Rebecca Black Talks Back

“Looking stupid is the best part about what I do,” Rebecca Black tells me with a breathy giggle a few hours before her Toronto show. It’s snow-storming outside, and we’re alone in a dim grey dressing room at the Axis Club. She’s sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor, rummaging through a suitcase stuffed with costumes—her outfits for the evening ahead. She pulls out a corseted blue cone bra. (“It’s custom.”) She holds up white synthetic mohair boots with sludgy stains at the toes. (“These have seen better days.”) She plops a belt made entirely of bullets in my hands. (“They’re real! Feel how heavy.”)

It’s the wardrobe of a 27-year-old woman with a 10-year-old girl‘s untainted approach to dress-up. The wonderfully wacky, all-over-the-place arsenal of a person who has ostensibly never second-guessed herself. Or, in Black’s case, someone who veered so far in the direction of wanting to hide that she had no choice but to swing back around.

Rebecca Black did not shoot into stardom, the way we often hear it glamorously said about fame-ascending young women. She was flung into public consciousness in the most unforgiving way; a 13-year-old shoved under the vitriolic microscope of virality. At its inception, her now-infamous 2011 music video “Friday” was a harmless project; a birthday gift from a mom who wanted to support her daughter’s singing dreams. But as its views soared, it became so much more.

We all remember. Looking back, “Friday”’s worst crime was overwrought silliness. The lyrics, written in an afternoon, were simple and somehow infuriating. (Gotta have my bowl. Gotta have cereal.) The city-lights green screen visuals, with footage shot in Black’s backyard, were low-budget and shoddy. The auto-tuned delivery was mocked and mimicked. Ultimately, she was trialled in the court of public opinion as an overzealous teen with bad taste, unleashing a wave of unprecedented web meanness.

To the shock of everyone involved, “Friday” gained 167 million views in three months, making it the most-watched YouTube video of that year and cementing it as a reigning moment in 2000s pop culture. Rebecca Black was mercilessly picked apart by millions. She was the subject of early-days Facebook memes, the most Googled name of 2011 and a cautionary tale about the slippery slope of internet fame. Years later, Black says it left her feeling afraid of the world.

“It delayed the process of finding my confidence and my ability to move in a way that was not based on other people’s opinions,” she says, now sitting on a love seat across from me. The years immediately following her harrowing hit were spent trying to distance herself from it. “I felt shamed by the idea of always having to mention ‘Friday.’" In a 2011 interview with New York Magazine, Black promotes a new, upcoming song with “barely any auto-tune”, branding it “a fresh start.”

But “Friday” persevered as a pop culture juggernaut, with Black under its shadow. While navigating fame in this shaky period, she was often ruled by fear and surrounded by well-meaning adults who stifled her self-expression. “I look back at outfits I was wearing when I was 14, and I’m like, ‘I look like a 40-year-old woman,’” she says with a sigh. “Why am I wearing so many blazers?”

But then something good happened. Because “Friday” had forced her into isolation, it also allowed her to find herself. “It definitely made me a weirdo and a loner. I turned to the internet, I turned to music, I turned to artists that I love,” she explains, citing Sophie and Lana Del Rey as inspirations. “It was kind of thanks to ‘Friday’ that I cultivated my interests as much as I did, because I was always on my computer, on Tumblr. I didn’t have a lot of friends. I spent so much time alone that it made me a big daydreamer.” Over the past six years, specifically, Black has been focused on “changing the worlds” she was in and entering a new realm of courageous creativity.

Today, that’s Salvation: her sexy, bizarre, synth-y seven-track project that looks the world in the eye. The title song is about queerness, being disgusting and trusting yourself. (“I’ll stay hot and you stay judgy,” she purrs.) It masterfully uses the auto-tune that was once weaponized against her. Its visuals toy with Americana—satirizing pageant sashes and Western-wear. She references queer codes through drag and unadulterated irony. She’s big on tackiness: sequin micro shorts, peekaboo bras and graphic tees that say things like “90% bitch, 10% angel”.

Like Charli xcx’s chartreuse-coloured Brat and Addison Rae’s weirdo fantasy world-building, Salvation belongs to a new era of pop music, defined by distorted melodies and intentionally off-putting aesthetics. “Dumb, big, impractical” are the words she uses to describe her current look. “There’s a lot of joy in it.”

The further she’s gotten from “Friday”, the more Rebecca Black has come to embrace it in all its weirdness—along with the rest of the world. Since the dawn of the decade, it’s been named a “high-camp masterpiece” and heralded as “ahead-of-its-time” art. What does Black make of this newfound critical acclaim? “I think the way taste and time work together creates this fluid relationship,” she reflects. “There’s an ever-flowing conversation to be had about what relevance taste even has to the goodness of something… A purposeful lack of taste is also cool.” These days, that’s exactly what she’s going for.

I see the power of this choice hours after our chat, when I return to the now-packed venue for her concert. To commence the set, a warped rendition of her seminal song begins to play, the nasally echo of her teen voice amplified against a building synth. Fri-Fri-Fri-Fridayyyy, the remix teases. Adoring screams erupt.

Two male dancers walk on stage and start making out. Black emerges wearing an “I’m ❤️ Confused” shirt and sunglasses, with white gauzy cloth constricting her arms. Her new hit “Tears In My Pocket” begins, and the muscular models pull apart her fabric bondage as she sways slowly against a flashing LED backdrop. Unbound, Rebecca Black is free.