Rebecca Black

Rebecca Renee Black was born June 21, 1997, in Irvine, California, to veterinarian parents; her mother is a Mexican immigrant and her father has English, Italian, and Polish heritage^[1]. She attended private school until sixth grade before transferring to public school after experiencing bullying, and she found an early passion for musical theater before dropping out of high school in April 2011 to pursue music full time through homeschooling^[1].

In late 2010, Black's mother paid a vanity-label production company to make a music video for the song "Friday." It was uploaded in February 2011 and went viral the following month, but for reasons that had little to do with music: the video attracted a wave of mockery so intense that Black, then fourteen, received death threats serious enough to prompt a police investigation^[1]. Despite the hostility, "Friday" became YouTube's most-viewed video of 2011 and was later certified platinum. Black has since said she became severely depressed as a teenager under the weight of the ongoing cyberbullying that followed^[1].

After a prolonged dispute over the rights to her early work, Black founded her own independent label, RB Records, and began a deliberate artistic reinvention^[1]. The 2021 EP Rebecca Black Was Here marked a clear break from her viral-era image, and her 2023 debut studio album, Let Her Burn, was met with generally favorable reviews that recast her as a serious pop artist rather than an internet punchline^[1]. She publicly came out as queer in 2020 and has since described herself as queer, bisexual, and pansexual^[1].

Following the 2025 EP Salvation, Black released her second studio album, Age of the Exhibitionist, on September 4, 2026^[1]. She has described the record as "a curation of self" and has spoken about a long-standing, deep-seated need to be truly understood and seen, a need she connects directly to spending her adolescence as an object of public scrutiny she never consented to^[2]. The album became her first project to chart, reaching number 75 on the UK Album Downloads Chart^[1].