A thorough knowledge of religious stories isn’t required for someone’s life to resemble one anyway. That’s the thing with collective myths. They make it easier for us to find traces of sacredness in the microcosm of our own personal experiences. Listening to Rebecca Black’s new project SALVATION, a name kept ringing in my ear. Someone Rebecca Black shares a connection to, even if she’s aware of it or not. I kept thinking of Mary Magdalene. A woman who endured centuries of public misinterpretation to later step into her own divinity is a parallel to Black’s experience too striking to ignore. For an album wrapped in camp, glamour, and the candy-wrapper sheen of pop excess, the comparison might seem overdramatic. But then again, what’s salvation without a little spectacle?
Rebecca Black’s journey through the vines of pop culture has been anything but conventional. When screens, YouTube and internet connection speed test websites became parts of our everyday life, Rebecca Black was a name you’d see everywhere. She had just released Friday, a song about having fun with her friends. As harmless as it was, the music video garnered a lot of negativity, turning her into one of the first viral figures online. “There was a time in my life when I was so afraid of people knowing I was that girl from that video.” She reflects. “But at some point, I realized how exhausting that was. I have nothing to be ashamed of. If anything, people should grapple with a little bit of shame for the way they treated a child.” Black was one of the first casualties of a culture drifting from reality to digital existence, where anonymity gave people the illusion of consequence-free speech, words they’d never dare say face-to-face. If the music video was released today, the reception would be immensely different. Today, child vloggers and singers who make content just for the fun of it barely raise an eyebrow. But Rebecca Black was the first to face that spotlight, and like most pioneers, she took the full force of the backlash that always comes for those who go first.
Unlike what might be expected in her position, Rebecca Black didn’t retreat. She sharpened herself against the weight of expectation and pressed forward. Across albums, standalone singles, and EPs, she has built a career that refuses to be dictated by anyone but her. Black’s latest offering SALVATION is an accumulation of lessons learned and about the importance of holding on to your intuition like a guiding star. How she can fully tap into it and let it guide her path, is also the product of all the other experimentations that come before SALVATION. In her first full-length project released in 2023, Let Her Burn we saw the artist explore what stories she was willing to tell in a lengthier context. “That experience was such an important foundation for me moving forward as an artist. It really allowed me to go anywhere that I wanted to go next.” she recalls. The album wrestled with introspection and self-inflicted wounds, like reading the most brutal reviews about yourself, but written in your own handwriting. In Destroy Me she sings: “I’m so good at getting paranoid / Got a list of people I try to avoid / My identity, so easy to destroy / Go ahead and destroy me.”
In SALVATION, the divide between doubt and selfhood fuses into a striking recognition of who she truly is. More attuned to her own guiding markers than ever, she presents herself as someone who has not only survived the battles that once held her back but has emerged strengthened by them. Even in her most vulnerable moments, she never feels defeated, only deeply, almost defiantly, compassionate towards herself. The project’s first single, TRUST!, ressembles the themes of Destroy Me but with a sly reversal. This time, she’s not just inviting scrutiny but instructing her critics on how to do it properly, no half-assed hate allowed. The music video places her on trial for her past, with stills from Friday flashing in the background.
“I’ve been doing this long enough to know that I wanted to create a boundary between Rebecca the person and Rebecca Black the online persona. That persona is meant to be absorbed, picked apart, it’s for consumption.”
A similar subject matter is addressed on American Doll, where Rebecca Black sings “It’s safe to swallow me / Take my autonomy / Best girls are made up of grace and apologies / Did you like me better then? Do you want to hate me now?” During our interview she says: “How I am in my personal life isn’t something I’m willing to give out to the world.” So enters Rebecca Black TM, the sacrificial doll. This isn’t retreat but confrontation. She acknowledges the way she’s been picked apart as she takes the scissors herself, slicing through old expectations. She’s in on the joke and she isn’t necessarily asking for permission.
Rebecca Black isn’t trying to rewrite the narrative around herself because she has already reclaimed it. She doesn’t flinch from the past or try to smooth over its rough edges. Because what is there to smooth really? She lifts it up, turns it over in her hands and molds it with something close to resurrection. Everything is a reckoning that she is no longer defined by the world’s gaze but by her own. Saints have their icons, martyrs have their myths, and Rebecca Black has her own mythology, a self-forged legend built from every piece she refused to leave behind.
