How Rebecca Black found success as a hit DJ – over a decade after releasing ‘the worst song ever’ and being mercilessly trolled at age 13

When it was released, Friday exposed its 13-year-old singer Rebecca Black to such vicious trolling, she wasn’t sure she’d survive it. 

Over a decade later, Rebecca, now 27, is thriving – much less surviving. 

The American songstress has just released her second album, titled Salvation, and been announced as Grammy winner Katy Perry’s opening act on her new Lifetimes tour. 

She’s also the main attraction of her Salvation tour that will see the hit DJ and popstar travel across North America and the UK with her music, as she looks world’s away from the timid teenager whose first brush with fame left her reeling. 

Friday was dubbed the ‘worst song ever’ within a month of its release, as Rebecca found herself the subject of cruel parodies, hateful comments telling her to ‘cut yourself and get an eating disorder’, and even death threats. 

Which makes her comeback story even more incredible, as Rebecca relaunches her music career with Salvation that’s the highest point of her redemption arc so far.  

While the album and its title track has received mixed reviews from critics, the YouTube comments under the music video of the hyperpop title track are overwhelmingly positive. 

‘From having the most hated song on the internet to this..she’s grown so much,’ one person wrote. 

‘This has literally been on repeat all day like it’s that serious. i genuinely think this is one of the best pop songs ever made,’ another said. 

‘Between [Rebecca Black]’s bops, Sabrina’s tunes, Chappell’s slaps and Gaga’s return to her roots…..POP is back baby!!’ a third YouTube user placed Rebecca in the same league as Grammy-winning popstars. 

As Rebecca emerges reclaims her career after the crippling failure of Friday, Femail revisits her story – from her turbulent teenage years to becoming a ‘camp icon’ who is being billed as ‘America’s answer’ to Britpop sensation Charli XCX: 

Life before Friday 

Rebecca grew up in the family-friendly Californian suburb of Irvine where she attended a private school until sixth grade before moving to public school after ‘experiencing the same low-grade bullying that most kids do’. 

Her parents, mother Georgina Marquez Kelly and father John Black were both veterinarians who – despite their divorce – remained close with each other. 

In 2010, Georgina paid a little-known musical production company $4,000 to write a song for Rebecca, who had joined the musical theatre program at her new school. 

The well-meaning mother-of-two wanted Rebecca, then 13, to get a ‘glimpse of what it takes’ to build a successful career in the music industry that was, at the time, busy making Canadian teen Justin Bieber ‘the next big thing’. 

Ultimately, the California native continued, she was hoping to ‘discourage’ the teen when she commissioned Ark Music Factory co-founder Patrice Wilson’s songwriting services. 

Wilson’s first track, called Super Woman, about a woman in love didn’t feel right for Rebecca because it was about ‘adult love’, so she went with Friday – a light-hearted song about a teenager counting down to the weekend. 

Despite her mother’s reservations about some of the lyrics, Rebecca went ahead and recorded the song and starred in its amateurish music video that was filmed at her father’s house, and all but forgot about her first foray into the industry. 

Little did she know that Friday would live in internet infamy after its music video, Rebecca’s heavily autotuned vocals, and the song’s inane lyrics (‘Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday, Today i-is Friday, Friday’) were widely mocked, parodied, and derided. 

The worst day of the week 

When she recorded Friday, Rebecca believed the song wouldn’t travel further than her circle of friends and family – and she might have been right had the tween pop song not come to American comedian Daniel Tosh’s attention. 

One month after Ark uploaded the song’s music video to YouTube, Rebecca received an ominous email from a stranger who warned her that Friday was ‘gunna be tore up, but you will be famous’. 

Both of these predictions came true and Rebecca watched in horror as the views on the YouTube video kept rising steadily – from a modest 4,000 to 100 million – as Friday trended on X as the ‘worst song ever’ and made its creator the most Googled person of 2011. 

Just three months after it was released, the song had amassed over 166 million views on YouTube – but the majority of engagement with it was negative, including an overwhelming three million ‘dislikes’. 

The comments section was overrun with vitriolic comments about her musical capabilites and her appearance, as one person wrote: ‘I hope you cut yourself, and I hope you get an eating disorder so you’ll look pretty.’

Another suggested Rebecca ‘go die in a hole’. 

‘When I first saw all these nasty comments, I thought this is all my fault,’ the youngster said. ‘[I thought] this was all because of me.’  

As Friday spread like wildfire, and the spotlight shone far too harshly on Rebecca, false rumours about her also began to circulate online – including one that she was pregnant. 

‘Waking up to a rumour that you’re pregnant is not fun,’ Rebecca, then 14, told ABC.  ‘It’s just frustrating, because I’m still excited over my first kiss.’

By June 2011, Friday had been pulled from YouTube over the internet and, in August, Rebecca revealed she had been taken out of school after being cruelly mocked by her classmates.

She told ABC News that they would repeatedly ask her what day of the year it was and sing Friday whenever she walked past. 

Such was the hatred for Friday and, by extension, Rebecca that she also began to receive death threats that were investigated by the police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

The threats – one by email and one by phone – demanded Rebecca take Friday down ‘or else’ as an investigating officer revealed they ‘specifically mention that they were going to take her life’. 

The terrible teens 

As the years went on, Rebecca struggled to acclimatise to her newfound internet celebrity status. 

She tried to make sense of it in a self-produced single called ‘My Moment’ that was released five months after Friday, before releasing her third single ‘Person of Interest’ about teenage crushes as Rebecca struggled to hit the right note. 

Plans for her debut studio album, which was scheduled for release in 2011, fell through and – apart from her sequel to Friday (titled Saturday) – Rebecca’s music career flatlined. 

