'Cruel comments stick with you': 7 years after 'Friday,' Rebecca Black is overcoming the trolls

Rebecca Black was only 13 years old when “Friday” became one of the most disliked videos on Youtube. With lyrics like, “Kicking it in the front seat, sitting the back seat. Gotta make my mind up. Which seat can I take?” it seems that the video was made to be mocked.

Almost overnight, Black became one of the internet’s biggest targets — despite, and I will die on this hill, creating a pretty solid banger for what critics called the “world’s worst song.” (It’s worth a revisit. It’s actually really fun for a tween.)

Now 20, Black is a popular personality on YouTube, and her music has certainly matured from a song about getting her bowl and her cereal.

Black recently sat down with BBC Radio 5, and she commented on the cyberbullying she experienced when she was only in eighth grade. She didn’t even see the video before it was posted — she saw it when the rest of the world did.

“I saw everything. When I started reading those negative comments I just couldn’t stop — I just kept going and going and going,” she said. “People commenting don’t think a real person has to read this and move on with their day.”

Black felt that she was unable to continue her career without first processing what happened to her.

“I felt like I had the biggest ‘kick me’ sign on my back, and everyone was just lining up before they’d even looked at me.”

But through the years, it seems that Black can take what happened during her early teen years in stride, and she has come out stronger.

Her newest music video, “Satellite,” was released earlier this week. She said, “I was 100,000 percent proud to put my name on it and feel like it is absolutely me. It was like, ‘there she is — there’s the girl’, You can be the girl that the internet deems has the worst song ever and years later still say, ‘I love music.'”

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