When asked what shifted between the recording process of Let Her Burn and SALVATION for her to be as at ease in her artistic vision, Black explains that she has worked really hard over the last few years to steadily build the audience she has right now. “I’ve always known in my head for the last few years that as long as if I put my head down and move forward, ones who it will mean something to, will find it. Even if it takes them years.” Her connection to her fans is undeniable, evident in the sparks that light up her eyes when she speaks about the people who have stood by her art all this time. “My audience has accepted everything I’ve given them with so much love but also encouraged me to go harder. With Salvation, I’ve spent a long time session after session find what that meant.”
Wanting to create something bigger sounds simple in theory, but tying it to personal evolution and artistry is far trickier. You can’t manufacture the effect of grandeur just for the sake of it by tweaking a few knobs. That’s why she’s become very diligent about what she commits to, never embracing an idea unless it rings true to her, a constant test of intuition. “I remember sending the early versions of some songs that landed on this project to people and they didn’t really see it. There would have been a world where I would agree with them, scratch it and do something else. The more and more the project solidified, the more I started saying “These are the songs. Trust me, you’re going to get it.”
Rebecca Black taking stock of her own vision has led to some of her most electrifying work yet, Sugar Water Cyanide being a prime example. She seems to agree. “It’s one of my favorite songs I’ve ever made.” She gushes while talking about it. Produced by Nightfeelings under thirty minutes, the track is poppers in sonic form. It’s fizzy, head-spinning, and dangerously new to keep things interesting. It’s a cocktail of Long Island iced teas and strawberry bubblegum, a sugar rush with a bite. Here, Black has her foot on the gas. ”I knew I needed one song that would push the creative boundaries for the entire project, something that raised the stakes. I wanted a track people could go absolutely feral for.” And feral they went. The gays, the girls, and anyone with a shred of taste haven’t stopped shaking their asses to it since.
On SALVATION, Rebecca Black fully embraces the club culture she holds sacred. She speaks its language fluently, as demonstrated in the title-track, Salvation over a swung techno instrumental and a groovy acid bass line. Another future classic which will be on a lot of DJ’s USB’s is Twist The Knifewhere she sings “Dancing til’ I die” over a Jessie Ware-esque melody and a pulsating bass. This lean towards the appeal of a sweat-drenched dance floor isn’t surprising regarding where Rebecca Black is in her life. “For me this project was about lightness and not taking myself too seriously and if there is one place where I don’t take myself seriously is at the club. The club became my church, in a way. That only further solidified what SALVATION as a project was.”
At the end of every party, you must face the music even if you want to or not. When the veil of glow and neon is dimmed, the questions remain, waiting to be answered. In her case the question is the name of the title itself. Do You Even Think About Me, a techno-Evanescence fever dream, peels back Rebecca Black’s armor to reveal something rawer. Her voice surges with emotion while a production that crackles like a storm on the horizon enhances her performance. Even in reflection, she never fully lets off the gas, the beat pulses forward, pulling her through the wreckage.
Rebecca Black seems to have mastered the art of moving through the fire without letting it swallow her whole. With the weight of outside expectation shrugged off, she moves with a clarity that few artists in her position are afforded. And with that clarity comes a deep empathy for the next wave of young women navigating the same unforgiving landscape. “I feel quite grateful for is that I had years to figure this shit out. I look at Chappell Roan or any young women who are thrust upon the public sphere in that intense of a way and think that it shouldn’t be on these women not knowing immediately adjusting to this position.” She is passionate about the subject, visibly feeling for these women. “No motherfucker would be able to do half the things Chapell is doing.” She says. "I give praise to anybody who is brave enough to put themselves out there on the internet and not running away when it gets ugly, especially when what they are offering is truly a gift.”
Rebecca Black’s vision is finally catching up to people. The pendulum, once merciless, now moves with her momentum. She isn’t chasing the crowd, and the less she does, the more the crowd chases her. Her Boiler Room set brought in a wave of wide-eyed revelations, comment sections flooded with confessions: “I had no idea she was this good.” The world finally seems ready to receive what she has long been offering.
With that, SALVATION becomes more of a reminder than a title. She has already saved herself, so whatever praise, criticism, or attempts at pigeonholing come next, they arrive too late to matter, crashing against a foundation that cannot be moved. The story of Mary Magdalene is not one of ruin, but of recognition. A woman misnamed, misunderstood, and yet, in the end, redeemed. Not by those who sought to define her, but by the truth she always carried. Like Magdalene, Rebecca Black wears a crown of her own making. She has seized her salvation with pop brilliancy, with an artistry sharpened by time, with the kind of self-possession that alchemizes external opinions into fuel, into something she can wield. Salvation is never given, only taken. And she has taken hers with both hands, her own mythology fully in her grasp.
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