In the halcyon days of pandemic TikTok, anyone mindlessly scrolling the app would almost certainly have seen the beaming face of Addison Rae. A sweet Southern blonde with a signature nose scrunch, she had dropped out of Louisiana State University for a wildly successful career emoting and dancing online, becoming the app’s highest-paid personality in 2020. You could watch her throw it back at TikTok’s first content mansion, the Hype House, or lip-sync to a bitchy Kardashians conversation with an actual Kardashian. Before the Kid Laroi was a Billboard-charting star, he was riding her coattails. “I need a bad bitch/Uh, Addison Rae,” he sang on his early viral hit, “Addison Rae.”
Social media celebrity is fickle, so Rae diversified her endeavors, acting in a Netflix rom-com and launching her pop career with a middling, Selena Gomez-esque debut single, “Obsessed.” The quality of these projects invited ridicule, and Rae’s sheer level of online exposure made both petty backlash and legitimate grievances inevitable. But it is often when a beautiful young singer “flops” that she encounters a new, more niche type of fame. Rae’s unreleased tracks leaked and began spreading online, resuscitated by queer pop-culture obsessives who noticed her hanging out with Charli XCX and listening to Burial and Arca. This smidge of subcultural status, combined with slightly more compelling vocals from Rae, were just enough for these poptimists to say: “Wait, this is kind of a serve.”
Now bidding for pop’s middle class, Rae has released a few tracks from her “lost” album, including the Gaga reject “Nothing On (But the Radio),” the Charli-assisted “2 Die 4,” and her latest, “I Got It Bad,” a bedazzled turn-of-the-millennium pop song that activates the same basal pleasure system as Lily Rose-Depp’s diegetic Idol smash “World Class Sinner/I’m a Freak.” On “I Got It Bad,” Rae is the generic innocent heroine falling for a bad boy, ready to submit to the extremes of obsession—“I don’t want something right down the middle”—and the mechanizations of the pop machine. And submission feels good—or at least, there’s an immediate reward in the song’s blingy flourishes and bass-heavy breakdown. “This is definitely something that could ruin my life,” Rae sings, sounding like someone familiar with the thrill of turning an ordinary character into an object of unusual fixation.
