Rebecca Black’s “Friday” music video garnered condemnations from nearly everybody but Simon Cowell and a select group of pre-preteens, but one can’t deny its one redeeming quality. Despite the obnoxiously auto-tuned voice, the immature lyrics and the random awkward rap scene, the song did teach us the days of half the week. 

If a truly bad song can take the place of years of Sesame Street, what else can we have learned from other, better songs? Let’s look at just a few of them.

“American Pie”

Pretty much all we learn is that Don McClean is the ultimate nostalgist. He could beat everybody’s parents in reminiscing about the good old days and complaining about today’s corruption, and make it sound tuneful. Next time your mom starts going on about the poor state of music in today’s world (Ke$ha, anybody?), challenge her to compose a metaphor-riddled song that goes on for 10 minutes.

“Hollaback Girl”

Gwen Stefani taught us how to spell “bananas”. More importantly, she spelled it with the right number of N’s and A’s, something that has stumped spelling bee contestants since someone first decided that it would be fun to watch little kids come close to peeing their pants in anxiety while waiting in a line to spell a word that is barely phonetic.

Cha-Cha Slide/Cupid Shuffle/those other awkward group dance songs

In theory, we learn how to do a fun dance from the singer/narrator’s instructions. In reality, everyone manages to look like a complete dork, jumping around like an idiot on a crowded dance floor. Of course, that’s how we dance anyways (I’m just waiting for Don McClean’s song about “The day the dancing died”), but these songs add the fun component of sliding, turning, and shuffling, whatever that may be.

"1234"

The Plain White T’s may have their faults, but their music is kind of adorable. This song, though, teaches us to count to four, a very important number. It also teaches our ears to search for hidden words -- “There’s only ONE thing TWO do, THREE words FOUR you.”

"ABC"

This old song by the Jackson 5 goes even further. We not only learn the numbers one, two and three, we learn about ABC and Do Re Mi. The song claims that love is as simple as those three syllable strands, but that evidently means that seemingly simple things are complicated.

"Do Re Mi"

This song, unlike others on the list, was evidently meant to be didactic, or just to spotlight Julie Andrews’ voice in The Sound of Music. Either way, it taught us a great deal about the musical scale.

Any song by Ke$ha

These songs do the opposite of teaching, unless they’re attempting to teach you how to spell everything incorrectly. Still, they’re annoyingly catchy.

Anything by Nickelback

These songs are excellent at teaching incorrect grammar. You know that song “Gotta Be Somebody”? Considering that Chad Kroeger is a guy, the chorus should actually go, “Nobody wants to be the last one there, and everyone wants to feel like someone cares. Someone to love with my life in her hands. There has to be somebody for me out there. Nobody wants to go it on his own, and everyone wants to know he’s not alone. Somebody else that feels the same somewhere; there has to be somebody for me out there.”

One can make a song to teach anything, as students of Darrell Huber learned from “Ide Ate Ite”. However, it means a lot more, and is quite entertaining when these are popular songs. This is your editor-in-chief signing out, and reminding you that yesterday was Thursday, today is Friday, tomorrow is Saturday and Sunday comes afterwards.