At American Social on Brickell this past Saturday they were playing good music, hits from the ‘80s and ‘90s, and then suddenly they were playing Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” which is the song from a viral 2011 YouTube video that was so cringeingly awful it became a sensation. I remember hearing people quote that song for a long time before anyone showed me the video and I thought it was weird that everybody around me in class was occasionally speaking in terribly rhymes but I’d been told that these things will sometimes happen on college campuses and so I didn’t think much of it.

            Really it’s the video that’s so hypnotically dreadful, not the song itself, which when you hear it over loudspeakers at a busy sports bar, riding the momentum of a sequence that features Village People, then Tupac, then Tom Jones, then Backstreet Boys—“Friday”, by merit of its earworming mediocrity and the fact that folks of my generation were once upon a time enamored of its gaudy music video, is a perfectly agreeable tune when you’re tipsy and nostalgic.

            It brings to mind the wonderfully atrocious video for “Dancing in the Street,” which will someday in the future, I’m convinced, be talked about way more often.