Reneé Rapp’s latest song and video, “Leave Me Alone,” is the first “open statement” she’s made since “scandalously” leaving The Sex Lives of College Girls (ironically, Rapp was one of those people who never wanted to go to college). When the announcement was first made, Rapp insisted it was for the sake of more fully focusing on her music career. When the show first premiered on HBO back in 2021, Rapp was still “just” a Broadway actress who had yet to release any albums. So it was that she told Variety in 2022, “[I thought], ‘I can do music on the side, like, I can just hustle.’ And now I’ve just kept acting, because it keeps supporting the music… Acting was my way into tricking everyone that I warranted attention, so that I could have this interview with you.”
Later on in said interview, referencing the fresh record deal she had just signed with Interscope, Rapp added, “I was also really proud of myself because it worked. I acted, I made a platform for myself, I commanded a little bit of attention, and now people give a fuck. So I was also like, slay. I kind of ate with the plan.” And yet, the collateral damage of that plan, many have argued, ended up being the cancellation of The Sex Lives of College Girls. While showrunners Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble were willing to work around Rapp’s character, Leighton Murray, transferring to MIT in Boston during the third season, it seemed that audience interest in the show after her departure in the second episode, “Lila by Lila,” almost immediately waned. And although they tried to “replace” her with not only a new roommate named Kacey Baker (Gracie Lawrence) for Bela Malhotra (Amrit Kaur), Kimberly Finkle (Pauline Chalamet) and Whitney Chase (Alyah Chanelle Scott) to bond with, but also by drumming up a “mentee” sort of character—Taylor (Mia Rodgers)—for Bela in her new role as a freshman dorm advisor.
Even so, two new primary characters were still not enough to replace Rapp as the apparent “glue” of the show. Much to her narcissistic, Regina George-esque delight—that is, if “Leave Me Alone” is any indication. Which, surely, it is. If for no other reason based on the lyric, “I took my sex life with me, now the show ain’t fucking/Leave me alone, bitch, I wanna have fun.” As for that last line, it’s repetitive, mantra-y nature has its roots in a song like Gwen Stefani’s 2004 hit, “What You Waiting For?” (also known as: her first breakout single as a solo artist).
But the DNA that “Leave Me Alone” shares with “What You Waiting For?” goes far beyond the way that Stefani repeats her own version of “Leave me alone, bitch, I wanna have fun,” “What you waiting, what you waiting/What you waiting, what you waiting/What you waiting for?/Tick-tock, tick-tock/Tick-tock, tick-tock.” For, in both instances, Rapp and Stefani are speaking to the pressures that women in the music industry face when it comes to “striking while the iron is hot” a.k.a. putting out new music while they’ve still got some buzz around them. Not only that, but “acting right” or, more accurately, as expected. And what’s expected, even now, is to always play to the gallery.
However, despite each woman’s shade-throwing and expressions of irritation about this reality, they’ve both ended up capitulating to the expected “timing” of their musical releases. For Rapp, her sophomore album, Bite Me, will arrive at the end of the summer, when there’s still heat (literal and metaphorical) around her departure from The Sex Lives of College Girls and its subsequent cancellation. But, for those who might blame Rapp for the show’s demise, it’s like she declared as the first line of her debut, “I can’t be everything to everyone.” That debut, an EP titled, what else, Everything to Everyone, came out three years ago. In between, Rapp has released a full-length album called Snow Angel and caused controversy for being a self-declared “ageist”—particularly against millennial women—on an episode of Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen. For, although the topic at hand might have been The Real Housewives of Potomac, it led into Rapp explaining her general contempt for “older” women as follows: “I just was, like, ‘the young one’ in situations and, like, like, millennial women were always, like, coming for me. And I was like, ‘Shut up.’”
For someone with such disdain for said generation, however, she certainly forged an entire career out of the millennial movie that is Mean Girls. Adapted from the hit Broadway musical that Rapp also starred in as Regina George. Needless to say, the movie based on the musical based on the movie paled in comparison to what Rachel McAdams achieved in the 2004 original. And, speaking of 2004, that was, again, the same year that Gen Xer (but millennial icon) Stefani had the “audacity” to call out double standards for women in the public eye, singing, “Born to blossom, bloom to perish/Your moment will run out ‘cause of your sex chromosome.” Something that Rapp has yet to fully understand as she, like many in her generation, has been conditioned by a certain app to view anyone that’s about five years older than them as “old.” An accusation to which Rapp might respond with, “Leave me alone, bitch, I wanna have fun.” And, much like “I know you are, but what am I?,” it’s a catch-all “fuck off” insult to anyone that says something you don’t want to hear.
