Whether by choice or by algorithm, you probably already know who Addison Rae is. The early adopter of TikTok became the most followed person on the platform before the 2020 lockdown. Her fame comes with proof; today, every clip she posts is broadcast to 88 million accounts. It wasn’t long before corporations took notice, and Rae parlayed that fame into a brief gig as a sportscaster and then as an actor, appearing in Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving and Netflix’s He’s All That. Now, she’s decided to become a pop star. It’s fair to receive this bit of information skeptically.
Addison, her debut album, isn’t burdened by this history or any expectations. It doesn’t sound burdened by much of anything; the 12-song, 33-minute collection of tracks is airy and whimsical. Rae wisely doesn’t try to present herself as a figure of hidden depth; there’s no suffering from success motif, no maudlin meditation on fame being a prison. Fame is a gun, however, according to the final, Grimes-esque single released before the album. A gun is a weapon, it can be a tool, but however it’s used, Rae is “pointing it blind.” “Don’t ask too many questions,” she teases. “You’ve got a front row seat, and I / I’ve got a taste for the glamorous life.” Lyrics like these register as not just self-knowledge, but as an awareness of how she is perceived. Skeptics might dismiss Rae as frivolous; pop heads know that frivolity is the basis of a lot of great pop music. It’s difficult to imagine anyone better equipped to embody that right now than Rae is.
Rae is the celebrity of the social media age. She is fame achieved via saturation. In a recent interview on The New York Times‘Popcast, she shared that at her TikTok peak, she guessed she was filming and posting anywhere from eight to 12 videos of her dancing per day. It was a mission to build a platform, to get out of here—to where, she didn’t quite know yet. But she had the innate understanding, as one of the first babies of the new millennium, that fame comes, increasingly often, before success at any particular discipline. Rae was born in October 2000; she was three years old when Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie began living The Simple Life, six when Britney Spears was on the cover of every tabloid in the supermarket checkout, seven when Keeping Up With The Kardashians premiered. She’s a child of that world.
While that 2000s era of celebrity was often treated as the nadir of culture as it was happening, it didn’t take long for pop music and social media to begin fetishizing it. Lady Gaga’s 2008 debut The Fame was a tongue-in-cheek, semi-satirical response to the years that immediately preceded it. Slayyyter’s self-titled 2019 mixtape was similarly obsessed with a hot pink, spray-tanned glitterati, directly referencing TMZ and sex tapes. The primary difference between these projects and Addison is that Gaga and Slayyyter were using celebrity as an inspiration before they had achieved it. For Rae, it was the celebrity that came first. Addison was created from inside the storm, so, in a genre obsessed with artifice, it stands out with authenticity.
Rae is hardly the first famous-for-being-famous person to attempt a music career. Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Heidi Montag, and more all tried their hand at music, and except for Hilton’s “Stars Are Blind,” which history has been kind to, all of their efforts were quite bad. Even “Stars Are Blind” was ultimately a fluke, given that Hilton has never achieved anything like it again—it’s easy enough to land one good pop single with the right team behind you. But Addison has several genuinely great tracks; lead single “Diet Pepsi” surprised a lot of people with its wispy restraint, while “Headphones On” ventures into the kind of trip hop that Madonna played with in the late ’90s.
What emerges from these songs (and, often, their meticulously directed music videos) is a clarity of vision and sense of self rare even for new pop stars who achieve fame through more traditional channels. Though Rae frequently mentions her appreciation for Madonna and Britney Spears, she was a teen in the age of The Weeknd and Lana Del Rey. You can hear the moodiness of both artists across Addison, while the charming, awkward bluntness of the album’s lyrics feels pulled directly from the Del Rey school of songwriting. “New York,” the album’s opening track, manically repeats “I love New York / love New York / love New York / love New York.” It’s silly and unpretentious and it feels true, like you really are hearing Rae’s thoughts. Rae wrote almost all of the album with Swedish producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser, an unusual move for a pop debut; aspiring pop stars tend to work with a wider range of collaborators for the best shot at a hit. Instead, Addison is sonically cohesive, and though it might be a stretch to dub it experimental, it’s hard to imagine Rae’s young peers being as willing to get this weird with it. She sees Spears et al. as a playful fantasy, not as something to painstakingly recreate. The point is to capture the feeling and idea of being young, beautiful, rich, and famous—not to document real life.
In a widely circulated clip from the Popcast interview, Rae reflected on her days trying to go viral on TikTok, opining that “choice and taste is kind of a luxury in a lot of ways.” To be successful on TikTok, or at least as successful as Rae is, you spend a lot of time following trends: dance trends, song trends, fashion trends. Clearly, Rae became successful enough to have that luxury of choice and taste, and she puts it to good use. Addison could have easily been a vanity project, a novelty with no replay value, a flawed grasp toward respectability. Instead, it presents Addison Rae as a person with opinions of her own. No longer does she need to follow whatever is trending; it’s time for her to tell us what she thinks is cool.
