Addison Rae’s Aquamarine did not take place

In late October, two weeks before the US presidential election, famed political analyst Nate Silver revealed that, despite all available data, he was certain Donald Trump would win. It was a gut- level feeling. A feeling which transcended any data analysis or objective consideration of the candidates chances based on polling or simulations. In fact, when Nate’s own simulations on election morning showed an even 50/50 split for the candidates, it was clear there was a disparity between the intent, methods, and the results. He would eventually unplug his prediction model halfway through election night, convinced it was divorced from reality. When Trump eventually did defeat Kamala Harris, in what can only be characterized as a humiliating defeat for the democratic party, it called into question an entire paradigm of politics. Not just for the democratic party, which had now leveled three very similar campaigns with diminishing results, but for an entire set of analytical tools; an entire modality of understanding how mass movements operated, and for predicting the future. Despite two decades of refinement for data science as a methodology and mode of understanding the world, why was it so patently clear at a gut level that some clear truth was refusing to show up in the data.
When Charli XCX’s Brat took the world by storm, there was an equivalently indefinable gut feeling to the experience, that the album was dead on arrival. Despite the eternal rave, the promise of emotional intensity beyond the self, and unending milestones of success, it was a failure in some quality beyond our capacity to measure. Brat was the corpse of a real experience, puppeteered to the ecstatic screams of a social body that had become unfathomable. The numbers hid something, obfuscating a clear and unstoppable truth.
When Charli’s definitive album, Pop 2, was released in 2017 it reflected the crystallisation of a wide range of burgeoning movements which had been waiting to be birthed into the collective consciousness. A chrysalis state reflected in its expansive collaborator list, unprecedented for a pop release at the time. A list that included previous collaborators like AG Cook and Sophie, but also a new suite of future notables like Caroline Polachek, Umru, Pabllo Vittar, Dorian Electra, and Kim Petras. A list of names that would eventually form the new roster of queer icons and pop’s intelligentsia. While Charli XCX had attempted to validate the sounds of PC Music, the wider scene of deconstructed club music, and the burgeoning hyper-femme experience through her previous mixtape Number 1 Angel and the preceding Vroom Vroom EP, there was a vastness to Pop 2. A quality which was reflected in the equivalently ostentatious title, a title that proved to be more accurate than anyone could have predicted at the time. Pop 2 posited itself as a sequel to an entire realm of experience, to imagine what pop looked through the looking glass. In a world which had de-stabilized the relationship between media and experience, where our art had become untethered from our day to day experience, Pop 2 thought to ask ‘what can we feel where nothing is real’?

“I think all pop music should be about who can make the loudest, brightest thing. That, to me, is an interesting challenge, musically and artistically. And I think it’s a very valid challenge – just as valid as who can be the most raw emotionally. I don’t know why that is prioritised by a lot of people as something that’s more valuable. The challenge I’m interested in being part of is who can use current technology, current images and people, to make the brightest, most intense, engaging thing.” —Sophie

Despite the disappointing commercial reach of all of Charli XCX’s albums from Pop 2 up until Brat, there was the sense that she had positioned herself as the axis around which pop as a concept would have to rotate around. That discussions of pop music had to include her, even if it was to present the reactionary idea, that hyper-reality was something to reject, that the world could never accept it. While famed youtube pop critic Todd in the Shadows insisted that Charli would always remain the “popstar of the future”, he, nonetheless, had to say something about Charli lest his silence serve to invalidate his pop cache.

Released at the very moment where Arca and Sophie became names spoken like spells, Pop 2 was a stamp of credibility on genres and spaces which had felt impossibly subterranean before. While Deconstructed Club music had floated under popular music consciousness with the success of electronic producers like Jam City, Kingdom, Elysia Crampton, Andy Stott, and the PC Music scene, no one had made a compelling portrait of how this genre might intersect with the wider world. No one had managed to demonstrate its practical role in culture at large. By the release of Charli’s eponymous album in 2019, the entire field of Charli collaborators and influences would become a genre all to itself. Hyperpop was a genre under Charli’s wing, under her shadow. Charli was more than anything a cultural figure, a person who could pull underground moments into the spotlight with the pull of her cultural gravity. You don’t have to be famous to make others so.
By the release of Brat however, those genres—whose lifespan were irrevocably tied to Pop 2—seemed to be on their last legs, and Charli’s capacity as kingmaker seemed weaker than ever. Coming into 2024, as hyperpop’s moment had crested—with Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ Unholy falling off the airwaves as a final gesture of its impotence—and Sophie’s tragic death hanging heavy, there was nothing but a scene of people who seemed desperate to move into something new. Arca’s monumental KICK series presented five templates of everything deconstructed club could be that was anything except itself, and Andy Stott and Elysia Crampton were hitting the breaks, going quiet, going soft. Underground electronic music and alternative pop music was much more situated to provide a Magdalena Bay than it was to provide someone who could fit into Charli’s hyper-real world. As a culture the very idea of hyper-reality, of synthesised experience, felt deeply out of tune with the tone of the moment. On a gut level—in some way ineffable—the conservative turn of US politics under Biden’s neglectful stewardship and its predominant concern over the price of eggs, seemed unaligned with the aesthetic world of Charli. In 2022, when she released the preceding album, Crash, the outright rejection of Charli by popular music and the distaste and rejection by her own fan base for “going pop” (a humorous thought to consider), seemed more than anything like a cosmic gesture. A signal that the Charli moment, and the Charli world, had died. That world of detached joy, of queer pop-girl fantasy, was untenable, unreachable from this moment for the collective consciousness.

