TGIF

I'm sure you've all heard, or heard of, by now Rebecca Black's new classic "Friday."  A great deal of recent scholarship has been devoted toward analyzing and deciphering this complex, deeply layered work of art--and it is a work of art; my only question is how to classify it: is it poetry, or is it symphony?  Setting those questions aside, however, it is clear that this song demands interpretation.  Specifically, Freudian interpretation.

Like Oedipus’s tragic plight, which holds universal among the sexual urges of men, so too must Black’s “legend must include horror and self-punishment” 817).  Hence, Black must submit herself to the self-inflicted punishment that comes from lack of sleep and early rising (“Seven a.m., waking up in the morning”).  However, Black goes on: “Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs / Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal.”  Clearly, “bowl” is cryptographic for the phallus.  As evidence for this, we need only consider the phallic shape of the spoon and the act of oral ingestion, along with the sexual connotation of the word “spoon” itself.

After succumbing to her oral desires (which are, of course, never fully satisfied [1161]), Black goes “downstairs” (note the sexual imagery here)  in order to hurry to the bus stop: “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).”

Black is forced to hurry for two reasons.  First and foremost her desire for the phallus (which the shape of the bus represents), for which her desire has already been exacerbated due to the sexual frustration she experienced while eating breakfast.  The second reason Black hurried can be traced the clear penis-envy that she has for her friends.  Even though going to school is clearly unpleasant, her Id nevertheless drives her toward the bus stop, where she can demonstrate that her phallus measures up to those surrounding her—in order that she might become the Phallus Queen.

Black, however, ultimately turns down the bus.  This is because the bus, as a sexual object, represented “the last moment in which the [sexual object] could have been regarded as phallic” (843).  The bus, then, is merely a fetish, or “a substitute of the penis” (842).  More importantly, however, the bus is a substitute for a “particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost” (842).  Such a penis “should have been given up, but the fetish is precisely designed to preserve it from extinction” (842).

Black’s friends—forever the scotimizers—arrive to draw Black away from the object of her desire; in doing so, however, they merely reinforce the preexisting phallic-desire and penis-envy that drew Black to the bus stop in the first place.  Note the camera lingers upon the adolescent, Beiber-esque male in the back seat: he flips his hair, and Black enters the car, implying a sexual invitation and acceptance.  Specifically, the boy introduces yet another fetish (coupeur de nattes) when he does so, as he has unconsciously linked a desire to the new perversion of hair-cutting.  In essence, he is inviting Black to cut his hair with sexual vigor.

With that, Black sings “Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday / Today i-is Friday, Friday (Partyin’) / We-we-we so excited / We so excited / We gonna have a ball today.”  In this case, Black is regressing to a childlike stage of development; when faced with the prospect of sexual arousal, she returns to such elementary teachings as the days of the week.  This is further cemented by the sexual imagery in her language (“wee-wee” and “ball”—note too the immediacy and urgency of the latter, which must be had today).

Clearly, posting this on YouTube was a tormented cry of sexual repression.  And yet, at the same time, she “doesn’t want this weekend to end.”  In addition, although Black is outwardly female, her lyrics clearly suggest an Oedipal, and therefore masculine—perspective on reality.  It must be concluded, therefore, that Black is also a hermaphrodite.  Alert the Internet.