Thelife- When "Friday" went mega-viral in March 2011, 13-year-old
Rebecca Black was relentlessly ridiculed for the heavily auto-tuned tween tribute to the weekend. - It remains one of the most disliked videos in
YouTube history. - Unlike many of the videos that went viral in the 2010s, however, "Friday" has aged like a fine wine.
- Today, it's widely considered one of the decade's "most important music moments."
- Having already lived a full internet life, Black is now in her early twenties and ready for a brave, new era as a queer pop contender.
Rebecca Black is ready for her moment, or rather, her second.
Hoop earrings swinging to the beat, lip gloss shimmering, a glass of white wine close at hand, her late-night DJ set for Club Quarantine felt like a first look at the confident queer icon she's become in the nine years since "Friday." When she played the infamous single, in between tracks by Yaegi, Slayyyter, and Rina Sawayama, the virtual dance party's chatbox exploded with comments.
"This song was ahead of its time," one fan declared.
"We love a camp queen," another announced.
—club quarantine (@reachclubq) April 16, 2020
In 2011, at the universally awkward age of 13, Black accidentally became the poster child for internet stardom when "Friday," the cringe pop hit that defined a decade, went viral.
With her mother's support, Black paid $4,000 to record the song and video through a vanity record label named ARK Music Factory as a fun, resume-building experience. Back then, Black was an eighth-grade honors student with big, theatre kid dreams, a zit on her right cheek, and a life-sized Justin Bieber cut-out in her bedroom at home, who'd get on stage at lunchtime to sing and do cartwheels. She was already dealing with the same kind of "low-grade bullying" most teens face, but after "Friday," it intensified to the point of abuse. Eventually, she was forced to drop out.
"Gosh, I forget that I was so young when I started," she said, reflecting. "Because I mean, I feel like I'm a 45, I don't know, million-year-old woman at this point. I'm 22, and I have to be reminded of that all the time. And that's okay. It comes with whatever age it comes with. Everybody has a different timeline for their lives, of when they're going to start figuring things out."
—Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) March 19, 2011
The all-encompassing phenomenon of "Friday" had a lot to do with how and when it went viral. The song and video instantly became internet canon, propelled by a snarky shout-out on the Tosh.0 blog and a tweet from comedian Michael J. Nelson. (It seems archaic now, but back then, we still needed people like Daniel Tosh and Ray William Johnson to help us discover "funny" content online).
Critics, at the time, wondered whether Black would embrace the "ironic adoration" or fizzle out, eventually joining a "pantheon of ironic music stars" and "so-bad-it's-good Internet memes, like 7-year-old rapper Matty B or American Idol's Sanjaya." Lady Gaga, forever ahead of her time, countered by calling Black "a genius." And in the years since Friday's release, pop
Black could have logged off forever and allowed herself to be branded the "Friday girl." But to her credit, she didn't.
In 2013, she caught the YouTube vlogger wave as it was cresting, and quickly befriended popular fellow creators like Alexa Losey and Dave Days, with whom she released a spiritual sequel to "Friday," fittingly titled "Saturday."
"I found myself on the internet so much more than I ever did in high school. For me, this was my high school — FaceTiming my friends for eight hours and sometimes doing, like, FaceTime sleepovers where we both go to sleep and then wake up and like, we've been on FaceTime the whole time. Because we all lived halfway across the country from each other or sometimes halfway across the world."
Although Black suffered unrelenting criticism and cruelty on the internet in early adolescence, she later found comfort, community, and ultimately, redemption there, too. Now, she knows how to play into the "Friday thing" without letting it solely define her.
"I think that it's really cool to own those things and I wish I could have known that a few years ago, when I felt like all I was doing was trying to run away. And the faster that I ran, the faster it just caught up with me," she said.
"What I've learned is, it's my story, and I can do what I want with it."
For years, Black made "a conscious decision not to come out." But when she finally did, on the heels of a breakup with a long-term partner, it felt like a homecoming of sorts — she's been a DragCon regular and a vocal advocate for LGBT rights for years. Her journey to self-discovery has been more circuitous than others. But "the new queen of gay bops is here," just in time to celebrate Pride month as an openly queer person for the very first time.
"For me, it took time to identify those things within myself — coming to terms with my queerness, coming to terms with being Hispanic, and coming from a Mexican immigrant mom, and like, obviously, all of the 'Friday' stuff."
"I don't know if I could have really planned how that would all work itself out," she said. "I'm still figuring things out as I go. So, as long as people feel like they can connect with me or whatever I'm creating on some level, then awesome...I feel like I know where I fit."