And finally there was Brat.

Released in a year that saw the dominance of pseudo-earthy and faux-authentic artists like Morgan Wallen and Zach Bryan, and the back-to-basics pop ethos of Sabrina Carpenter, a unilateral rejection of the hyper-real ethos, what would Charli do?

Addison Rae is the prototypical celebrity of the contemporary zeitgeist. Initially gaining popularity from Tiktok dances she quickly pivoted into a set of podcast exclusivity deals, fragrance lines, and an acting career, all of which she fired through at a pace that was frankly whiplash inducing. She is perhaps the platonic ideal of the contemporary multi-hyphenate. Her success was immediate and non-descriptive, and her career has been a perceptual set of half-gestures made under the guidance of a content-based mindset. Two utterly uninteresting podcasts were rushed to market in early 2020, and a remake of a middling 1990s romantic comedy film was rushed into the discount bin of Netflix streaming, ensuring a constant reassurance that Addison Rae was still alive, still visible. Content was available. She was a celebrity utterly bereft of a presence, or even a single feature to differentiate her from the mountain of tik-tok celebrities slamming against Hollywood without making a dent. In fact at a certain point it seemed as if fellow Tiktok superstar Charli D’Amelio was destined to have a better Hollywood career even with her infamously terrible reality tv shows. Awful is better than non-descript. And yet, there was something about Addison Rae, some quality of… a girls’ girl.
Behind the scenes of her infinitely disappointing content-creator career, Addison Rae had begun planting the seeds of a music career. During this period, circa early 2020, Addison had begun work on a series of tracks with a portfolio of y2k verified hitmakers (who had worked with Britney during her hit years), and producers behind similar content-creator-to-singer success stories like Troye Sivan. After a leak of these early tracks forced her hand, and brought her attempt to build in secret to a screeching halt- not too different from Charli’s XCX World- she rushed an EP to market. The resulting 2023 EP, titled AR, featured a set of nondescript tunes heavily indebted to early 2000s dance pop with equivalently larger-than-life aspirations… and a Charli XCX feature. The online reaction was positive, a reaction of surprise more than anything. These songs were competent. In fact, for a tik-toker they represented a high bar far above what her contemporaries were doing. It was clear that Addison Rae was someone, but it remained to be seen if she was someone worth caring about. Competence is a necessary feature of pop stardom, but beyond a certain threshold it’s a negligible quality, what makes a pop career is differentiation. What makes your music yours, unmistakable? An inability to properly enunciate may have been a demonstration of a weakness in Ariana Grande’s craft, but a strong point in her ability to build an Ariana-ness in her own music.

