Rebecca Black, and the lessons for sports parents

Rebecca Black, and the lessons for sports parents

The hottest teen act going right now is an Orange County, Calif., 13-year-old named Rebecca Black, whose video for her song “Friday” has 16,882,848 YouTube views as of the moment I’m typing this, threatening to put her at Tay Zonday-like viral video popularity. Unfortunately for young Rebecca, by Tay Zonday-like popularity, I mean millions of people viewing her video to see how amazingly, appallingly bad and/or unintentionally, “Chocolate Rain“-ish hilarious it is.

I’m sorry to do this, but it’s my duty as a journalist, and a link-baiter.

For my purposes, other than a cheap attempt to gain web hits by hooking a line onto Twitter’s No. 1 trending topic, is that it involves two groups well-known to all in the youth sports world: indulgent parents, and people more than happy to take their money.

The indulgent parents are, obviously, Rebecca Black’s, who paid $2,000 to an outfit called Ark Music Factory to put together an AutoTuned mess of a song with sub-banal lyrics. According to bohemian.com, the fine folks at Ark troll the nation for 13- to 17-year-olds, for whom they will supply the skills (pre-written song, video, etc.) to guarantee stardom!

To a youth sports parent, this sounds like the same pitch travel ball programs make.

In this case, you can say Ark Factory did its job — too well. Its song, containing everything that makes pop music insipid in one tidy package, has inspired a backlash so hard that a stunned Rebecca herself has likened it to cyberbullying. For all you sports parents, such is the risk when you try to buy your child’s advancement and stardom. Just go to any travel ball game to see grown people yelling at and rating players as if they were pros. And feel the resentment on any team when the other parents discover your child might have had a place bought for him or her. Also, blindly spending your money on the first travel ball program that blows you some smoke can end up creating an athlete that seems as technically sound but aesthetically horrible as “Friday,” or otherwise just get suckered out of your money.

By the way, these are lessons that stage parents, whether sports or pop music, never seem to know, and never seem to learn.