Rebecca Black is saving pop music

Fifteen years ago the whole internet decided a thirteen-year-old was the worst thing that ever happened to music. She just released one of the best pop records of the year. Funny how that works.

Let's go back to 2011 for a second, because you need the before to get the after. A thirteen-year-old girl puts out a song called "Friday," the internet loses its mind, and for the better part of a year she becomes the single most mocked human being on the planet. A kid, piled on by millions of grown adults who treated bullying a teenager like a group activity. It was ugly, and most of us were at least a little complicit in it, even if all we did was laugh along.

Here's where it gets good. That same girl is twenty-eight now. She writes, she produces, she DJs, and she just self-released a second album that's thrilling and filthy and clever, the kind of pop record half this year's chart-toppers would kill to have made. She survived the worst start a pop career has ever had and then came back running laps around everyone who laughed.

And Friday wasn't a bad song. It kinda eats. Can we admit that now?

the album is called Age of the Exhibitionist and it is a statement

Out in September, twelve tracks, self-released, so no major label steering the ship, just her. The title tells you the whole thesis. Age of the Exhibitionist is about performance, about being watched, about what it does to a person to spend their whole life under a camera that never once turned off. Who better to make that record than the woman who got famous as a punchline before she could legally drive.

The lead singles set the temperature fast. "Speakerphone" and "Hot Wet Delirious" are sweaty, confident, maximalist club records with zero interest in begging anyone for approval. She kicked the door off the hinges and walked in like she owned the place.

she is in on the joke, all of it

The smartest thing about this record is how knowing it is. Rebecca Black has spent fifteen years watching the internet talk about her, and she turned every bit of it into material. The album pokes at stan Twitter, at the exhausting churn of online discourse, at the machine that builds people up just to tear them down for content. She's not pretending the last decade and a half didn't happen. She's standing on top of it.

Tracks like "Corsetry" and "Anaheim Star" show off range and a real point of view, and then there is "Michael," which is the quietest, most personal thing on the record and probably the one that lingers longest. On an album this loud and knowing, it is the song where she drops the volume and just lets you sit with her.

why the gays were always going to win this one

Of course we claimed her. We always do, and this time we were early and we were right.

Think about the arc for a second. Public humiliation, a long wilderness stretch, a flat refusal to disappear, and a triumphant return as a fully realized, self-made, unapologetically queer artist. Call it a comeback if you want, but really that's the most gay narrative structure there is. She came out in 2021, landed on Variety's Power of Pride list, and leaned all the way into the kind of pop that lives and dies in our clubs, sweaty, knowing, dance-floor first.

She made her Boiler Room debut. She opened for Katy Perry on the Lifetimes tour. She DJs, she produces, she does the unglamorous technical work most pop stars outsource. Nobody handed her a second act. She got written off, went away for a while, and quietly came back great.

so here is the actual argument

Pop right now is in a weird, cautious place. So much of it is algorithm-tested, risk-averse, engineered to be inoffensive enough to soundtrack a car ad. Everyone's terrified of getting clowned online, which is funny, because the one person least afraid of getting clowned online is the woman who already survived the worst version of it at thirteen.

That fearlessness is the thing pop is starving for, and it's the thing Rebecca Black is handing out for free. Age of the Exhibitionist gets weird when it could play it safe and gets personal when most records would coast. It sounds like someone who went through the fire and came out the other side free. The Exhibitionism tour is rolling through the fall, DC on the fifteenth, Montreal on the twentieth, and if you've been sleeping on her because your last memory is a fourteen-year-old meme, you're about fifteen years behind.

The girl we all laughed at grew up and made something great. Least we can do now is dance to it.

editor's fave: "Michael"

If you only play one track off the record, make it "Michael."

It is the quiet one. Less about the drop, more about the writing, a little sly and a little tender, and on an album this loud and knowing it is the moment she turns the volume down and just lets you sit with her. You can hear her enjoying the fact that she gets to decide what she gets to be now. After everything, that is the part that gets me.