In the lead up to Brat Charli released three singles (including one b-side) along with a set of remixes for two of them. An excessive rollout perfectly inline with what we would eventually understand as the blitzkrieg of Brat, the avalanche of Brat-ness. The first single, Von Dutch, was intended to wipe the slate clean from her previous album’s sonic flirtations with traditional dance-pop and return Charli to artifice. The writhing electro-clash had the obtuse, subversive, and abrasive pleasure of her fan favorite album, How I’m Feeling Now, but had whittled it down to a fine sheen. It fit into an interesting pocket between the sonic world of her early work, but the laser-focused popular interest of her previous album. The reception was, unsurprisingly, mixed to some degree by this quality. While it sounded like Charli, there was again, a gut feeling that things were different. By the time follow-up singles Club Classics and 360 released, replete with canonising references to the “Charli world”, it felt like more than anything like a post-mortem on the scene. Name-drops for collaborators like AG Cook, Sophie, and Hudson Mohawk—along with outsiders integral to the extended Charli constellation like sewerslut—some of whom were now dead, retired, or repositioning themselves as the old guard, just felt odd.
While Charli had, for the past few albums, quickly followed singles up with accompanying remixes, the Von Dutch and 360 remixes were different. Instead of tapping producers to rework the songs, Charli brought in other popular artists to redo the songs with, including Yung Lean, Robyn, and yes, Addison Rae. While 360 would eventually also get a rework by iconic UK producers Skream and Benga, all eyes were on Addison.
With the inclusion of Addison Rae on the remix of her new album’s first single, and Charli’s insistent media presence confirming her bonafides, it seemed like Charli was doing something she had never done before, build something outside her own world. While Charli has always been a kingmaker, so to speak, her role was also in fostering outsiders and giving them legitimacy and platforms, of being a tastemaker. While Charli built a world, it was always the XCX World, an expanse to center her own career. Charli has, for the majority of her career, felt like an upcoming artist, or at least an artist of the moment. Someone primarily concerned with creating new heights, of being her own force. Only at this moment, trying to launch an artist with no underground cache or pop bonafides did it feel like Charli was something established. Charli XCX was an industry figure, an insider, someone trying to create a new market.
Establishment is a concerning place to be as a pop star. While pop music loves a “Bitch Im Madonna”, they don’t extend that love beyond it, and the glory of reveling in historicisms is short-lived. Madonna is, and therefore has no room to become. If Addison is becoming, then it must be Charli who is. But what is Addison becoming, what was Charli XCX’s vision for the future? What was this new market…
Addison Rae, as the first external voice attached to the Brat moment, is central to the Brat worldview and its future, but that future would have to be carefully contextualised to demonstrate its intentions. The 360 music video, perhaps the defining music video of the Brat era- despite its significantly trailing view count compared to Guess- was a confident statement of who Brat is. Julia Fox, Chloe Sevigny, Alex Consani, Blizzy Mcquire, Rachel Sennott, and a never ending parade of iconic female celebrities demonstrated that the ethos of Brat was a world much bigger than just the XCX World. Brat was an entire manner of being, a gestalt of the modern urban gay, the modern urban woman, captured in a panoply of cultural references and media cache. Brat is the indescribable fantasy world where women slay, unabated by the world, where the primary virtue is to be undefeated, untethered. Brat was a demonstration of an identity in a way Charli’s music had never before been. In fact Charli’s music and art has often been criticised for the opposite quality, its insularity and self-referentiality, qualities which Brat turns inside out as a method of being. YOU can exist through an insular layer of references and self-canonising, YOU can be the main character of a rave, and a central figure of a world all your own. Brat is a testament to the indomitable spirit of self. And Addison Rae, the celebrity without a face, the celebrity without a moment, was its critical character.
Addison Rae is a person who should not have a music career people take seriously. Her entire backstory is the kind of fame you have to thoroughly wash off before you can make serious in-roads into credibility. While no-one should doubt the benefit of fame in making a career in any creative field, music is a medium built on the language of authenticity and individualism. You can make fake music, but you have to do so willfully, of your own volition. While Willow Smith can extinguish the nepo-baby criticisms that dogged her early career, that's a fire that can only be beaten by demonstrating, in no uncertain terms, one’s own individuality, one’s own authentic interest and artistic talent. That stink, however, serves as a perfect medium to express the Brat ethos within. Addison Rae is a woman par excellence, attractive and bubbly, supportive and driven, traumatized and yet unburdened, loving and sensual. She is the platonic ideal of the Brat woman, someone free from the rough edges of reality, a hyper-real figure. If, regardless of the forces levied against her, she could still, through pure force of will- and by disconnecting with material reality to build one's own reality- build a music career without the drudgery of authentic gestures, then she was BRAT. Is there a pretence or context for supporting the musical vision of Addison Rae? No, but Brats support Brats. Is there a pretence for supporting Kamala Harris’ campaign promise of giving America the most lethal fighting force? No, but Brats support Brats.
As the hyper-individualism of the modern democratic party finished chopping the roots of it’s already minuscule collectivist past, as Kamala became both character and animus, a personality whose role in politics was to demonstrate the individual characteristics we associate with a president, not to actualise a collective will, it became inevitable that the twin destinies of Brat and Kamala would intertwine.

As Addison Rae’s twin volley of Diet Pepsi and Aquamarine hit the twitter-sphere they landed like memes more than tracks, ideology more than music. To say you like Addison Rae felt more like a confirmation of one’s Brat-ness than a gesture towards the music’s legitimacy. What was there to like? This was a music career built in reverse, dredging up the Brat approved music canon to reconfigure a history of pop music as Addison’s world. A world where Lana del Ray and Addison Rae existed simultaneously since the beginning, where Jessie Ware and Addison Rae were always contemporaries. Addison Rae is hyper-reality par excellence, a music career that never discovered the dissonance between reality and feeling, but started there from its opening notes. A music career that never really began, but simply arrived already complete. A candidate thrown like a hail mary with three months to go in the mold of a class of politicians already on the way out, a name vaulted into history as nothing more than a shooting star of a moment that never really happened.

Brat was the dream of a woman unhurt, floating above the world, the center of the rave. One which was promptly thrown into the muck of a shitty fucking world. In its wake we have Addison Rae, the fantasy we can retreat into, the cloister of a memory of that dream we’ve woken up from..

Brat Summer Is Over, Long Live Addison Rae.