After Friday, the Deluge

Rebecca Black’s Friday had barely finished breaking the internet when Jenna Rose arrived with My Jeans and the floor dropped out again. Rose was thirteen, from New Jersey, and by all evidence her parents funded the whole production—which tracks, because the video had that specific quality of parental money meeting zero industry taste. The beats sounded like a spreadsheet trying to emulate hip-hop. The rap verses were about denim.

Early 2011 briefly opened a portal where this kept happening. After Friday went viral through the sheer force of collective mockery, a wave of similar videos surfaced—earnest, auto-tuned, impeccably produced in the technical sense while being aesthetically catastrophic. The humor was always slightly uncomfortable because the target was a kid who had no idea she was becoming a meme. The internet wasn’t thinking about that, and honestly neither was I at the time. That discomfort is more visible now than it was then.