In November 2017, podcaster Ethan Klein was seated in his car in the parking lot of a Ralph’s grocery store in Los Angeles “sh______ bullets”. “I was legitimately freaked out,” he recalled on his podcast h3h3. “We get in the car, we drive… I’m… looking over my shoulder. I’m sitting there, expecting him to come out of the backseat.” Klein had been spooked by a YouTube message from a one-time pop music Svengali named Patrice Wilson, co-founder of now defunct music composition company ARK Music Factory, which, essentially, created songs for rich kids to sing. In 2011, Wilson had achieved overnight celebrity – or at least “internet celebrity”– for writing, producing and rapping in a novelty song, Friday, for 13-year-old wannabe-singer Rebecca Black, whose mother paid ARK $4000. The cheesy ditty included head-smackingly simple lyrics such as “7 AM, waking up in the morning/ Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs/ Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal (cereal)", and was accompanied by a low-budget video of Black riding in her car with her friends. When comedian Michael John Nelson called it "the worst video ever made" on his YouTube channel, the song became an unlikely viral hit. But by 2017 the hits had dried up for Wilson and ARK Music, and Klein had lately used his h3h3 podcast to deride Wilson's track record of working with young teenagers.

Wilson's response was to put a countdown clock on his YouTube channel, containing a reference to h3h3. “It was super creepy,” Klein would recall on a later episode of his podcast. “We pulled up the live stream… and the countdown faded to a shower curtain. A livestream of a show curtain. A really creepy seedy one. And there were shots of him walking through a graveyard.” Klein was spooked but not yet fleeing for the hills. Twenty-four hours after the shower curtain incident, however, Wilson’s livestream changed again. “It was originally counting down 300 hours to December 1 at midnight,” Klein recollected. “He changed the video and it scared the living Christ out of me. It’s a graveyard – a looping image of a graveyard and in the description it says “Ethan”. I’ve got Patrice’s livestream open with my f____ing name and a close-up reoccurring of a rainy tombstone.” He got his car and drove to Ralph's grocery store and waited. When this second countdown expired the image of man in a hoodie appeared on Wilson’s YouTube. “It’s so sad,” went a slurred voice. “You sit there you sit there and you encourage it.” That was it – Wilson’s big reveal. “This is so stupid..what is my life right now,” said Klein, who realised his life was not in danger after all. “Listening to Patrice Wilson talk about bullying with pitch shift in his voice.” It had been a strange journey for Wilson. Black had become a runaway meme. Tens of millions clicked on the tune to drink deep of its awfulness. Black was consequently subjected to horrific online abuse. “I hope you cut yourself and I hope you get an eating disorder so you'll look pretty, and I hope you go cut and die,” went one typical message.

Rebecca Black celebrates her 100 million views on April 15, 2011 Credit : FilmMagic

What happened next to Black is well documented. She enjoyed a brief period of acclaim and infamy, including an appearance on Good Morning America. The bullying continued too. This week the now 22-year-old articulated the level of vitriol she had suffered in a moving Instagram post addressed to her adolescent self. “Nine years ago today a music video for a song called Friday was uploaded to the internet,” she wrote. “Above all things, I just wish I could go back and talk to my 13-year-old self who was terribly ashamed of herself and afraid of the world," she wrote. "I'm trying to remind myself more and more that every day is a new opportunity to shift your reality and lift your spirit," she wrote. "You are not defined by any one choice or thing. Time heals and nothing is finite. It's a process that's never too late to begin." But what did the future hold for Patrice, the would-be Simon Cowell who pops up in the Friday video with a kitschy rap? In 2017 he wiped the YouTube channel featuring hits by his production company ARK Music Factory (he had ceded ownership of Friday to Black after legal battle). This was replaced by a 339 hour, 53 minutes, 56 seconds countdown. That ticking clock continued even after he had posted the second timer directed at Ethan Klein and h3h3. When the original clock ran out on December 1 the screen faded to grey. There follows a montage that felt like an outtake from a cheap horror movie: a spooky house in silhouette, a dark corridor, an ominous tree-line. It’s terribly blurred; details are difficult to make out. And then the final reveal: a despondent figure on a cheap couch, staring at the camera. It’s Patrice Wilson.

