Here's That Rebecca Black Documentary You Didn't Ask For

Rebecca Black has been a part of the pop culture vernacular for less than a year, yet she — and those involved in the creation of her so-bad-it’s-a-sensation video for “Friday” — are already the subject of a short documentary by This American Life‘s Jon Ronson. In it, we meet Benni, known on the internet as “Awkward Dancing Girl in Pink,” who says that on the set of Rebecca’s shoot, she was trying hard to get Patrice Wilson, the man behind the video-making machine, to notice her. He didn’t.

Ronson then seeks an interview with Wilson; at first he wouldn’t grant permission for Ronson to interview him, but when he heard that Ronson would be appearing on Conan O’Brien’s late night show that night, he allowed him in. Hmm, maybe it’s because the world really didn’t want to know how little effort went into creating something so popular? This is how Wilson says the lyrics for the hit song came to him:

“‘Friday’ probably took me about thirty minutes. It did. Thirty minutes. It was Thursday and I was like, ‘I need to make a song, I need to make a song’ and then it was Friday. I’m like, ‘It’s Friday. Oh that’s a song, it’s Friday!’ There’s no song about Friday out there. I’m like, really? Make ‘Friday’.”