The Friday Paradox

Rebecca Black got famous for all the wrong reasons—which is to say she got famous the way the internet prefers: as a target. Friday appeared in 2011 and the pile-on was immediate and vicious, a thirteen-year-old’s auto-tuned pop song treated like a cultural war crime. What nobody wanted to admit was that it was just a pop song—clumsy, earnest, no more ridiculous than half of what was charting at the time. The mockery said more about the mob than it did about her. She kept making music anyway, mostly on her own terms, and there’s something quietly satisfying about that trajectory.