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It’s been 12 years since the release of “Friday,” the accidentally viral hit sung by pop performer Rebecca Black. At the time, Black was 13 years old and completely overwhelmed by the public response. The music video received 1.2 million downvotes on YouTube, surpassing Justin Bieber’s “Baby” as the most disliked video on the platform. Combined with a maelstrom of internet trolling, the backlash made Black feel, as she stated in a heartbreaking 2020 tweet, “ashamed of herself and afraid of the world.” But even then, the queer community had her back.
“The only people I would see fight for me or even just empathize with me were people who were queer and who really understood my experience,” Black tells me from the plush vinyl booth of the Clark Street Diner near the 101 freeway, a smoggy tributary cutting through the heart of Hollywood. “That was really helpful for me as a kid, to be like, ‘Okay, this isn’t that bad. I can figure this out. I’m not alone.’”
It’s painful to imagine the warm and confident Black ever feeling cut off from the world. Now 25 years old, the singer has come into her own, reinventing herself as an artist on her incendiary debut album Let Her Burn after coming out as queer in 2020. Her disarming smile makes frequent appearances between bites of chocolate chip pancakes and sips of Diet Coke, which Black loves, especially if it’s poured from a soda fountain. But far from wanting to disavow her past, Black hopes her fans can learn something from the judgment she endured in her teenage years.
“Defining anybody by what they created as a child is horrible. But I got through it. If my story can help people with something that is traumatic or anything that is really difficult, great,” she says, with genuine compassion in her voice.
For Black, everyone deserves the chance to tell their own story on their own terms — and from that perspective, Let Her Burn is a hell of an opening chapter. Tracks like the Oscar Scheller produced “Doe-Eyed” finds Black exploring her sexuality and queerness front and center. Through bass-heavy 808 beats and Oneohtrix Point Never-inspired synths, Black sings, “Get down, my turn, scream my name / Handcuff me to the bed frame.” The musician says writing a seductive track that was so “explicit and unserious” felt empowering, especially after coming out. And with lyrics like, “Got a little kitty with a big dream / Come and lick it up like it’s strawberry cream,” it’s easy to see why. This album isn’t just a debut; it’s a ceremonial burning of her past persona, finding the artist taking back her own narrative.
“My intention is like, here I am as a pop star, take it or leave it,” Black tells me. “No matter what happened to me before this, I am here to make music that is just as good and exciting as everybody else out here. And if you don’t see it and don’t want to take it, that’s fine, but just know that that’s why I'm here. I’m not here just to redeem myself.”
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The title of the album, Let Her Burn, evokes the Salem witch trials, but perhaps a more fitting image might be a phoenix rising from ashes. On “Destroy Me,” Black dives headfirst into her past trauma, disarming her haters by exposing her own insecurity. “[The song] is about trying to find a way to let that go in a way where it feels like I have power over it, like, ‘Yes. Go ahead and destroy me. Everyone does it,’” she tells me. “The reality is we're all trying to find empowerment from really dark places in our lives.”
But although Black has clearly matured and healed through making this album, she still sees herself as being in an ever-evolving chrysalis stage of her career. “I’m not necessarily coming to you with this album of ‘I am a finished, perfectly confident person,’” she says.
That continuous evolution includes aspects of Black’s own identity that the singer is still working to understand and communicate to the outside world. For one, news of her queerness has apparently not yet spread to every corner of her following. “Well, I just apparently came out again two weeks ago on Twitter when I talked about having a girlfriend,” Black jokes. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh my God, congrats on coming out.’ And I was like, ‘I thought we did this two years ago.’”
While on the Dating Straight podcast in April of 2020, Black spoke about a breakup with a girlfriend, subsequently coming out as queer. Black’s current partner, Veronika Wyman, seems to be her astrological match. Black is a Cancer surrounded by earth signs and Wyman is a Libra with lots of Scorpio in her chart. “I think what we have in common is that she’s deeply emotional and really sensitive, but not in a way that’s chaotic,” Black says. “We’re just really here to listen to each other.”