“All the false accusations, they just burned me,” he says. “Those videos that accused me of being a rapist, a paedophile. That say I eat children…” He is on the brink of tears. To understand how Patrice ended up weeping on YouTube we have to go back to 2011. ARK Music Factory had gone into business as vanity pop label. For between $2000 and $4000 Patrice and his business partner, Clarence Jey, would write their clients a song, put them in a video and arrange a photoshoot. “It is very amazing,” Wilson said in an interview on his channel. “You get everything. You even get lunch.” Patrice was born in South Africa and lived for a time in Eastern Europe where he rapped under the stage name “Pato”. Clearly he was no Max Martin in the making. But early songs he wrote for customers – such as My Reflection for Sabrina in 2010 – weren’t outright howlers. They were derivative and silly and nobody paid them any attention. Enter Rebecca Black and her mother Georgina Kelly. Black, a privately-educated teenager from swanky Orange County California, wanted to star in a pop video. And for $4000 Patrice penned her a ditty. It was called Superwoman and it was about falling in love. Aged just 13, Black rejected it as inappropriate. So Patrice went home and wracked his brains. It was late on Thursday. Midnight loomed. A light bulb clicked. “I wrote the lyrics on a Thursday night going into a Friday,” he said. “I was writing different songs all night and was like, “Wow, I've been up a long time, and it's Friday.” And I was like, wow, it is Friday!” The Friday video was uploaded onto YouTube on February 10 2011. At first nobody noticed the cornball promo, in which Black clowns around in a car with friends. By March it had notched up just 4,400 views. But after Michael J Nelson posted it on his YouTube channel, comedian Daniel Tosh posted it to his Tosh.O Comedy Blog. Within four days it had achieved five million hit. On March 18 Black was on Good Morning America belting out the chorus “It's Friday, Friday/ Gotta get down on Friday”. The problem was that people weren’t clicking on the video because they liked it. This was the ultimate “hate-watch”. Friday was a terrible song – but that special kind of terrible song that refuses to leave your brain. Wilson took this as a compliment.

Alison Gold in her video for Chinese Food Credit : youtube

“The whole point [was] to create something that was really simple but something that sticks in people's head,” he said. “To have people say, 'I hate this song, but I'm still singing it.'” He seemed to have found his business model. After a dispute over ownership of Friday he and Black parted ways. But he had other proteges. He wrote It’s Thanksgiving for 11-year -old Nicole Westbrook. The melody and even the lyrics were almost identical to Friday’s. Then there came Tweenchronic – aka 10-year-old friends Alison and Stacey – and their 2013 viral hit Skip Rope. Patrice once again directed the video in which the children appear to buy alcohol and cocaine, before Wilson turns up to rap with them. Stacey was never heard from again. Alison, though, used her full name of Alison Gold on the follow up that Patrice composed for her, Chinese Food. Peaking at 29 in the Billboard Hot 100 it was almost as big a hit as Friday – and almost as terrible too. “I love fried rice (Yeah),” she sings. “I love noodles (Yeah)/ I love Chow mein, chow Mo-Mo-Mo-Mo Mein.” The song’s unnerving simplicity was accompanied by a disturbing video which features outmoded and offensive caricatures of Chinese people (as well as Japanese Geisha). And then a man in a Panda suit turns up to dance with Gold. He takes the head gear off and underneath is – who else? – Patrice Wilson. He was by now starting to get a reputation. Wilson had hit upon a formula: an annoying song is performed by an oblivious preteen and people click not because they like the music but because they loathe it with a vengeance. The performer is hated upon, Patrice walks away with his anonymity intact, his bank balance swollen. The fact that he seemed to work exclusively with prepubescent girls was drawing negative commentary, too.

Alison Gold and Patrice Wilson in the ABCDEFG video Credit : youtube

This rising creep factor went off the scale in 2014 with his and Gold’s final video, Shush Up (released by Wilson’s new label, Pato Music World). The song portrayed the now 12-year-old in a sexualised manner, as a criminal in jail. She wears clinging outfits and is bound up in chains. At one point she is executed in an electric chair. Following an outcry, Shush Up was quickly removed from the internet. With that Patrice’s life in pop seemed to shudder to an end. But most of his videos were still on his YouTube channel. He had soon become a punchbag, particularly for sneery podcasters. On h3h3, Klein and his wife Hila repeatedly scorned Wilson’s “weird creepy vibes”. They had great fun, in particular, with a clip from the video to Gold’s song ABCDFG in which Wilson, dressed as beloved children’s entertainer Mr Rogers, glares at the adolescent through a window. The tweenage Gold, meanwhile is chirping: “I need somebody to help me through/All these feelings that I'm dealing with/These feelings that I can't resist”. It is incredibly chilling. By November 2017 Wilson had had enough. He pulled all his musical content and started his countdown. Attached was the cryptic title “#_o_o_o=65lt@66-6-h3h3”. Most of this was gibberish. But “66” referred to the age at which his father died. And “h3h3” was directed at… well, H3.