Posted by Andrew Unterberger on 11/09/2012 at 1:03 PM News

The Popdust Files: Friday, it's thanksgiving, nicole westbrook, Patrice Wilson, rebecca black, viral videos

Every so often over the last 18 months, some so-bad-it’s-good-or-maybe-it’s-just-really-bad viral video will pop up that every blog will trip over itself in declaring it the next “Friday.” (Hell, we’re not totally innocent of it ourselves.) But 99% of the time, said blogs miss the point entirely. Usually, they’re just talking about a video that’s funny because of how awful and amateurish it is, of which there are thousands and thousands of such videos produced every year, none of which deserved to be mentioned in the same sentence as Rebecca Black, or Ark Music Factory, the pay-for-production record label behind the masterpiece.

What really made “Friday” special was the way it actually approached legitimate competence—so much so that a lot of people unfamiliar with contemporary popular music really didn’t even get why it was supposed to be funny. But it got so many of the little things wrong—the critical details that make up base-level standards in pop music and music videos—that it felt totally weird and disorienting in a way that was impossible to even properly comprehend. It takes a twisted mind to engineer such fundamentally dissonant pop music, and not just any old idiot with Pro Tools, a video camera and a YouTube account can match it.

It’s unsurprising, then, that the first true successor to “Friday” should come from the man arguably most responsible for the original’s runaway success—Patrice Wilson, head of Ark Music Factory and mastermind behind Rebecca Black’s viral hit. Patrice has returned, with young Nicole Westbrook in tow, for the brilliantly demented “It’s Thanksgiving,” a Holiday anthem sure to join several different pantheons at once. Westbrook is as So Excited for turkey and potatoes as Black was for end-of-week partying partying, and the song even directly echoes “Friday” in both its hook (lots of “Yeah!”ing) and its bizarre fixation on chronology (“December was Christmas, January was New Year’s…”)

As with “Friday,” the song is catchy and professional-sounding, and the music video looks to have probably cost at least a couple thousand dollars. But the devil is in the details, and here are the 13 best of them:

1. Nicole wearing a t-shirt with a message totally irrelevent to the rest of the video:

2. Nicole and her friends’ super-excited slo-mo celebrations of Christmas, New Year’s Eve and Easter:

3. Nicole and Patrice both wearing Uncle Sam hats for the 4th of July celebrations (because that’s what you do when celebrating 4th of July):

4. Nicole dizzy with excitement out of Thanksgiving break approaching:

5. Patrice innocuously making his first appearance:

6. Nicole insisting on standing awkwardly with her hand on her hip:

7. Nicole being soooo pumped that her friend brought ribs, most traditional of the Thanksgiving foods:

8. Nicole being sooooo not pumped that her skeevy friend brought cranberries:

9. Nicole on her saying-grace swag:

10. Patrice in a turkey suit, now also showing up at Christmas for some reason:

11. Nicole singing into a turkey-leg microphone:

12. EVERYBODY GIVE IT UP FOR MASHED POTATOES!!!!

13. It was all a flashback, maybe?

Enough to digest here for another 18 months, at least. Don’t call it a comeback.