Rebecca Black is Back - Transcript

This is a transcript of a “Terrible, Thanks for Asking” episode entitled “Rebecca Black Is Back.” The text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future for accuracy. Listen to the episode here.

What if the most embarrassing thing you did in middle school was the thing you were still most known for today? Like, what if to this day everyone who heard your name in a professional or personal setting in which you were encountering one another for the first time said, “Wait, is that the girl who pooped her pants on the soccer field?” or, “Is that the kid who fell up the stairs holding a milkshake?” or, “Is that the white girl who came back from spring break in Mexico with cornrow braids and a sunburned scalp and honestly that’s what you get for cultural appropriation?” Whatever thing still makes you cringe about being 13 years old, imagine if that was what people still knew about you today. Again, not just the people who went to middle school with you… but basically everyone. Terrible, right? [MUSIC plays, “Friday” by Rebecca Black] Reporter: Just five months ago, Rebecca Black exploded. Friday hit 167 million views on YouTube. That’s half the country, making her an instant star. But it also launched a national debate about whether it really was the worst song ever. In 2011, Rebecca Black was a normal middle schooler… until she wasn’t. So, to set the scene for 2011, what it’s like online at this time: 2011, Instagram is new-ish. We are not running businesses on Instagram. There are no influencers. We are just, you know, plopping down terrible, highly filtered photos that are almost illegible. You and your mom, and my mom, and myself, we were all still on Facebook, and we didn’t hate it yet. It was the place to be. YouTube was a place where people put up random vlogs, where there were a lot of weird prank videos. Justin Bieber was discovered on YouTube. He did covers of Usher songs, then he was on “Ellen,” then he was a big recording star, and then all these little kids were seeing this and thinking, “Oh my gosh. Cool. I wanna do that!” Rebecca was the kind of kid who just LOVED to perform. She always had. Rebecca: Where I grew up, there was, like, this little shopping center that kind of had all these little, like, things for kids. There was a dance studio and a karate studio. My brother went downstairs to karate. I went upstairs to dance. And, like, that was just kind of something my parents tried. And I think my brother lasted a few weeks and karate, and it became very clear that it just did not matter to him at all. And I never left that dance studio. Like, I just fell in love with it at — I don't know. I mean, I was I think only maybe 3 years old when I started, and I really never stopped. And that time where, I mean, these are, like, very... beginner level dance classes, what I really just loved was this opportunity to perform. And even though I didn't stay a dancer throughout my entire life, and I regret that to this day, I don't regret that I never stopped performing. And that performing went from dancing to I tried my hand at acting classes, and then I found singing when I was 10 years old. But I think my earliest memories were those days where it just became like the best part of my day. It was the first, like, defining thing where I can remember me going like, “I like this so much. And I want to be doing it.”

And I grew up in, like, such a small community. I went to a really small school where you knew the same people from the time you were 5 to when you were 12, which I mean isn't a big gap of time, but at that point it is your entire life. And it was like the one place where I could go in and just say, “This is mine. I could see myself never getting tired of this.” Rebecca grew up in Orange County, California in a small ranch community. It’s not like Orange County, the show. It’s not Orange County as seen on “Laguna Beach.” It wasn’t fancy. Both of her parents were veterinarians, and more than anything, they just wanted their daughter to find something that she loved. Rebecca: They let me just, like, explore. And my mom was always my champion. I mean, she was never a “stage mom,” because she never knew what she was doing in that regard. But like, whatever I needed her for, you know, if it was like, “Hey, I need a costume for this,” she was like, “All right, well, let's go figure it out,” because she just wanted me to have the best chance at, like, living out my whatever my fantasies were at the time. Even though she didn't always have the means to. She would always make it work.  Rebecca’s mom would drive her to auditions that weren’t really auditions — the kind they have in strip malls where they charge you to be a part of them. She’d drive her to real auditions up in LA. She signed Rebecca up for classes and lessons and went to all of her performances.  Rebecca: I really feel like the most definitive memory of myself comes from when I entered middle school, which was when I went from being in, like, that tiny little environment of elementary school to in, like, a regular public school. And I was the new kid. And I was really into what I loved, which at that point, like, my kind of performing desires had turned into this love for musical theater. And so I was the kid who just cared so much about it, probably to the annoyance of so many other people. My brain was starting to think in terms of like, OK. I'm in eighth grade now. I know I want to do this. Nobody is really guiding me. So I kind of have to figure this out myself. I'll go to high school. I'll be a part of my programs there, like, my whatever, it's the drama program and the musical theater program, whatever. And then somehow I, like, gotta get myself to be able to apply and be accepted into, like, Tisch, which is a New York school for arts, or Juilliard or, like, Berklee School of Music or something like that. And so I had a friend of mine who was kind of similar to me in that and had done this project with this company over the summer. And they gave her a song. They created a music video. And that was that. And so I just asked her, like, “What is this? How did you do this?” And she gave me the information. And I don't think I even really cared if it was real or not, because I loved, like, the whole experience of trying out for these things and getting, like, some version of what felt like experience. 

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