Unless you’ve been living only on Mondays for the past few weeks, by now you know all about Rebecca Black. She is the girl who recorded a song called “Friday” and put together a music video to go with it, a video that has now become a certified viral hit phenomenon punching bag.

While we may all desire to have our 15 minutes of fame (why is mine always on back order?), I can’t imagine anyone would want it to come the way it did for Rebecca.

Released February 10 through an independent label called Ark Music Factory, the song and video got little notice until a couple of weeks ago, when it suddenly started gaining views and taking a lot of heat. At the time I write this blog entry, the video has just over 26 million views and is gaining almost 4 million views a day.

Unfortunately for Rebecca, it appears that the vast majority of the people watching the video don’t like it. And they haven’t been bashful about leaving their thoughts about it.

• “instant abortion” – Wowplayer43
• “Yeah something other than Charlie Sheen to make fun of!” – anhanninen
• “She suck more than justin biber. i’m starting to like justin biber.” – icarlycarly
• “I think this just killed me, a little. Wait… Yeah, it did.” – 333jcw
• “THIS IS WORST THAN JAPAN’S TSUNAMI AND EARTHQUAKE.” – animehunter0808

Really? Comparing Rebecca’s video to Japan’s problems?

The people at Ark Music Factory have noticed all the hate. They have disabled the ability to “like” or “dislike” the video (before they did that, there were nearly 70,000 more dislikes than likes) and it appears that they have done something with the comments section, because there are several pages of blank comments and several pages where all the comments have been marked as spam. (UPDATE: After this blog entry posted, both the “like” feature and the comments are working again. Could have been simply a YouTube error.)

Rebecca has noticed the comments as well. She told Good Morning America last week that the comments made her cry at first. She says she is over it now, though I don’t know how a 13-year-old ever gets over something like that.

The complaints about this video have been pretty much evenly divided three ways: Lyrics, Vocals, and Video Content.

There is no question that the lyrics are juvenile, at best. After all, the song was nice enough to tell us that “Yesterday was Thursday (Thursday), Today it is Friday (Friday), we we we so excited (excited).” It also told us that “Tomorrow is Saturday and Sunday comes afterwards.”

But the song was likely written with teens and tweens in mind, not the older people who have been leaving the over-the-top hateful comments about them. I can’t help but wonder what kind of lyrics the people leaving those comments listen to. How many of them like Lady Gag’s Gaga’s “Bad Romance?” After all, with lyrics like “Rah, rah, ah, ah, ah; Roma, roma, ma; Gaga, ooh la la; Want your bad romance” and “I want your ugly, I want your disease; I want your everything as long as it’s free; I want your love; Love, love, love, I want your love,” how could you not like it?

The vocals aren’t all that great, either. Much has been made about the heavy auto-tune in the video. When asked about it on Good Morning America, Rebecca replied that she knows that she isn’t the best singer out there, but she believes that she has some talent.

You can judge whether she has talent for yourself, since she did an unplugged version of the song.

Frankly, I don’t hear that much difference between the official video and this unplugged version. Her voice is very nasally to me, though she does hit a couple of nice notes in there. While I wouldn’t think the judges on American Idol would put her through to Hollywood, she does have some talent to work with. Some vocal lessons might help her grow that talent.

The content of the video has not gone unnoticed by viewers either. Specifically, the age of Rebecca and her friends and what they are shown doing. Twice in the video, we see Rebecca, who is 13, riding in a car with her friends, none of whom look to be any older than she is. Yet there is no adult “driving” the car. I put driving in quotation marks because the shots of the teens driving the car are all green screen. The only time we see the car really move, there is an adult actually driving, though his face has been obscured by the front window.

Viewers also noticed that in the party scene, the kids all appear to be getting out of cars that they drove to the party themselves, as there doesn’t appear to be an adult in sight. Many people have taken this as a message that Rebecca is saying to sneak out of the house, steal your parents’ car, and go to an unsupervised party.

While there are many things not to like about “Friday,” does it really deserve the outright hostility it’s received? How does leaving hateful comments hoping she will “kill herself” or become “bulimic so that you will look pretty” help anything? Critique the song and video all you want, but leave the hateful comments at home. No one deserves such comments, much less a 13-year-old who thought it would be fun to make a song and video.

Then again, Rebecca may be getting the last laugh against her haters. OK Magazine reported Saturday that “Friday” had climbed to #19 on the iTunes Top 100. That was a jump of 12 spots from Friday’s ranking of #31. By the time this blog entry posts, she could conceivably be in the Top 10.

Way to go, Rebecca.

What do you think about Rebecca’s song, “Friday?” Leave your thoughts in the comments below.