Coming across like The Idol’s Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) meets Vox Lux’s Celeste (Natalie Portman), Addison Rae has outdone what it means to do a “sendup” of the pop star. That much has been made clear after she finally unleashed an EP of her previously unreleased songs, called simply: AR (in honor of her initials, obvs). The five-track offering gets right into what Rae is all about—putting the word tart in “pop tart”—with “I Got It Bad.”
Produced by OzGo and Rami, perhaps Rae chose to avoid involving her own producer boyfriend, Omer Fedi, on the project because the song is probably about him. Complete with details like, “He looks like the boy next door from my boy band poster/But he drives like a maniac in his black Range Rover/He got me close, but now it’s official.” Elsewhere, she speaks to what Usher once did on “U Got It Bad” by demanding, “Take off every piece of me/Until there’s only skin on my body/He’s what I want, I could just cry/He’s what I want, give me more time.” Yep, Rae has no trouble emulating the “World Class Sinner” vibes of the aforementioned Jocelyn (“You can pull my hair/Touch me anywhere,” etc.). She even looks vaguely like Jocelyn (meets Keira Knightley) on the cover of the album, which features her blowing her pink bubblegum for a touch of “ironic” flair that alludes to this particular brand of bubblegum pop. Still often maligned and underestimated for its influence on the culture.
And, talking of influence on the culture, Charli XCX makes a cameo on the next song, “2 Die 4” (no, it’s not a remake of Tove Lo’s song of the same name, itself a sample of Hot Butter’s “Popcorn”—though OzGo actually produced it, too). Considering this is the girl who made a song called “Obsessed,” lyrics like, “My neck, to die for/My legs, to die for/This ah-ah sex, to die for/I-I-I want someone who thinks I’m to die—” should come as no surprise. Nor should the continued braggadocio manifest in, “My taste, to die for/My waist, to die for/This boom-boom bass, to die for/I-I-I want someone who thinks I’m to diе for.” In short, she’s saying what Carrie Bradshaw did when she told Aleksandr Petrovsky, “I am someone who is looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love.” Except that it’s done with her more narcissistic Gen Z flourish, admitting, essentially, that she wants someone who’s obsessed with her. Every mundane, potentially plastic aspect of her.
By now it should be clear that AR is very similar to what Kim Petras tried and failed to do with the egregious Slut Pop. In the same fashion, Rae is essentially parodying what pop music is but still churning out the kind of earworms that people can’t resist. As well as earworms they would never expect. This includes Rae’s decision to cover an unreleased Lady Gaga song called “Nothing On (But the Radio),” which “Stefani Germanotta” originally composed in 2007 with Billy Steinberg and Josh Alexander. And though ill-informed Gen Z probably wouldn’t know it, the song is of course a reference to Marilyn Monroe responding to the media’s question, “Is it true that when you posed for that famous calendar photograph, Miss Monroe, you had nothing on?” She quipped, “No. I had the radio on.”
In this modern era, there’s, needless to say, no big scandal about women being in various states of undress. In fact, it’s expected if she wants to hold on to her fame. And as Rae does an almost better imitation of Gaga than Gaga does of Madonna, it’s clear that AR is all about stylization. Like a drag queen exaggerating all the tropes and cliches about women, Rae does the same with pop music. Complete with the obsequious sex kitten act apparent in the promises, “I’m calling just to tell you/Get here, I’ll make it all worth your while/I can make you some food [because the way to a man’s heart is still through his stomach, right?]/I know you’ll be wearin’ a smile/‘Cause I’ve got nothing on, but the radio.”
More Olivia Rodrigo-oriented than the rest, “It Could’ve Been U” has that pop-punk sort of bent as Rae taunts a good-for-nothing ex who treated her badly one too many times. Detailing how she used to break down with each of their break-ups, she finally decides, “Now I don’t wanna make up, I’ll make out/With somebody new, it could’ve been you/‘Cause every time we’d fuck up, I’d freak out/You’re out of second chances, now I’m out/With somebody new, it could’ve been you/It could’ve been, it could’ve been you.” Alas, whoever he was seemed to be busy assuming that being a straight (/straight-leaning) man made him untouchable on the behavior front. But Rae contradicts that false confidence by boasting about how she’s currently with someone who’s far superior, describing, “He’ll take me to places I wanna go/Introduce me to people I wanna know/And you might be there, but I wouldn’t know/I used to miss you, now I don’t.” Of course, she’ll probably end up writing a “vampire”-esque song about this new dude, too. For what are consistently disappointing men for if not inspirations for pop songs by women?
They’re also for reminding that this is a man’s world, but it wouldn’t be nothin’ without a woman or a girl. And so, to close out the roughly eleven-minute odyssey of what it means to emulate all the “pop bitches” who came before her is “Obsessed” (Mariah Carey probably refuses to acknowledge that anyone else has a song called this). Originally released in 2021, Rae is at her most Selena Gomez-sounding on this (hopefully) tongue-in-cheek, grandiloquent single that says so much about a generation raised on social media (with Rae herself transitioning from being a “social media star” to a pop one). For everyone has become more than a little obsessed with themselves, which makes it a bit harder to find a subset of people to be the obsessors (though Taylor Swift doesn’t have a problem with that).
Regardless, Rae has decided, “And if I lost you, I’d still have me, I can’t lose/When you say that you’re obsessed with me, me too.” The only problem is, with everyone so busy being obsessed with themselves, it doesn’t leave much room for noticing that “parodying” self-obsession (and pop, for that matter) has become much too serious.
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