YOU MIGHT HAVE heard about her already – but if you haven’t by now, and you didn’t see this, you’d probably be coming across Rebecca Black fairly soon.

Rebecca Black, from Los Angeles, is just 13 years old – but has turned heads around the world as her debut single, ‘Friday’, picks up an extraordinary amount of coverage on YouTube and on the world’s music blogs.

But rather than the usual positive feedback that tends to characterise such virals, the reason why Black’s song is being shared so much is not because it’s brilliant: but rather because it’s almost universally accepted as being utterly dreadful.

In the song, Black sings/raps/extols the virtues of Friday – singing about the difficulties of having to go to school when all one wants to do is party, and so on.

It’s only when one considers her age – again, she’s 13 years old – that the set-up of having to stand at a bus stop, while her friends then pull up in a convertible to ship her to school begins to seem a little bit unusual.

Here, for example, is a choice of some of the mesmerising (!) lyrics from the song’s middle-eight:

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today it is Friday, Friday
We we we so excited, we so excited
We gonna have a ball today
Tomorrow is Saturday
and Sunday comes afterwards

As Billboard columnist Kevin Rutherford described it: “Black’s video for ‘Friday’ is one of those rare occurrences where even the most seasoned critics of Internet culture don’t know where to begin.

Black is the latest product from the Ark Music Factory, an LA-based agency that prepares songs like Friday and essentially casts aspiring teenage superstars into ready-made roles, hoping to concoct a successor to soon-to-hit-puberty Justin Bieber.

The biggest problem with the song, however, is that it’s still horrendously catchy. Warning: Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’ cannot be unheard.