One Place That You'll Never Leave

I cannot wait for the day when The Children know Rebecca Black primarily as the offbeat hitmaker she strives to be. I hate that any discussion of her music—this essay included!—demands dredging up the 2011 meme-song she made when she was 13. I’m not here to tell you it was a misunderstood masterpiece, though it isn’t nearly as annoying or cringe as its detractors claimed—a case study in hating and mocking young women who simply do what 13-year-olds of all gender experiences do: make goofy shit.

Black has made peace with her memedom, remixing “Friday” into a gleeful self-parody that does not shriek of desperation or immaturity. It goes hard! I think she’s a smart musician who had to learn under sudden and insane scrutiny and ridicule the way many child-performers do, but without the promise of serious stardom. A decade after that debacle she released an astute and exemplary hyperpop EP, Rebecca Black Was Here. It’s six songs of slickly produced sapphic disaster. It’s silly, sad, self-aware, and sick as fuck.

I don’t know a lot about hyperpop except that I like it and its scions are all gay icons—SOPHIE, Charli, L@L. Music for which I would abandon my wallflower tendencies if I were of the clubbing kind. Songs that still bang when the poppers wear off.

The opening track, “Better in My Memory” is probably my favorite of Black’s works. It conforms to the genre convention, starting with sugarplum singing, slightly-off kilter from glitchy percussion, quickly descending into grungy electro-distortion and speak-singing.

The chorus casts the narrator in the role of an obsessive architect, carefully rearranging the idyllic snowglobe past to assure herself she’s not as wounded as her memory makes obvious.

This song’s main rhetorical move is to run its instrumentation in reverse. The drum loops are flipped, the synth blares accelerate in volume instead of striking and fading like an organically plucked note, and the melody resolves on a minor lilt. A song about rewriting romantic history that hopelessly rams against the forward march of linear time. Excellent.

At the song’s center the synth line reaches out and reverses like a beam of light wrapped around a black hole’s gravitational pull. It fucking GOES.

I’m reminded of Janelle Monae’s “Neon Gumbo”, which takes the outro of the prior album’s “Many Moons” and rewinds it into a barely recognizable interlude. In “Many Moons”, Monae invokes Shangri-La, and an escape from oppression—“Neon Gumbo” deftly undercuts that fantasy. As Monae’s narrator is captured and her memory erased, what was once an anthem of liberation becomes a garbled mess. Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN culminates in a similar rewind. For better or worse, the past is immovable.

Self-destructive desire is a mainstay of music. We need to imagine ourselves strong, imagine our suffering has some kind of meaning, to keep the despair at bay. It’s a flawed thesis, and the klaxon synths signal Black’s self-awareness. Mayday, mayday, we’re going down, and we are not yelling timber.

The experiment failed. The narrator cannot gaslight herself into a happier memory within destroying her own reality and sense of self, so she is left trying to forget everything.

Self-destructive desire is a mainstay of queer life. We know that our desire makes us deviant and therefore subject to destruction. The trick is to live under threat without reservation. The only other option is oblivion. We cannot, like the narrator so naively claims at the song’s outset, “turn it off.” By the song’s end emptiness and absence draw desire’s eye.

When altering the past is impossible, elimination appears inevitable.

Lawmakers are trying to legislate queer and trans people out of existence. They act as though we are anomalies of a morally repugnant future, when we have always existed—often in the margins, sometimes as liminal spiritual figures, or criminal deviants, and “oh my god they were roommates.” They have long tried to bury our pasts to entomb our present.

Compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory hopelessness go hand in hand.

Nostalgia is seldom afforded to those whose lives and histories have been erased time and time again.

What can we do against such reckless hate?

It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing to dance, dissent, and deny them the satisfaction of seeing us dead.

There is no denying that we, like Rebecca Black, were here.

Did you know the Youtube video for “Friday” only had about 4,000 views before tosh.0 and MST3K tweeted about? Wack.

Do you know any teenagers? Do they know “Friday”? Can you ask them for me?