Addison Rae’s “Fame Is a Gun” Highlights That Britney Adage, “With a taste of a poison paradise/I’m addicted to you”

In the tradition of songs ruminating on fame (largely begat by Madonna with 1998’s “Drowned World/Substitute for Love”), Addison Rae adds to the genre with “Fame Is a Gun” (in sharp contrast to Halsey’s “Girl Is a Gun”), the fifth single from her debut album, Addison. Except that, in defiance of the usual tradition of cautioning against the “perils” of fame (e.g., everyone around you being fake, “trading fame for love,” being stalked by obsessive creepshows [hear: Billie Eilish’s “NDA”], etc.), Addison is mostly talking up the glory and glamor that goes with the territory. 

Continuing her work with Sean Price Williams (who also directed “Diet Pepsi” and “Aquamarine”) for the accompanying video, the opening scene riffs on the idea of Addison starring in a movie. Hence, the title card, “Addison stars in ‘Fame Is a Gun’” written in a cursive pink script. Dressed in a vinyl pink trench coat and wearing a blonde wig and the “standard-issue” black sunglasses that all celebrities seem to wear when they’re in “don’t look at me”-meets-“too cool for you anyway” mode, Addison careens down a sidewalk in New York (though it feels like a miss not to have shot this in Los Angeles). To be sure, there’s a definite callback to the early days of TMZ in the mid-00s, when celebrities getting “caught” partying/being drunk in the wilds of LA was the website’s bread and butter. After this bit of careening, she then stumbles into a theater, whereupon Price Williams cuts to “another” Addison. One who is ultimately both audience member and performer. 

Addison then lulls her listeners in with the verse, “Tell me who I am, do I provoke you with my tone of innocence?/Don’t ask too many questions, that is my one suggestion/You know I keep it real, I live for the appeal/Knew it from the start, it was the only way to mend my broken heart.” Cutting to the core of why so many people—particularly girls—are attracted to the idea of being famous, Addison casually reveals that being “damaged” a.k.a. missing some form of love or acceptance in one’s childhood is part and parcel of the “drive” for fame. This pattern has been seen time and time again, including in the childhood of Britney Spears, the fellow Louisiana girl that Addison has clearly modeled herself after (particularly with many of her sartorial choices). And perhaps, at the outset of her career trajectory, Spears would have agreed with the sentiment behind the lyrics, “Don’t ask too many questions, this is my one confession/It never was enough, I always wanted more/I always wanted more.” 

But it’s the chorus that most overtly applies to what happened when Spears finally achieved her own dream (and also her parents’, who blatantly wanted “a return on their investment”). In it, Addison croons in a siren-like tone, “Fame is a gun and I point it blind/Crash and burn girl, baby, swallow it dry/You got a front-row seat, and I/I got a taste of the glamorous life.” It’s the latter line that pays homage to Sheila E.’s 1984 hit, “The Glamorous Life.” And it is through this nod that Addison (with help from her usual co-producers and co-writers, Luka Kloser and Elvira), while touting fame, also undercuttingly derides it. For it is in “The Glamorous Life” (co-written and co-produced with Prince) that Sheila E. admits, “She wants to lead the glamorous life/Without love, it ain’t much.”

That doesn’t seem to bother the pink trench coat-outfitted Addison (while the “other” Addison is the one with the abovementioned “front-row seat”) as she sits at a table with a “syringe-bedecked” turkey as its centerpiece. Because maybe “love” doesn’t have to be genuine a.k.a. familial. Maybe, like everything else at present, the ersatz version of love (i.e., an online following) is sufficient. Especially if it pays for “the life you think you deserve.” 

As her guests at that table pass cigarettes back and forth, Addison sits at the head (naturally), slowly lowering her sunglasses. Meanwhile, the Addison watching above from the rafters—clearly meant to represent the “pre-fame” version of Addison still yearning to be “onstage,” as it were—insists, “There’s no mystery, I’m gonna make it, gonna go down in history/Don’t ask too many questions, God gave me the permission/And when you shame me, it makes me want it more/It makes me want it more, more.” In other words, the contempt of critics and commenters only fuels her fire to succeed, to become even more famous. Therefore, more “loved” (even if all that love comes with an equal amount of hate). Indeed, it’s during the bridge that Addison assures, “Nothing makes me feel as good/As being loved by you.” This is an assertion potentially dripping with irony, as Addison is undoubtedly well-aware of cautionary tales like Spears’—of how the public can love you one day, and want to burn you at the stake the next. It’s a line that also speaks to the drug-like nature of fame. How the craving for more and more “love” from fans is part of what can eventually start to feel as hollow as the lack of love one received during their upbringing. 

Intercut scenes of Pink Trench Coat Addison loading a gun and Audience Addison holding onto an LED rope (à la Charli XCX during the Brat Tour) serve to eventually “meld” the two together. Because, soon enough, Audience Addison is no longer in the audience with her two friends, but onstage with Pink Trench Coat Addison. At one point, she tries to grab the gun out of Pink Trench Coat Addison’s hand, only to find it’s somehow turned into a turtle. This perhaps being symbolic of both “coming out of one’s shell” and retreating into it when feeling unsafe or threatened, as many celebrities so often do after reaching a certain peak in their fame (see: Chappell Roan). 

During the song’s breakdown (the part where she chants the bridge, “Nothing makes me feel as good/As being loved by you), Addison offers up some of the signature choreo that audiences have come to expect from her in these videos (especially after “Aquamarine”). It’s also markedly noticeable in these scenes that she’s wearing a coordinating pink cone bra in the same vinyl “fabric” as her coat. A fashion choice that also feels like a deliberate homage to the original Queen of Fame (/Queen of Loving Fame), Madonna. And as she continues her choreography during the chorus, Addison’s “generic blondeness” channels all those blonde pop stars (and actresses) before her. Both the ones who were chewed up and spit out and the ones who not only survived, but thrived.

For the moment, Addison appears destined to stay on the latter path. The final shot of the turtle crawling on the carpet seeming to indicate that she has a hard enough shell to take it. The “it” being all the pratfalls that go hand in hand with fame. And yet, as far as Addison can tell, once she got a taste of the glamorous life, she knew she was never going back again. Or, as Spears once put it on “Toxic,” “With a taste of a poison paradise/I’m addicted to you.” Not to mention, “It’s getting late to give you up/I took a sip from my devil’s cup/Slowly, it’s taking over me.”