Against this backdrop, she embarked on a YouTube career as she tried to reclaim the platform with her brand of vlogs, Q&A-style videos, and, occasionally, covers of songs by artists like Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, and The Weeknd. 

But she never escaped the fallout from Friday, as Rebecca admitted feeling depressed and lonely at the age of 15. 

She also revealed her high school classmates threw food at her and her friends. 

‘[The backlash] certainly affected me growing up, in positive and negative ways, as to who I am and the insecurities I had as a teenager,’ she told Billboard in 2019. 

‘It’s been a really weird journey. It’s definitely not been an easy, feel-good story.’

Healing 

After a three-year hiatus from music, the American singer dipped her toes back in the industry and released her debut EP, RE/BL, at the age of 19. 

It was also around the same time that Rebecca began openly speaking about her ‘very complicated feelings’ about Friday that she described as such an ‘unusual start’ to her music career.

‘No one can prepare you on how to deal with that,’ Rebecca, then 21, told The Project, an Australian news programme, in 2018. ‘There is no class to go to, there is no teacher or mentor. 

‘I don’t think the world of the internet had realised the consequences that it can have to a person.’ 

YouTube was still relatively uncharted territory when Rebecca became one of its earliest sensations, as the fresh-faced singer – looking world’s away from her 13-year-old self – compared what she experienced to the ‘Wild West’. 

She admitted the ‘onslaught of negative attention…was so sudden and so intense that I wasn’t sure I would survive’ in a moving essay that was published six years after online trolls descended on Rebecca’s suburban Californian life. 

‘People were writing things all over the internet, on social media and they were laughing at me on TV shows, and making fun of me in YouTube videos,’ Rebecca wrote. 

‘It was open season and I was the target. The fact that there was a human, a person  – a 13-year-old girl – on the other side of the screen seemingly escaped so many people’s attention.’ 

By 2017, however, Rebecca had begun to heal from her past as she channelled her experiences into Love Is Love – a tour she headlined alongside fellow YouTube stars Miles McKenna and Shannon Beveridge – with a message of positivity and self-love. 

As ‘one of the first people to experience online bullying’, Rebecca emerged the likeliest champion for others like her, with the 20-year-old writing: ‘Internet bullying is not inevitable, if we allow ourselves to learn a bit more and stand up for others and what’s right.

‘And I’m seeing people bravely speaking up about how they have been bullied and hurt, to try to give other people hope that things can get better. 

‘That’s why I’ve chosen to add my voice to the chorus.’ 

‘Every day is different’ 

Rebecca came out as queer in April 2020 when she told the hosts of the Dating Straight podcast she had recently broken up a woman. 

When asked how she specifically identifies, Rebecca said ‘every day is different’ but feels most comfortable labelling herself as queer. 

‘To me, the word ‘queer’ feels really nice. I have dated a lot of different types of people, and I just don’t really know what the future holds. Some days, I feel a little more on the ‘gay’ side than others.’ 

The same year, she also marked the nine-year anniversary of Friday with a heartfelt Instagram post as she admitted how she was ‘terribly ashamed’, depressed, and tormented at school.   

‘Nine years ago today, a music video for a song called ‘Friday’ was uploaded to the internet,’ she wrote on February 10.

‘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 went on.

‘To my 15-year-old self, who felt like she had nobody to talk to about the depression she faced.

‘To my 17-year-old self, who would get to school only to get food thrown at her and her friends.

‘To my 19-year-old, self who had almost every producer/songwriter tell me they’d never work with me. 

‘Hell, to myself a few days ago, who felt disgusting when she looked in the mirror!’ she continued, as she affirmed no one is ‘defined by any one choice or thing’. 

It’s Friday again! 

By the following year, Rebecca had embraced Friday for everything it brought her – and everything it taught her – as she released a new remix of the song Big Freedia, 3OH!3, and Dorian Electra to mark its 10-year anniversary. 

Commemorating the momentous occasion ahead of the release she wrote, ‘this week FRIDAY turns 10 AND has gone GOLD. been cooking up a very special remix featuring some iconic people.’ 

She also recreated the original music video’s iconic convertible driving scene, with the blue-haired Rebecca showing off her new, edgy persona as she rocked a faux leather leotard with studs while driving with the gold plaque in her passenger seat.

Her vocals had been sped up and the pitch elevated for a more grown-up, electronic sound that was complemented by its trippy, three-minute music video. 

Fans praised the hyperpop recreation of Friday as well as its ‘genius’ video – but what most impressed listeners was Rebecca’s sense of humour about the widely-derided original.  

‘I just want to add kudos to this b**** for doing this,’ one person wrote. 

‘The poor girl received so much f***ing unnecessary hate for this song 10 years ago that easily could have made any other teenager make really really bad decisions. 

‘But instead she took it all in stride and ten years later makes this incredibly humorous remix. I think she deserves an incredible amount of praise for that at least.’ 

New beginnings and finding salvation   

When Rebecca kickstarted her DJ career last year – by playing a Boiler Room set no less – the singer paid homage to Friday again as she remixed the song with Charli XCX’s 360. 

A video of the mashup quickly went viral and Rebecca later quipped‘I will stop playing Friday when my therapy bills are recouped’ while playfully reflecting on the years of backlash she endured over a decage ago. 

Speaking to The Times, after the release of her second album Salvation, Rebecca explained why she has carried Friday with her all these years. 

‘The farther you try to run away from something, the faster it’s gonna catch you,’ she said. 

Today, Rebecca has her own group of loyal fans, known as ‘Rebesties’, and is friends with some of the people who parodied Friday all those year ago, she told the newspaper. 

‘I don’t have any intention of acting like it never existed,’ she continued. ‘It’s way more interesting for me to reinvent it every time.’