OMG, to have a video she could show to her friends. She never, for a moment, thought that her dreams of celebrity might actually come true. But as Pete and Dud discovered in Bedazzled, when you make a deal with Beelzebub, keep in mind that he has a better grasp of irony than Alanis Morissette.

She wasn't to know what would happen once the video was uploaded. Like all viral phenomena, there's little rhyme or reason (much like the song itself) to how these things take off. That zeitgeist is a slippery little fucker.

The internet has given us all a chance to weigh in on any topic and give a complete stranger a verbal wedgie. When my article on Rebecca Black first appeared on Sabotage Times, one commenter took me to task for my criticism of a 13 year-old girl, although even he couldn't resist taking a pop-shot at my profile picture. I learned two things from this experience - avoid ad hominem attacks, and stop shopping for T-shirts at BabyGap.

So what happened to us? When did we decide to hang out behind the internet bikesheds and start menacing other people for their iTunes money? Our online life might give us more opportunity than ever before to reach out and touch people, but sometimes it seems that we can't resist giving them a Chinese burn while we're doing it. Are we getting meaner, or is just human nature? Answers on a piece of hate-mail, please. 

Black Friday

A few years ago, a friend of mine was planning his daughter's seventh birthday party. He asked everyone in the office if they had any music he could borrow that would keep ten sugar-infused preteens amused for a couple of hours. He didn't admit it at the time, but I know deep down that I was the only person in our team likely to have the kind of music he had in mind.

So I brought in a variety of CDs, carefully chosen to suit the limited, but oh-so-specific needs of his demanding audience. The party was a big hit, and in the months that followed, whenever I got some new music, I'd make a copy for my friend's daughter.

About a year later, I came back from one of my lunch-hour record store trips, excitedly clutching a brown paper bag full of wonderment. As I rattled through the various titles with my friend, I asked if I should burn some disks for him to take home. He looked at me with an expression that blended pity with embarrassment, and said "Thanks, but, er, Abby's kind of grown out of that stuff now." She was eight.

At that point, I had to make peace with the fact that much of my music collection was going to go unappreciated by my friends, peers and contemporaries. My shared playlists on iTunes and Spotify may be a constant source of mockery, but I wear my pop preferences with pride.

I know that good pop music is just as worthy of my time as anything that features a three-minute guitar solo. And just because someone writes their own songs, it doesn't automatically qualify them as worthy of my time. Artists like Pet Shop Boys, Madonna and Lady Gaga have proved that popularity and credibility aren't mutually exclusive concepts.

Unfortunately, because great artists make pop look so easy, everyone seems to think that it is. Find a pretty girl, cobble together a few lyrics about partying, crank the autotune up to 11 and laugh all the way to the bank.

Which is the only logical explanation for the existence of 'Friday' by Rebecca Black. The latest 'discovery' by the musically moribund Ark Music Factory, Rebecca's debut single manages to get everything wrong. And leaves you wishing you'd been born profoundly deaf.

Cynical, tuneless and inane to the point of surrealism, Rebecca's would-be party anthem promises "fun fun fun" but is about as carefree and enjoyable as watching a kitten drown. As she pumps her fists in the air from the backseat of her friend's convertible, the impending weekend she's singing about seems less appealing than a nuclear winter. And then there's that voice. Imagine the guys who 'Autotune The News' getting Stephen Hawking to read out the Tweets of a 13 year-old girl.

Universally recognised as one of the finest pop songs of all time, ABBA's 'The Day Before You Came' sees Agnetha sorrowfully recalling the tedium of her daily life prior to her lover's arrival in her life. Perhaps that's the sense of stultifying ennui that the writers at Ark were trying to convey when they wrote:

"Seven a.m., waking up in the morning

Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs

Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal

Seein’ everything, the time is goin’

Tickin’ on and on, everybody’s rushin’

Gotta get down to the bus stop

Gotta catch my bus, I see my friends (My friends)

Kickin’ in the front seat

Sittin’ in the back seat

Gotta make my mind up

Which seat can I take?"

Hopefully the one without an airbag. 

If any good can possibly come of this aural travesty, it's the fact that weekends will now forever be tainted by memories of Rebecca Black. As I write this on a Sunday evening, the week ahead suddenly doesn't seem quite so bad.