Rebecca Black: 14 years after the "Friday" disaster, the singer returns transformed

This is the story of a pack relentlessness like the web of the 2010s has rarely seen. That of Rebecca Black, an American girl who was a young teenager at the time and became the laughing stock of the United States in 2011 - and far beyond - because of a harmless and soothing song called Friday . Fourteen years after the indisputable catastrophe, the 27-year-old singer returns transformed into an alternative artist with a new EP called Salvation , this Thursday, February 27.

She will be promoting this new album starting in March with an international tour, in the United States but also in Europe. She will notably be stopping off in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Bristol, London, Manchester, Glasgow and Dublin in the coming weeks . Enough, perhaps, to definitively leave behind the fiasco that made her the laughing stock of the world while she was still in middle school.

Passionate about the performing arts since childhood, Rebecca Black was 13 when a friend told her about ARK Music Factory, a small label that produced children's songs for very young aspiring singers. With her parents' approval, the Californian schoolgirl recorded a song with them and shot a video to accompany it.

Friday is an ode to Friday night, with a mind-numbing text ("Yesterday was Thursday, tomorrow will be Saturday, and Sunday will come after") sung in a nasal voice by Rebecca Black - one suspects an unfortunate use of autotune - all dressed up in a video whose staging betrays a very limited budget ($4,000 in total, according to the New York Times ).

Add to this already unfavorable cocktail the internet of the 2010s, the scene of the advent of social networks still in their infancy, at a time when the notion of cyberbullying had not yet become established in public debate; you get the recipe for a massacre.

"For me, it was just a fun thing to do over Christmas break," Rebecca Black recalls today in an interview with Vice .

The middle schooler had no creative control over the project, ARK offered her the song as is. "Basically, I went in, recorded my vocals, and they did what they wanted with it. Same thing with the music video."

The video was uploaded to YouTube on February 10, 2011 ("I didn't see a single version of the clip before it was uploaded," says Rebecca Black) to the indifference of the world. It would take a month for the magic of the web to work.

The song came out of the shadows on March 11, when it was relayed by American comedian Daniel Tosh on his own blog , accompanied by the note: "Songwriting is not for everyone." The same day, the popular site Buzzfeed published an article titled "This is literally the worst thing I have ever heard."

That weekend, Friday 's YouTube views went from a thousand to a million, as reported by the Washington Post . The machine was launched and nothing seemed to be able to stop it: the title quickly established itself as a semi-commercial success, ranking 58th in the American Top 100 .

As the Sydney Morning Herald reported at the time, Friday became the most-talked-about topic on Twitter in March 2011, overtaking... Japan, which was being ravaged by an earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear disaster all at once. And what people had to say about it would paralyze anyone with fear - let alone a 13-year-old girl.

"You're so fat," "You can't sing," "I hope you die," and "You should get an eating disorder, it would make you prettier" were among the tens of thousands of comments that appeared on young Rebecca Black's computer screen every day, as reported by ABC News at the time. She would even be the target of death threats, revealed by the Anaheim police .

Friday ends 2011 as the most-watched video of the year on YouTube . Once a simple schoolgirl, Rebecca Black is suddenly propelled to the rank of national phenomenon. Stephen Colbert, star host of a talk show, performs the song on his colleague Jimmy Fallon's show, while Rebecca Black multiplies interviews on the most-watched sets in the United States ( The Tonight Show With Jay Leno , Good Morning America ).

The wave spread well beyond the United States. In France, for example, Daphné Burki delivered a parody of the song on the show Tout le monde il est beau, tout le monde il est gentil , broadcast at the time on Canal+ and presented by Bruce Toussaint.

"At first, when I saw the mean comments, I cried," Rebecca Black said at the time . "I felt like it was my fault (...) Today, I don't feel that way anymore."

The few prestigious endorsements that punctuated her year 2011 undoubtedly helped. "Rebecca Black is a genius, and anyone who tells her she's old-fashioned is talking crap," Lady Gaga herself berated. The musical series Glee , which was enjoying phenomenal success across the Atlantic at the time, covered her song in one of its episodes. Katy Perry, then at the height of her career , went even further by making Rebecca Black one of the main actresses in her video clip Last Friday Night (TGIF) .

But behind the scenes, the young girl suffered more than she let on: "I was so much sadder than I wanted to admit," she confided to Vice in 2020. "No one wants to feel like the whole world is laughing at them, and that's true at any age."

"I wish I could talk to the 13-year-old me who was so ashamed of herself and so afraid of the world," she wrote on Instagram years later.

Bullied by her classmates, the young girl dropped out of school and was homeschooled for a few years, during which time she went through a period of depression. When she returned to high school, for the first and final years, the bullying resumed. After graduating high school, she decided to skip college and moved to Los Angeles to pursue her musical ambitions.

Because Rebecca Black never gave up on music. After a series of uninspired singles released in the wake of Friday to capitalize on this unexpected success, the singer first maintained a media presence with videos published on YouTube and then unveiled a first EP, RE/BL , in 2017. She has released three since, as well as a first album in 2023 entitled Let Her Burn .

By signing some big hits. That year, she opened for Blackpink , global K-Pop superstars, alongside Sabrina Carpenter, who has since had global success with her hit Espresso .

"I struggled with a lot of resentment after ('Friday') and the experience (that song) was. But there comes a point where you have to move on, or that weight crushes you," she told Buzzfeed in 2021.

To find some lightness, Rebecca Black continued her momentum by venturing ever further into electro. The break with Friday is definitively consummated on Salvation , available this Thursday. A hyperpop exercise in the lineage of artists combining popular successes and alternative sounds like Kim Petras, Slayyyter or Charli XCX , who signed the hit of last summer with her album Brat .

Without denying the song that propelled her into the spotlight: last October, the DJ took to the decks at the Boiler Room, a famous club in Washington. And ended her set with a remix of Friday , mixed with the musical layer of 360 by Charli XCX. In front of an entire room of clubbers singing these lyrics violently mocked 14 years ago, Rebecca Black exults.

"I think Friday really forced me to learn how to stand up for myself and take charge of my own life," she told Variety in 2021. "It taught me a lot about strength, and how important it is to project that in your art. As an artist, one of the most important things is to have your own perspective and why you do things. And Friday taught me a lot about my 'why.'"