The Singles Jukebox

But wait, why aren’t they covering this song on Fr[JOKE REDACTED; EDITOR TERMINATED]

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[4.56]Katie Gill: Straightforward break-up song or an allegorical kiss off to “Friday” and ARK Music Factory? You decide! I’ve got to say though, I’m adoring this paint by numbers track more if I view it through that latter, slightly conspiracy theory lens — she never needed you, Patrice!
[7]

Will Adams: Don’t call it a comeback; in the five years since that song, Rebecca Black has trickled out singles and developed a considerable (and supportive) audience as a YouTuber. It’s the least she deserves after bearing the brunt of the backlash for so long. But “The Great Divide” has piqued interest on the basis of “wow it’s actually good” as if that were somehow shocking, as if Black herself had some inherent inability to be competent at music. Just as there’s little use in shitting on her for still surfing on the success of “Friday,” there’s little use in applauding her for clearing a perceived low bar. Especially when “The Great Divide” is good on its own merits. Not perfect — namely, Black’s vocals follow the Perry-Lovato school of thought that exertion = impact — but good. Crash Cove’s remix swaps the original’s appeal to serious artistry with exactly what it needed: booming, obvious dubstep that, in line with today’s pop M.O., is designed to heighten emotion to its extreme via swoops and plunges and electronic fripperies. The inextricable legacy of “Friday” may mean that Black will never be taken seriously as a pop star, but in light of her YouTube success I question whether that’s even her objective anymore. “The Great Divide” makes a strong case for the line between novelty and disposability; being the latter is not necessarily a bad thing.
[7]

Tim de Reuse: The circumstances that led to this song’s existence are inseparable from the experience of listening to it in 2016 and, unfortunately, much more interesting to think about than the song itself.
[5]

Alfred Soto: As a mild admirer of “Friday,” I wish the metaphor were more than a line she drops at the end of a chorus, and I wish the electronic taffy-pulling of the production didn’t substitute for a commitment she couldn’t muster anyway.
[4]

Hannah Jocelyn: It’s hard to imagine something similar to “Friday” happening today, where everything is think-pieced to death and the only viral videos are utter nonsense. So years after “Friday” and various other songs, Rebecca Black returns not as a novelty, but as an Emotional Serious Artist Person. And so, the original piano-based version is “Skyscaper,” and the remix is “In The Name of Love.” If I had never heard the former or latter, both of which I really like, I would give “The Great Divide” a higher score. So maybe it’s poor timing, but this definitely feels derivative and maybe not as epic as Black or Crash Cove thought it was. I’ll give this a good score anyway, because Rebecca Black deserves at least a little bit of respect for her performance here, even with the Melodyne artifacts in that “i-i-i-i-i-ide” vocal run. She really does belt, giving it what she couldn’t when she first became famous at a perilously young age.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: I’m old and crotchety enough to feel that YouTube-created “celebrities” are not actually celebrities at all. Especially when they have little-to-no talent other than over-emoting and looking doe-eyed in their music videos. P.S. the song’s terrible.
[0]

Jonathan Bradley: “The Great Divide” is Rebecca Black’s grueling trudge back from meme status, having already failed to alchemize her accidental fame into intentional stardom. Her vocal exertions seem premised on redemption: see, I can sing now. Please may I have my dignity back? The effort is neither necessary nor pleasant: high-speed nostalgia has finished transforming Black from viral bathos to warmly remembered pop-cultural ephemera. She can’t be faulted for taking another shot at a musical career — after all, she wanted it enough in her younger years to have her parents send her to Ark Music Factory’s pop singer fantasy camp, and time has proved again and again that great singles can come from anywhere. One hasn’t come from this all-grown-up animated GIF: it’s telling that the most appealing moments of “The Great Divide” are when Black allows one of her familiarly warped vowels to slip through.
[2]

Iain Mew: The verses set up Rebecca Black as a decent Iselin Solheim-like singer for the right kind of track; the right blend of light and precise to go with elemental slow trance. “The Great Divide” isn’t quite that track, because the chorus reaches too far to justify her name being the one up there and comes off the worse in a contest with waves of bubbly drops.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: I could believe Rebecca Black as a plausible but not particularly accomplished or charismatic pop star based on this alone. That said, I’m not sure what the payoff could be here, certainly not a proper hit or a long career.”The Great Divide” is too lifeless, the chorus too awkwardly stuck between Leona Lewis’ “Collide” and Years and Years’ “Without,” and her voice too plain for the theatrics of the former or the yearning of the latter. It’s a nicely produced track but like the vocals, plain and lacking emotion. Given an actual melody she doesn’t sound too bad, but the lack of emotion means she still sounds like a robot, just in a different way to before.
[5]