What Stefani didn’t want to hear, circa the early 2000s, was more pressure from managers and agents to “cash in” on the prospect of going solo after No Doubt. That theme is more overtly addressed in the extended video version of “What You Waiting For?,” directed by Francis Lawrence, when Stefani is shown arriving at LAX (an allusion to having just completed the Rock Steady Tour) and then being chauffeured back home as she gets a call from “Jimmy,” the guy (presumably manager or agent) who wants her to get into the studio with Pharrell right now. Stefani explains that she needs to sleep, that the studio can wait and that “I’m gonna do it, but I gotta get inspired.” Something “the suits” never understand when it comes to making art.
Cutting to “one month later” in the video, Jimmy is still harassing her about getting started when all she wants to do is stew and sleep. Instead of saying, “Leave me alone, bitch, I wanna have fun,” Stefani concedes to going to the studio, only to fall down the rabbit hole of a medical office (it’s sort of like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s Lacuna Inc., but for writer’s block and “creative pathways”) that forces her to create, goddammit. In other words, it was an era during which female musicians didn’t have the language or mindset to consider what can now be called “Gen Z-ifying” fame. Something Rapp taps into in the verse, “My manager callеd me, said, ‘Where’s thе single?’/Leave me alone, bitch, I wanna have fun/‘Oh, you’re breaking up, babe, I don’t got no signal.’” Something Stefani never would have said or done when Love. Angel. Music. Baby. was being made. Though she obviously wanted to.
Apart from Stefani, there’s a certain fellow Gen Z influence that’s deeply embedded in “Leave Me Alone.” Namely, Billie Eilish (after all, they’re two queer, mid-twenties Gen Z women). Particularly when it comes to the sound and lyrics of the first verse, “I’m a real bad girl but a real good kisser/Leave me alone, bitch, I wanna have fun/Got my hair tied up, phone on ‘Don’t disturb’/Leave me alone, bitch, I wanna have fun/Wear my jeans so low, show my little back dimple/Leave me alone, bitch, I wanna have fun/Even line my lips just to match my nipples/Leave me alone, bitch, I wanna have fun.” Not only channeling Eilish’s aura during her Happier Than Ever era and on a song like Hit Me Hard and Soft’s “Lunch,” the video itself gives way to an all-girl “sleepover,” of sorts, in a similar vein to Eilish’s “Lost Cause.”
The difference is, Rapp’s slumber party arrives after passing out at an “exclusive”-looking club/bar (not unlike the one Britney Spears is in during “Gimme More”—mainly because of the pole). After that collapse (from “too much” fun), the camera switches to a POV shot of her looking up at all the women who have gathered around her, only for a clapperboard to appear above Rapp in her “costume” for the “blacked out” sequence. This conceit emphasizing the notion that women in entertainment (and in general) are always expected to be “on” no matter what they’re going through or what they actually want for themselves. And what Rapp wants, as she makes very clear, is to have some fucking fun. The kind of fun that Gen Z romanticizes 00s-era Paris Hilton having when she went out on the town (i.e., Hollywood), trailed by TMZ and other assorted paparazzi.
To that point, there’s an undeniable “00s sound” (again, despite her well-documented ire for millennial women) that Rapp exudes, channeling the likes of Lindsay Lohan’s “Rumors” and Katy Rose’s “Overdrive” (which, yes, appeared on the original Mean Girls Soundtrack). And, in the spirit of those two songs, Rapp acts put-upon and annoyed by life at such a young age, as evidenced in a chorus that confides, “Can I tell you a secret?/I’m so sick of it all (uh-huh)/Come get wet in the deep end/T-t-t-take it off, c-c-c-cannonball.” Rapp effectively confirmed that this level of angst-riddenness fuels the overarching theme of the album by revealing the title to be Bite Me—another very 00s teen girl flourish on her part.
As for her unconscious (or subconscious) pillow fight in the video, it soon devolves into an all-out fight club, with Rapp getting punched in the face to the point where she’s bleeding from her mouth (reminding one of another Gen Z “it girl” of the moment, Lola Young, in the video for her own latest single, “One Thing”). But it seems that no matter how many times people (or her own life choices) try to knock Rapp out, she’s still going to get right back up and keep talking her shit (there’s a reason, after all, that she has a song called “Talk Too Much”).
So while Rapp’s managers, agents and fans might essentially be saying, “Look at your watch now/You’re still a super-hot female/You got your million-dollar contract/And they’re all waiting for your hot track,” Rapp is ostensibly determined to take things at her own pace and do it all her own way. An approach that goes in direct contrast to something she also said about making music to Variety in 2022: “I’m doing this to make friends. You’re my friend. Like please, Jesus Christ, I need to be less lonely.” But with a song as deliberately “alienating” as “Leave Me Alone,” it would appear that Rapp has had a change of heart about that since becoming more famous. Not quite to the same extent as Chappell Roan, but still.
