Rebecca Black Doesn’t Need Anyone To Save Her

New York’s hottest club is the Margaritaville in Times Square, at least according to Rebecca Black. This place has everything: vaguely island-inspired cuisine, tropical storm effects, and a two-story-tall Statue of Liberty that doubles as a VIP booth. Jimmy Buffett is playing on loop.

“It's a perfect vibe for my chaotic, slightly hungover self this morning,” Black tells me as we sit down for lunch on a dreary Tuesday, overlooking Times Square traffic and the fake Lady Liberty. “One of my favorite things to do is go to chain restaurants, because they're delicious and perfect and so comfortable.”

At home in Los Angeles, Black drives half an hour for Chili’s viral Triple Dippers, but since there’s no Chili’s in Manhattan, she had to look elsewhere. “How crazy would it be if I got a New York strip steak?” she asks. Instead, she settles for a chicken quesadilla.

If anyone would know New York’s hottest clubs without living in the city, it might be Black. The 27-year-old singer has blossomed from the teenager who gave us “Friday,” one of the first YouTube-viral smashes in pop culture, into an unexpectedly ambitious and experimental rising star in queer pop. She staked her claim in the club world last October with a Boiler Room DJ set in Washington D.C., closing with a brilliant mashup of “Friday” and Charli XCX’s “360.” As one TikTok commenter put it, “maybe friday was brat all along and we were too naive to see it.”

Black’s nightlife queen reputation is about to be cemented with her next musical endeavor. “I wanted to do something that feels very loud and brash and allow myself to take up space in a way that I haven't before,” says Black, whose 2023 album Let Her Burn features everything from hard rock to ‘80s-inspired soundscapes.

The result is Salvation, out Feb. 27, a seven-track odyssey that takes Black on a journey of self-discovery through liberating dance-pop. It’s not quite an album, but it’s not an EP, either. Even Black isn’t entirely sure of “whatever the f*ck Salvation is,” but if she had to pin it down, it’s a mission statement about trusting her instincts, which inspired the title track.

“This was my first project that wasn't dominated by heartbreak or love, so a lot of it was searching for, ‘What is this about? What am I trying to say?’” she says. “I was sitting on the tube in London listening to music and the word ‘salvation’ came into my head. It very quickly became a song about not needing to be saved, and taking things that other people think you should do and throwing them out the window for the sake of learning to trust your gut.”

Black embraces every aspect of her messy 20s in Salvation, from syncopated, horny bangers like “Sugar Water Cyanide” to darker tracks like “American Doll” about the pressures facing female stars. It ends with “Twist the Knife,” a cinematic dance stomper that tells a story of revenge-fueled murder. “Maybe it’s a Luigi [Mangione] anthem?” Black says. “I have nothing else to say on that, I'm not going to dig myself into a hole.”

It was always in Black’s destiny to land in the growing queer pop space. She grew up in Irvine, California, and like many Zillennials, she spent her nights on Tumblr. “I'm a child of the internet,” she says. “So much of how I see the world is shaped by my years on Tumblr, being alone in my house, and the ways I've learned to perceive myself through watching other women get perceived on the internet.”

Of course, she didn’t expect to become the object of the internet’s attention at the tender age of 13. As every chronically online person knows, “Friday” was inescapable in 2011, birthing countless parody videos and landing Black major interviews (like one when an ABC News reporter read hate comments out loud and asked her to respond). The backlash caused damage to Black’s mental health, which she tweeted about in September as her Boiler Room set went viral. “I will stop playing ‘Friday’ when my therapy bills are recouped.”

“I've been so surprised by people who know the lore ... I’m a dissociative queen.”

While she can joke about it now, Black has mostly blocked out that period of her life. “I've been so surprised by people who know the lore, sometimes better than me,” she says. “I'm a dissociative queen. Horrible memory. I smoked a lot of weed as a teenager, so I think that had to do with it.”

What Black does remember is trying to salvage the benefits of “Friday” and build a career. She dropped out of high school to be homeschooled and followed up “Friday” with more teen pop, like coming-of-age anthems “My Moment” and “Person of Interest.” These songs haven’t aged well for her. “I don't listen to them often, if ever. I don't think that would bring me a lot of joy,” she says. “But I have an appreciation for those little experiences somehow twistedly getting me to where I am now. I didn't have a lot of choices back then. I was guided to trust elders around me. That's the only thing that makes me not like those songs.”

Instant teenage stardom came with lots of responsibilities she didn't expect. “All of a sudden you have these big questions about your career and priorities and financially supporting yourself, and you feel like an idiot because you are an idiot, you're a kid,” she says. “You're not supposed to know anything about credit cards or strategy when you're learning pre-algebra. It was a confusing dissonance, because I've always had a very peaceful home life and parents that protected me when I was a kid.”

Queer people ... stuck their necks out for me before many other people did.

Black eventually healed her inner child and learned to embrace “Friday,” releasing a hyper-pop remix with Big Freedia, Dorian Electra, and 3oh!3 for its 10th anniversary. “When people met me for the first time and made a joke, I wouldn't know what to say because I'm a little anxious,” she says. “But I've learned that my avoidance tendencies can make things a lot harder than they need to be. It felt like I was releasing the shackles when I allowed it to be in the room with me, whereas it felt like a big elephant in the room for a long time.”

Her healing shows in our free-flowing conversation, which drastically shifts between topics like industry-focused docuseries like Quiet on Set (“there hasn't been a documentary for my kind of story”) to completely unserious Real Housewives deep dives (“I was a big Lisa Rinna girl”) and interjections about our lunch. “Oh, f*ck, I love sour cream,” she squeals when our food arrives. “This is going to heal whatever's going on in my body right now.”

Despite the mayhem, Black wasn’t robbed of the transformative coming-of-age experience. She came to terms with her queerness at 20 after spending time in LGBTQ+-dominated online spaces. “I always knew I had a deep connection to queer people and the queer community,” she says. “They stuck their necks out for me before many other people did.” So she sought out queer culture in real life, only to realize that was where she belonged.

“I started going to gay clubs and felt so connected to the music and felt so in my body, like I was in the right place. There's so much beauty in those spaces,” she says. “As a 21-year-old who had no fears and nothing to do other than get f*cked up with my friends on the weekend, it was such a place of freedom and expression ... It's just my world. I don't really go where gay people don't go.”

Ironically, she found happiness by embracing those infamous lyrics and “partying, partying,” especially as she was making Salvation. “I've always felt like I needed to present myself as an adult because I was a kid and wanted to be taken seriously,” she says. “This felt like the first year I was finally like, ‘Oh, I'm only 27.’ I got to be a little bit of a mess. And that can be OK and safe. It doesn't mean your life is going to fall apart.”

Now, Black is blending her party girl era with a cozy one. She’s set to tour across the U.S., Canada, and Europe to perform Salvation, before returning to clubs for more DJ sets. However, she also wants more sleep and comfort food (hence Margaritaville). As she continues writing her next chapter, she has some strong advice for her 13-year-old self who thought “Friday” could be the end of the world.

“You won't f*cking remember any of this,” she says. “The big thing that someone’s telling you is so important — ‘if you f*ck this up, it's going to change everything forever’ — sorry, you're not going to remember what it was. It's so cheesy, but if there's one thing I've learned, it’s that 99% of the answers have been inside of you from the very first day. All you’ve got to do is get in there and spend some time with yourself.”