You know me, Reader. I was lay (boyfriend’s bed, the Cuatro Torres just visible out the window, it’s Valentine’s Day, he’s at work, God it’s so hard), thinking (slightly hungover, freshly cut hair, 3 espressos deep, dodging the cumstain on my pillow) about whether to snatch an arbitrary line from Marx’s Grundrisse or Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet to feign informed sociological analysis of Addison Rae’s new single, ‘High Fashion’, and in doing so fraudulently intellectualise the fact that I froth-at-the-mouth-rabidly support this woman’s current trajectory. I was lay (I am lay) in these sheets, and you may think this introduction promises my resignation from this formula, BUT IT DOES NOT. Self-awareness does not necessitate moral puritanism, Reader. I am nothing if not a proselyte. And I might add: if any number of novels can establish status via epigraph, then so shall I. Without further ado…. Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel (one of my all-time favourites) is preceded by the following epigraph:

“The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”

This motif of “everything as it is now, just a little different” is echoed throughout the text, and comes to involve itself with ideas of intertextuality, representation, and authorship. To what point can anyone truly author anything, if the cultural artefact produced results from a centuries-long interpersonal means of production through which you learned the necessary skills and gleaned the necessary inspiration to be moved to make such an artefact? The Hassidic story itself is one Lerner says that he first happened upon in Agamben, but that is usually attributed to Walter Benjamin, who critics note heard it from Gershom Scholem. Maybe the sum of all things in the world-to-come, despite the new meshings of old influences and processes, is, as the story proposes, as it is now. Maybe, if we do not think of the “everything” as “every single thing” and instead visualise it as the holistic “everything of now” versus the “everything of then”, we realise that everything will indeed be as it is now, because the sum of all things will still weigh the same, in grams if not in cultural weight. All we do is reshape, remesh, rewind and press play. 

Stay with me. If we suspend our disbelief, this means that, no, your housemate was not the first housemate to piss himself in Wharf Chambers. No, the Leeds Swimming Society was not the first swimming society to play soggy biscuit. And I’m sorry, I really am, but you and your friends were not the first ones to find that bench on the hill behind Meanwood Valley Farm that overlooks the city. I know someone who shat there. But even if you and your group of friends were the West Yorkshire conquistadors that you imagined, my point is none of it would be really new! The soggy biscuit would simply be the incidental next iteration of thousands of years of rancid biscuit-based tests of character. I am sure that Henry VIII was the sorest loser of soil’d bisquite that 1503 ever saw. 

Circling back, though, you have likely inferred at this point that this is a setup for me to defend Addison Rae against plagiarism allegations. You wouldn’t be far off. “High Fashion”, a whisper-falsetto track that stings against a thick, layered synth instrumentation, definitely recalls “Fetish”-era Selena Gomez (2017) and Ariana Grande’s “Let Me Love You” and “Touch It” (2016). Likewise, Rae’s first and second singles from her upcoming debut pulled generously from pop of the last 20 years, with “Diet Pepsi” (2024) drawing comparison to early Lana Del Rey and “Aquamarine”’s (2024) glittery production pointing to Madonna’s Ray of Light (1998) and American Life (2003). And these are not baseless comparisons; Rae’s existing discography undeniably rehashes pop music as it has been established thus far, almost as an agenda. 

But in truth, I do not find it convincing that this makes her a copycat any more than it makes her a ‘student’ of the culture. The music itself, combined with the concomitant imagery she has released alongside it, betrays (at least to me) a concerted effort to be seen making a concerted effort to be a popstar. Whether it’s the performative, almost histrionic hypersexuality in her music videos; the ill-fitting, dress-up style outfits; the brownnosing of Charli XCX; the bubblegum-blowing on the cover of her debut EP; the OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES (2018) jumper; or the stylish, eyebrowless accessory that she has made of choreographer Lexee Smith, to me this rebrand screams popstar-plays-girl-desparate-to-be-popstar. It is the ouroboros!!! And dare I say it is, for the Aquama-ra-ra bitch, a foolproof ploy.

Medidate on this. A Tiktok darling of the universally-hated “Renegade” epoch, Addison had no doubt seen the vicious reception of ‘serious’ attempts at music by her fellows (colleagues? contemporaries?) and herself (see: “Obsessed” (2021)). She (and her team, I’m sure) would have known that a transition to popstar would be no mean feat, and to circumvent this, the (I’ll say it) genius move was to make her entire brand a satirisation of her own position in the media-sphere. If she were to play the part of a wide-eyed, fame-hungry protegé of Charli and Troye Sivan, both explicitly in the kitsch, frenzy, and referentiality of her music videos and more convincingly in paid-for paparazzi shots and dazed-and-confused red carpet interviews, any negative reception she received for the awkwardness of her reorientation towards music would be suffused into the self-consciously artificial, fawning persona she had marketed. She would set up a relationship with the public in which criticism is negated and instead relegates itself to fluffing up her own polemacy, and those on either cognitive side of those who criticise (those who consume the product without any level of interrogation, and those who enjoy the art of the charade itself) will praise her relentlessly (see: me). 

The proof is in the pudding – the numbers Addison is pulling right now are nothing to be sniffed at. On Spotify, “Aquamarine” sits at 32 million streams, and “Diet Pepsi” at a mammoth 292 million. Beyond this, Rae is fraternising with any number of established popstars (Lorde, Rosalía, etc.) while simultaneously gesturing at relationships with more esoteric figures such as Arca. She’s walking the tightrope well because she has erected neon billboards pointing at the tightrope and just how thin it is. 

As far as I’m concerned, “High Fashion” and it’s (anything but) coke-fuelled visuals has one foot (pun intended) planted in Addison’s hallmark please-don’t-make-me-sing! kitsch and the other firmly in an ambition to innovate, through however many layers of metacommentary. Disjointed, vapid lyrics (“I know I’m drunk, but…”) poorly solder a number of pop clichés together (‘couture’, libido, uppers, exhibitionism). They make the track fodder for off-the-bat criticism à la Artpop (2014), but the poor lyrical execution is juxtaposed against an unexpectedly complex, hazy instrumental which weaves in and out of the vocal performance and, during drops, cracks open into EDM-adjacent texture. The track’s video, too, plays with garish colour, visual allusion, and forced perspective, meshing together images of Addison as a chalk-covered gymnast, Oz’s Dorothy, and a closet fashionista literally playing dress up. It’s frenetic, but it’s notably more thought-out than the lyrics. The work put into the track’s music video and production problematise an assessment of the lyrics that dismisses them as thoughtless or manufactured. 

For if ‘manufactured’ is the intention, what is the logic behind it? Stirring controversy for publicity? Or holding a mirror up to the pop that we’ve been listening to uncritically for the last couple of decades? If Addison, the total newcomer to ‘serious’ art, she who is easiest to critique, decides to gut her lyrics of meaning, does this not reinscribe the words sung with words implied? Words that ask us how deep the lyrics of pop we admit as enjoyable actually are. The song she has produced, whether or not its lyricism is justified by the modalities attached to it, is just as the songs we accept are, but a little different. A little different in source, a little different in frankness regarding influences, a little different in its relationship with sincerity. But by writing a mirror instead of an image itself, this music encourages us to review what we consider good or original art, our acceptance of a world-to-come that does not invent its meaning machines but simply reboots them, and our own media literacy. 

Written by Kyle Galloway