World’s Worst Songs: “It’s Thanksgiving” by Nicole Westbrook

Thanksgiving, the first American holiday and arguably the most unique, doesn’t get much respect anymore. It’s been reduced to a mere speed-bump on the way to Black Friday. Apart from Pilgrim hats and hand-traced turkey cutouts made from construction paper, Thanksgiving hasn’t inspired a great deal of popular art, either. There’s A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and a few songs that can be rhetorically manipulated into “thanksgiving songs,” but what else?

Well, in 2012, we have this, which has been ubiquitous for a week or 10 days, but which must be included in any accounting of the World’s Worst Songs.

That’s 12-year-old Nicole Westbrook, and if you notice similarities between “It’s Thanksgiving” and Rebecca Black’s famous “Friday,” you are correct. This hairball was also yakked up by Patrice Wilson, the auteur behind “Friday.” It’s another example of the way the pop audience no longer sells itself to the highest bidder, but to the lowest. As an artifact of the way suburban conformity can destroy the human soul, you can’t do better. It’s the kind of art produced by people who believe anything you can’t find at the mall is something you don’t need.

(interval)

It’s been about 15 minutes since I wrote the preceding paragraph, in which time I have tried and discarded several metaphors for what the appallingly prefabricated Thanksgiving dinner Nicole prepares for her friends might represent, and I can’t go on anymore. A record that comes from a place as dead as this one does is pretty much immune to anything a person might say about it, good or bad, so I’m outta here.

I do hope you have a happy Thanksgiving this week, though. And I hope my mother is making a ham.

(Our friends at Popblerd had something to say about “It’s Thanksgiving” last week. Go read if you haven’t already.)