Let Them Drink Diet Pepsi: Addison Rae’s Fantasy of Excess
Article by Jonah de Forest, Image by Henry Redcliffe (found here).
Upon entering the court of her majesty, I received orders from Addison Rae. Well, indirect orders. Those of us who brought a camera to The Addison Tour in Washington, DC were herded into a corner before being instructed to hand our items over to the coat-check booth.
“I feel like I’m being punished,” remarked a pert blonde girl who bore something of a resemblance to Rae herself.
One of the venue’s employees explained that Rae had been overwhelmed by flash photography at her past few tour dates and instructed them to seize this kind of technology before the show started. Others balked – wasn’t this the striving TikTok star who once relished the opportunity to have her picture taken? The one who skillfully leveraged the app’s social capital as a digital curiosity for maximum exposure?
Recent years have marked a shift for Rae, pivoting toward pop music and consequently adopting a newfound relationship to her image and the public at large. The culminating act of this rebrand was the release of her debut album, Addison, a compulsively listenable body of work that seemed to suggest her influencer days were a thing of the past. If all that flash business distracted her from the matter at hand, who were we to argue? As we would soon learn from her meticulously staged performance, laser-sharp focus is the name of the game for Rae.
All article images are courtesy of Addison Rae’s instagram, which can be found here.
A crystal chandelier twinkled above the stage as a crowd of twenty-somethings chirped excitedly. Before the conversation in front of me about the efficacy of anxiety medication could reach its conclusion, the lights went down and the trill of Rae’s voice began to sputter through the sound system – intoning the word “FAME” as if it were a fascistic rule of law. Scantily-clad dancers emerged in a burst of red smoke as the crowd roared in anticipation, sensing that we would soon be in the presence of our newly-annointed pop princess.
Like Alice in a diamante Wonderland, Rae was dropped into the proceedings by way of a pulsing beam of light, bearing a look of affected bewilderment. When her aproned mini-dress was ripped off to reveal a latex get-up, she dropped any pretense of naivete, moving with the intensity of someone who had waited her entire life for this kind of moment in the spotlight. The lost little lamb turned dominatrix switch-up felt apropos for a figure whose Blonde Ambition is sometimes obscured by a bubbly, girl-next-door demeanor.
“Fame Is a Gun” was the song that kicked things off, a thesis of sorts on the grand project that is Rae’s celebrity.
“Fame is a gun and I point it blind / crash and burn, girl / baby, swallow it dry / you’ve got a front row seat and I / I got a taste for the glamorous life.”
On the studio recording these lines are delivered with cool detachment, but to hear it live was to bear witness to a supernova swearing by her own commandments.
Though her vocals have been the subject of online scrutiny, Rae was clear-toned and confident on the evening I saw her perform. This was especially apparent on “Summer Forever,” a wistful ballad that she delivered atop a rolling staircase. In any case, her singing chops are somewhat besides the point. Like her friend and collaborator Charli XCX, Rae’s music doubles down on the artifice of pop production. You don’t go to see Rae for Celine-style vocal acrobatics; you go to experience the magnitude of her star power.
Toward the middle of the show, Rae took to the floor to perform “High Fashion,” a libidinal paean to the lengths she will go to get her hands on some designer duds. Dance, the medium that launched her into the public eye, remains Rae’s strength. Her movement wasfluid and sensual, an aerobically intensive exercise in autoerotic verve. For this song, she offfered a debauched update on Fred Astaire’s Swing Time routine, stalking her shadows like a panther on the prowl.
A number like this showed Rae’s knack for anatomizing the conventions of pop, laying bare its excess and frivolity. But unlike the Gagas and Madonnas of the world, Rae doesn’t seek to critique the form she participates in, preferring to cast herself as a pleasure-seeking protagonist in a narrative of her own making. Within this framing, it is her spectators who are responsible for interpreting whatever irony may be found in her wake.
One is reminded of Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette, which presented the life of the ill-fated monarch through the immediacy of her internal world. The opening shot shows actress Kirsten Dunst reclining on a loveseat, pastries to her left, and a maid affixing couture upon her feet. She meets the gaze of the viewer with a smirk of sorts, as if to say, wouldn’t you? By the time the revolution rears its head, you’ve been too caught up in her spiritual and material world to register the weight of her actions.
Rae’s career embodies Dunst’s smirk; reveling in each new iteration of celebrity with an air of “let them eat cake.” In this vein, the deliriously fun “Money Is Everything” arrived in DC on the eve of a government shutdown. It was dramatic irony of the highest order, in part because Rae’s popscape seems so utterly removed from the social and political strife her audience is beholden to. Bathed in green light, Rae and her dancers gyrated to the beat while she posed a question that would’ve stumped Socrates: “Can’t a girl have fun?” The cherry on top was an explosion of prop-cash and confetti that got launched into the audience as Rae shouted, “Money loves me! I’m the richest girl in the world!!”
If The Addison Tour sometimes comes across as the concert you dreamed up in your childhood bedroom, it’s not necessarily to her detriment. Rae’s world is colorful, cartoonishly bawdy and exacted without a trace of self-consciousness. She closed out the show with her breakthrough hit “Diet Pepsi,” strapping on a poofy princess dress and singing with a conviction of feeling that was mirrored by the legion of fans who sang along with her. In this moment, as with many others, she possessed the ability to actualize a universal fantasy, embodying something we can all place ourselves in.
Before the show ended, she told the audience that, “everyday [her] dreams come true.” It almost seemed like this sort of thing could be achieved through blowing out birthday candles or wishing upon a star. If she’s entitled to this sparkling, rhinestone-encrusted dream, then so are we. Of course, getting your time in the spotlight requires a lot more than simply wanting something. As she sings on “High Fashion,” “I know how to make the hard things look really easy.”
