Man Man Are Touring With Rebecca Black
You remember “Friday.” We all remember “Friday.” Back in 2011, a gentler time in the history of the internet, a teenager from Irvine, California recorded a pop song that her parents had essentially bought for her. The ARK Music Factory, a work-for-hire pop songwriting and production company, wrote “Friday,” a strangely naïve and dumbfoundingly simple song about being happy that it’s the weekend. Black sang the song and starred in the charmingly amateurish music video. It went mega-viral, to the extent that Black was bullied so much that her parents pulled her out of school. But if you were watching the “Friday” video to laugh at it, or even to file it into the so-bad-it’s-good section of your brain, you were doing it wrong. “Friday” was a weird song, a slight DIY perversion of the day’s pop tropes, but it was also an infernally catchy koan of its own. To this day, I still get the “gotta get down on Friiiiday” refrain lodged in my head everytime I clock out for the weekend.
Rebecca Black has stuck around, recording music for the past eight years. A couple of years ago, there was a weird little flap when she recorded a song that sounded a lot like a Julia Michaels song that she’d already covered. It seemed like she was trying to find something approximating regular pop stardom — something just about impossible for the young woman who’d sung “Friday.” And now, she seems to be embracing the weirder aspects of her fame — or, at least, she’s comfortable doing shows with weirdos. Because Rebecca Black is now touring with messy art-rock veteran pranksters Man Man.
Man Man frontman Honus Honus broke the news yesterday on Instagram: Rebecca Black will be the band’s “special guest” at a few of the forthcoming shows on the band’s March West Coast tour. Presumably, this does not mean that she’ll do a traditional opening set. I’m imagining she’ll come out at the peak of Man Man’s set for a huge, cathartic “Friday” singalong. Or, at least, that’s what I’d like to see. Check out Man Man’s dates below.
TOUR DATES:
3/11 – Berkeley, CA @ Cornerstone
3/12 – Redding, CA @ The Dip
3/14 – Seattle, WA @ The Crocodile *
3/15 – Portland, OR @ The Hawthorne Theatre *
3/16 – Bend, OR @ The Domino Room *
3/17 – Reno, NV @ The Holland Project *
3/21 – Santa Ana, CA @ Marty’s On Newport
* with Rebecca Black
