Is it a parody? A parody of a parody? A hit? All of the above? The latter seems to be the correct answer. Tween artist Rebecca Black’s “Friday” has been viewed more than 13 million times on YouTube, and critics seem divided on whether it’s a whip-smart take on 21st century pop, a parody of tween hits or an embarrassingly bad video viewed primarily for its train-wreck value. Much has been made of the seemingly banal lyrics (“Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday/Today it is Friday, Friday/We-we-we so excited/We gonna have a ball today/Tomorrow is Saturday/And Sunday comes afterwards”), which seem to recount the days of the week for the calendar-impaired. But Rolling Stone’s Matthew Perpetua feels there may be some brilliant thinking behind all this. “There’s something else going on here, something that makes ‘Friday’ uniquely compelling,” he wrote at RollingStone.com. “When you see this video, you immediately notice everything that it does ‘wrong,’ but it actually gets a lot of things about pop music right, if just by accident…. If the video was intended to be a parody of teen pop convention, it would be on par with some of the best “SNL” Digital Shorts by Lonely Island. And thus [the video] forces its audience to reckon with a particular formula for pop music.” What do you think? Is “Friday” a sly wink at the state of tween pop, or is it just tween pop taken to an “anyone can do this” aesthetic? Let us know below.

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Even our editorial team recognized Black Friday.

(via thegrammys)