The Singles Jukebox

Not that one…

[Video]
[4.62]

Scott Mildenhall: You cannot go wrong with “Push the Feeling On.” Everything about “Friday” that had not already been done by Nightcrawlers and MK is therefore not so much an addition as an unneeded excuse. Samantha Harper brings not so much lyrics as placeholder text. “Friday” is not so much a song as a Wikipedia redirect page. Mufasa and Hypeman’s video seems quite a durable one, but it could never be more rightfully deathless than its forebear. Who could want that weekend to end?
[5]

Thomas Inskeep: Riton started with the source material of MK’s epic dub remix of Nightcrawlers’ “Push the Feeling On,” then adding some silly sung/chanted lyrics about the weekend — because apparently almost every club crossover in the UK these days has to concern “it’s the weeeeeekend!!!!!!” Which is fascinating, since no one can go out these days. Maybe that’s why everyone seems to connect to material like this, to remind us of the before times? I’d rather just hear the indestructible original, though.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: “Push The Feeling On” is regal and elegant for a house track, and obviously a great thing to pillage. No night in the club is ever as smooth or frictionless as that, so tizzing it up seems obvious. In the process, “Friday” ends up too buzzy, less like a fun 3 minutes in a club and more like being stuck in an overcrowded gym, which is where you’re most likely to hear it. 
[4]

Alfred Soto: As 2021 starts to look better than 2020, expect more anonymous signposts like “Friday,” augurs for better mask-free times. The bored vocals and anonymous beats, though, suggest the opposite: wanting to party in February 2021 elbow to elbow at an Applebee’s bar.
[0]

Katherine St Asaph: Another guilty-pleasure dancepop with an emotional core if you find them in those: wounded music for pregaming bad decisions, browning out in a Boohoo dress, and writing off the rest of the week, with a chorus that’d sound funereal if it weren’t for the Robin S. donk and jokey “it’s Sunday — wha?” Naturally, the song doesn’t think it’s about that, so it throws in “Hotel Room Service” bloops and dramatic pauses and a couple bros broing down over the intro and outro. But I’m sure that’s the draw for the kids meming it up.
[7]

Juana Giaimo: As much as I hate how music is now TikTok content, I have to say the viral video put immediately a smile on my face. But when I heard the original track, the re-edit lost part of its charm. The female vocals started sounding too plastic and the chant too euphoric, as if it was forcing a party where one previously happened naturally.
[5]

Samson Savill de Jong: I’d missed the meme connection to this song the first time, so you know what it reminded me of instead? Fucking Pitbull. Music can be so weird and interconnected, especially when sampling comes into play. There’s probably something to say on the irony of this mix coming into being because of an internet meme but also reusing a well-known sample in a slightly different way — an archetypical example of the semi-original definition of “meme.” The song is fine; it’s like the original but with more lyrics and bass. It has none of the joy of the video it’s ripping off 2 years late. But it doesn’t make me mad, possibly because the original song is fundamentally alright. And since this retains most of those elements, it’s going to be fundamentally alright too.
[4]

David Moore: The best part of “Friday” by Rebecca Black was excised from her hyperpop-indebted 10-year anniversary remix — “yesterday was Thursday, today it is Friday, tomorrow is Saturday, and Sunday comes afterward.” So it’s appropriate that the better-by-a-hair “Friday” released in 2021 so far builds a whole hook around the omission. But this song is also really more about the weekend, a distinct conceptualization, an affirmation of the logic of ordering the week around tension and release. And that in turn underlines what was so great about that little bridge to nowhere: the way that it’s a bit more cosmic, a bit more unstuck from the rigid linearity of time precisely because of how unremarkably it runs through the days. It wasn’t just Saturday, Sunday (“what!”); yesterday was also Thursday. Which is to say that in some way Friday also includes Thursday, which is to further say that in some sense it’s all the same day. Every day is Friday, just as every day, turns out, can be not-Friday; it is only truly Friday in your mind.
[7]