The Unconscious Automobile Fixation of Rebecca Black's Friday

(Yeah, Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ark)

Oo-ooh-ooh, hoo yeah, yeah

Yeah, yeah

Yeah-ah-ah

Yeah-ah-ah

Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah, yeah, yeah

If Black’s Friday is a modern teen bildunsgroman, here we witness the birth of Rebecca Black. She emerges from a realm beyond the semantic rationality of homes, kitchens, and schools. Her vague affirmative mumbling traces a field of primitive desire with roots deep within unconscious teenage slumber. From this fragile state, we are given a brief window into Black’s insatiable urge for adulthood.

7am, 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)


This is the turning point of the tale. We are confronted by Black’s rigid clockwork life, filled past accounting with things she's "gotta have." It's a life of inflexible demand and ruinous routine, all culminating in Black's transit dependency.

Yet here is where chance takes hold of Black’s future. Her humdrum world is transformed by a passing convertible filled with friends. For the first time, the possibility of an automotive lifestyle dangles itself before Black like a carrot. Filled with desire, she is powerless to resist. The convertible conversion begins.

[At the bus stop, fate plays its cruel hand. The automobile meets Rebecca, introduces itself in the Siren-like form of unbelted tooth-braced white preteen laughter. Stop your ears, Rebecca! Stop your ears!]


Kickin’ in the front seat

Sittin’ in the back seat

Gotta make my mind up

Which seat can I take?


The automobile grips Black’s mind like a bird of prey, squeezing her unformed thoughts along its upholstered lines. Black’s worlds of possibility, choice, and agency, contract to the point where the only decision… indeed, the overwhelming decision... is which seat to take. Should she take the front seat? Should she sit in the back? The sublimation of Black’s unconscious strikes like a bolt of lightning.

[Fixated by empty choices, Black is consumed. It doesn't matter which seat you take, Rebecca. You will be trapped either way!]

It’s Friday, Friday

Gotta get down on Friday

Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend

Friday, Friday

Gettin’ down on Friday

Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend



Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)

Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)

Fun, fun, fun, fun

Lookin’ forward to the weekend

Enter the Greek chorus. The repeating verse of the song provides the banal backdrop against which Black's seduction by  the automobile is thrown into stark relief. Who does not look forward to the weekend? Who does not enjoy “fun?” With this mantra, Black shows that she is no different from any of us. We are all “lookin’ forward to the weekend.” We all are vulnerable. We are all Rebecca.



7:45, we’re drivin’ on the highway

Cruisin’ so fast, I want time to fly

Fun, fun, think about fun

You know what it is

I got this, you got this

My friend is by my right

I got this, you got this

Now you know it


Every love story has a peak, where the lovers fall to their fates at terminal velocity, enchanted by possibility, blinded by the new. Here the automobilic whirlwind whips Black around like an S & M prodigy. She speeds out of control. The death drive is literalized in the automobile. Her obsession with seating arrangements returns with a vengeance to push the limits of rationalization, as her song lyrics descend into a meaninglessly repetitive affirmation. Black loses herself in the comforts of leather. She drowns in petroleum acceleration.

[The automobile bypasses the traditional circuits of education. Memory and examination fade next to the soothing touch of painted steel. The automobile awaits us all.]

Kickin’ in the front seat

Sittin’ in the back seat

Gotta make my mind up

Which seat can I take?





It’s Friday, Friday

Gotta get down on Friday

Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend

Friday, Friday


Gettin’ down on Friday

Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend



Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)

Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)

Fun, fun, fun, fun

Lookin’ forward to the weekend



The refrain returns. The system of desiring-production captures yet more of Black’s susceptible body, the release of the weekend amplifying itself like the honking of horns echoing in a tunnel.

[Here, Black's capture by the car takes hold of the imagination, as Black and her companions are vaulted into a nighttime urban fantasy. Their eyes gloss over, they assume control of the vehicle. They can no longer think. They can only drive.]



Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday

Today i-is Friday, Friday (Partyin’)

We-we-we so excited

We so excited

We gonna have a ball today



Tomorrow is Saturday

And Sunday comes after...wards

I don’t want this weekend to end

The bridge, a meaningless mindless mush of the ancient Babylonian seven-day cycle, reveals the deep roots of Black’s automobile obsession. The spatial desire for speed and movement is mirrored in the temporal cycle of work and play, of tension and release.

Yet the asinine repetitions of the days of the week do not reflect a state of stupidity or ditzy quality. Far from it!

Rather, the calendrical rhyme reveals how Black’s car-fueled coming-of-age tale stands in for a release from the constraints of bourgeois education. If given more time, Black would start chanting the alphabet backwards, untying her shoes, or making figures out of pipe cleaners as the automobilic enchantment unearths the layers of subjectification, the strata of conformity and confinement of the Liberal state education apparatus against which the automobile, here standing in for a culture of consumer capitalism, pits itself.

As Black’s body becomes captured and confined by the car, her mind disappears. All that remains is the most trivial autonomic response to the rising and falling of the sun. All that remains are the days of the week.



[The moon calls to Black, eclipsing the world of daylight. This world creates its own time, the time of 'Black's Friday.' Bookended by her affirming floozies, Black rises vampric from the back seat of the convertible. Speed becomes sensation.]



R-B, Rebecca Black

So chillin’ in the front seat (In the front seat)

In the back seat (In the back seat)

I’m drivin’, cruisin’ (Yeah, yeah)

Fast lanes, switchin’ lanes

Wit’ a car up on my side (Woo!)
(C’mon) 
Passin’ by is a school bus in front of me

Makes tick tock, tick tock, wanna scream

Check my time, it’s Friday, it’s a weekend

We gonna have fun, c’mon, c’mon, y’all


Here we reach the most interesting moment of Black’s tale. Rebecca Black, or “R.B.” becomes is figured by rhythm and blues. The rapper, also driving a car, and similarly unable to discuss anything other than its simple freedoms, reveals to us Black’s future, the post-Friday Black, the black Black. As she conjoins herself deeper and deeper within the steel cage, as she aligns herself with the system of automobility, Black moves from the back seat to the front seat to the steering wheel. Her decisions accelerate and complexify, moving beyond simple seat choice to a stream of consciousness that reacts to her environment of motion, to choices about lanes, about speed, about the turn signal.

This evolution culminates with the symbolic “passin’ by … a school bus,” the very bus on which Black would have been trapped had not fate intervened. The bus is greeted with the leitmotiv of Chronos, the “tick tock tick tock” of governmental capture from which Black, now black, has escaped. Black has grown up. “Check my time,” s/he says. S/he is free, and beckons us to join her in an eternal “weekend.”

[The mysterious figure of the rapper appears, his glittering watch betokening a time of alterity. Caution, Rebecca! Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear!]



It’s Friday, Friday

Gotta get down on Friday

Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend

Friday, Friday

Gettin’ down on Friday

Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend


Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)

Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)

Fun, fun, fun, fun

Lookin’ forward to the weekend



It’s Friday, Friday

Gotta get down on Friday

Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend

Friday, Friday

Gettin’ down on Friday

Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend


Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)

Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)

Fun, fun, fun, fun

Lookin’ forward to the weekend

As the story draws to a conclusion, we realize that Rebecca Black will never return. She is lost to us. From the perspective of Black the cereal-eating child, it is a tragedy. From the perspective of Black the partying automobile subject, it is a genesis.

Black life, from this point, will be a meaningless ritualistic journey of Zoolander-esque frivolity, a future filled with blowing hair and freeway congestion. Black’s empty soul fills with gasoline. She is lost. She is free. She is one with the automobile. She is America. She is us.

[Black is subsumed by ritualized loops of animal desire. Willow branches reach out spectral tendrils to entwine her within their grasp. The red light is the tail light of the automobilic vision.  Black fades into a sunset, fades to black, disappears into a lifetime of capture. Farewell, Rebecca! Farewell!]