Rebecca Black Is Manifesting A Fergie Renaissance

“We’re all performers in the age of the exhibitionist,” Rebecca Black declares in her new music video for “Speakerphone,” a full-speed-ahead swerve into the surrealist visual world the queer pop star has been creating for her upcoming third album. “There’s this voyeur perspective, and a lot of the music is about this relationship I have with putting myself on display constantly throughout my whole life,” the singer says. “I literally say in the song, ‘I want to be perceived, break off a piece of me.’ That second verse feels like the biggest peek into the album that it’s about to be a part of.” The art of pop stardom, evidently, is something Black cares about deeply, both as a performer and as a fan first and foremost — so for Bustle’s Gay Guy Music Video Night celebration, she’s looking back on the divas who taught her how to put on a show.

This is my favorite thing to talk about. I’m obviously not a gay man, but I have attended — and probably even hosted, accidentally — a million of these. There are so many music videos that I just watch when I need some joy. And there were a lot of music videos that I was watching while I was making this album, where I felt more informed by the music video than the music itself. Like, one of those was probably “Fergalicious.”

“Fergalicious” is one of my favorite songs in the world. There’s a scene in the video where they’re dressed as Girl Scouts and dancing in tandem, and that was one of my influences for the “Speakerphone” video. I just love Fergie. I think the world deserves a big Fergie renaissance soon. No one was doing it like she was back in the day. There was this unhinged pop star energy there that we’re starting to get back to. So that feels like one of the best music videos of all time. It’s so wild and bombastic, and very clearly conceptualized at the same time.

Fergie and Gwen Stefani are definitely both huge north poles, just in terms of how they approached their pop stardom and their artistic choices. This performance art element of being a pop star is really what excites me as a pop fan, and it’s something I’m wondering about my own relationship to as an artist. I remember talking a lot about Fergie even with someone like my dad. He’s a 70-year-old white guy from Iowa who lives in Orange County, but he likes to think of himself as a pop music aficionado — he did introduce me to Lana Del Rey in 2011, so we’ll give him that.

I remember telling him how I felt so connected to the mess that Fergie was. The mess was a very specific kind of mess. It felt very feral, like she just had these creative urges to do something so intensely. And she would just do it! Whether or not anybody liked it or thought it was pretty, she just went down the rabbit hole in a way I don’t think a lot of people have since. She’s not afraid of not being cool, and that’s always something that’s inspired me.

Another one that I feel like is in my holy trinity, or I guess quad-rinity, is “Lady Marmalade.” God, if we could re-create the feeling of that video — like, nobody’s doing group collaboration like that anymore! To have four just absolute Goliath artists from all different sects of the pop industry collaborating on this one thing and upholding their own flavor? I’ve watched that video so many times. It feels like so many artists in pop are inspired by showgirl-ism. Not just in the Taylor Swift way — but there’s this collective celebration of the fabulousness of femininity.

When I’ve been in Gay Guy Music Video Nights as an honorary member, that’s something that I speak about with so many other gay people in my life. And specifically gay men: It feels like there’s this connection to women — and then this connection that women have to gay men — where there’s this utmost appreciation of each other and the way that we view art. There’s a lot of familiarity there.

I could talk about 20 iconic music videos, but a lot of them really hold this higher level of feminine energy in common. I’m not really thinking about guys — unless maybe it’s Robbie Williams’ “Rock DJ.” I think it came out too early in my time, but somebody showed it to me when I was in the U.K. a few years ago, and it’s become one of my favorite pop songs of all time. It’s so energetic and so anthemic and also makes no sense — those are my other favorite kinds of pop songs. And the video is such a striking, surprising, extremely pop concept where he strips down, shall we say, to the truest version of himself. I don’t want to ruin the surprise because I think it’s one of the best videos ever. I love to show people that video.