Although she’s playful about all of this, Black clearly doesn’t take being an out LGBTQ+ musician lightly, and she is continually processing what it means to have the platform she does. “Not only am I a queer musician, I’m now a spokesperson whether or not I want to be. And that carries responsibilities. I just try to not speak for the entire community, I speak from my own experience,” she says.
Black is also thinking deeply about her relationship to her Hispanic heritage and her own family’s history. Black’s mother is from Mexico City but growing up in Orange County, a bastion of white affluent conservatism, she felt removed from her Latinx roots.
“It felt like this part of myself that I honestly had no connection with and was kind of told, ‘You’re Mexican, but you’re not.’” It wasn’t something to talk about or explore within myself,” Black recalls. “I know that my mom really struggled with that as a Mexican immigrant. I think she maybe regrets not letting Spanish become a part of our upbringing.”
The singer is empathetic to her mother’s struggles, acknowledging that assimilation is a complex issue influenced by the politics of the time. But after realizing how common her experience is, especially in places like Orange County, she has come to believe that speaking openly and transparently about her own journey can help other people navigate similar circumstances.
“I don't want to come out here and say, ‘I’ve been a proud Mexican American my whole life.’ because I unfortunately wasn’t brought up that way,” she says. “But now it’s such a beautiful piece of my family and of my relationship with my mother. I know that a lot of Hispanic people in my same realm have really struggled with that as well. I’m just trying to be honest about it.”
That commitment to honesty and authenticity is evident both from Black’s new album, and in the enthusiasm with which she discusses its craft. Pop was once a source of pain for Black; now it seems to spark pure joy. She uses words like “tinsely” and “synthetic” to describe the record’s myriad and variegated sounds. She delights in sharing technical factoids about the record that only a real music nerd like myself would appreciate. In between coffees, we get lost on philosophical tangents, waxing poetic about the power of pop music. She talks about her fantasy of collaboration with Prince, wanting to work with Skrillex, and her unabashed love of Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream.
“I love making pop in this current time. It is such an exciting moment for pop music,” Black says, citing artists like SOPHIE and Charli XCX as inspirations. “The horizon has just broadened. And I think that has allowed for people like me to come in and say, ‘I’m here and I can make something that is serious and really good and fun and insane.’”
If that was her mission, Black has succeeded. Let Her Burn is an unbridled and confident debut. It’s a bold genre-melding patchwork whose vibes zig-zag at breakneck speed, from the sexed-up club anthem “Crumbs” to the Y2K flavored nu-metal pop of “Destroy Me” to the ’80s-inspired single “Sick to My Stomach,” which gives Carly Rae Jepson a run for her money. But what unifies the genre-hopping journey are the echoes of her 2011 hit: cranked out auto-tune, harsh compressed synth sounds, and feverishly saccharine vibes. In many ways, “Friday” has boomeranged back into music production, influencing hyperpop artists like 100 gecs and Slayyter.
Black shares with me that in conversations with album producer, A.G. Cook, she learned not just about his love for “Friday,” but for ARK Music Factory, the team which wrote the 2011 single and many others of that era. This only deepens my theory that “Friday” was the origin of hyperpop — and with a knowing smirk, Black tells me, “I’ve seen the conspiracies on the internet for sure.”
Other artists might be tempted to put “Friday” in the rearview, but Black has realized that she can both reclaim her roots and present a bold new direction. By this point, she has fully recontextualized and embraced the iconic but once triggering hit, folding it seamlessly into her setlists. While on her first headlining tour last year the singer realized the power that “Friday” has over a crowd. “People die for that song,” she says, “It was so exciting and healing for me to have this song be a moment I know people are going to gag for. That’s super sick.”
As the tides of popular opinion turn, and in an era where there really are no guilty pleasures, it would appear that 2023 is Rebecca Black’s year — and she knows it. Let Her Burn is at its core an album about freedom. For Black, it’s about freedom from the past, the freedom to move forward, and the freedom, at last, to be a pop star.
Let Her Burn is available February 9. Rebecca Black will tour North America this spring.
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