MM #32: Addison Rae
Mabel tackles the twenty-first century
I have a confession to make. While I’ve made the nineteenth century my entire personality, I am actually obsessed with contemporary culture. This is not to say that I read books written in the last century. No, I don’t really do that (though I am currently enjoying Rona Jaffe’s 1958 The Best of Everything after working my way through Dickens’ David Copperfield for what felt like eons). I also don’t mean to suggest that I am interested in contemporary art. Believe me, I’ve tried, but there are only so many hours in the day, and there’s a John Singer Sargent exhibition at the Met right now!
When it comes to everything other than literature and art, I am a twenty-first-century gal. What’s left? Music, movies, television—and the one thing powerful enough to tether these art forms: celebrities!!!!!!! My favorite thing in the entire world!!!! Celebrities!!!!!!!
I don’t need to belabor the inherent connection between having the taste for the finer things (Dickens and Sargent) and loving celebrities (see below), but I know it mystifies some people, namely my parents. How many times have mom and dad pleaded with me, begging me to explain how someone so refined, elegant, and intelligent as myself (my words, not theirs) could love the Kardashians and the Housewives? It seems obvious to me. Perhaps you could think of me as a humanist. Perhaps you already know that I’m a Pisces. I feel things deeply. I empathize with those around me, whether they are alive, dead, confined to the pages of a great novel, or trapped on my phone in the form of an Instagram Reel of Lisa Rinna dancing to Madonna’s “Express Yourself” while wearing the Conner Ives’ Protect the Dolls shirt donned by Troye Sivan and Addison Rae at Coachella?
I am also a terrible gossip. I need to know the intimate details of other people’s lives. I thank Dickens for lifting the curtain back on the scandalous Steerforth and Sargent for exposing the shoulder of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. I’ve hounded after celebrity gossip at least since 2005.
I’ll never forget that summer. I was nine years old, on the beach with my family. The ocean could not tempt me. The hot dogs could not tempt me. My siblings’ exhortations to join them in building a sand castle could not tempt me. I wanted one thing, and one thing only: to be allowed to read my mom’s Us Weekly with Jude Law and Sienna Miller on the cover. I am nothing if not persistent. I wore her down, and she permitted me to read all about Jude cheating with the kids’ nanny. I was never the same.
What I love about the nineteenth century is that there’s pretty much unlimited gossip. I can read Queen Victoria’s journals. I can reproduce a horny letter written to Mandylion author Elizabeth Stoddard by her editor in The Morgesons, available here. But I’ve devoted a dozen previous newsletters to such topics. Today’s newsletter is about today.
Without further ado, a thousand words on what I’m currently listening to. . .
For the last week I’ve been nonstop listening to Addison Rae’s new single “Headphones On”—with headphones on, of course. I’ve been an earnest fan of Addison’s since she starred in a gender-bending remake of She’s All That and started hanging out with Kourtney Kardashian. AR, her widely lampooned 2023 foray into pop music, cemented me as a supporter (for those wondering what her fans call themselves, it is not “Raecists” as was rumored on X last year). Since the controversy surrounding AR—a ridiculed first single followed by a leak of the rest of the EP—Addison has remade herself as a pop ingénue that people can’t help but notice. She hangs with the right crowd (she screamed on Charli XCX’s “Von Dutch” and has been remixed by Arca) and evidently has a group of gay men with fantastic taste molding her into the exact pop princess I want. In the video for her single “Diet Pepsi,” she was Marilyn; on the follow-up “Aquamarine,” she revived the fantasy of the 2006 tween flick of the same name; and on “High Fashion,” she was Bling Ring meets The Wizard of Oz.
“Headphones On” finds Addison cosplaying as Björk and Ray of Light-era Madonna. The song begins with what sounds like an autotuned yoga om. A vaguely R&B beat reminds me of that scene in Sex and the City where Carrie glumly struts down the sidewalk in the Galliano newsprint dress.
Carrie’s season 3 walk of shame follows not a wild one-night stand, but a lunch where she confesses to Natasha that she had an affair with Mr. Big. Addison’s anthem similarly begins with pain—“guess I gotta accept the pain,” she sings—but unlike Carrie, who never really learns her lesson, Addison self-soothes by putting her headphones on and “listen[ing] to her favorite song.” Her headphones and the puff of a cigarette make her realize that “every good thing comes my way.” This doesn’t mean she isn’t still a little sad. After all, in one of the truest lyrics I’ve ever heard, she admits that she wishes “my mom and dad could’ve been in love.” But music transports Addison to a mystical place where her pain is less excruciating and her dreams come true. This fantasy plays out in the music video. Addison gallops across the black sand beaches of Iceland on a noble steed, her pink hair flying behind her. We learn at the end of the video that there is no horse. There is no pink hair. There is just Addison, headphones on, riding a mechanical pony in front of the supermarket where she works.
Addison’s derivation of spiritual nirvana from her use of technology firmly establishes her as an inheritor of Madonna circa 1998. As the sun set on the nineties, the pop icon was reincarnated as a yoga-posing, Kabbalah-practicing earth mother. In the music video for the lead single “Ray of Light,” Madonna, wearing a denim shirt and red string bracelet, sings in front of a green screen onto which images of a pre-Y2K world rapidly flit. Sped-up clips of people commuting and riding escalators flash across the screen. Madonna croons,
Zephyr in the sky at night, I wonder
Do my tears of mourning sink beneath the sun?
She's got herself a universe, gone quickly
For the call of thunder threatens everyone
By the time I read about Jude Law and Sienna Miller’s affair, I was already a devoted Madonna fan, thanks to my mother. I am certain I first listened to Erotica (1992) in utero. My knowledge of Madonna songs verges on the encyclopedic, but I remember many of her lyrics as I initially misheard them. For years, my siblings and I insisted that “Hung Up” began with Madonna chanting “tantos spice,” not “time goes by.” And I always thought that in “Ray of Light,” she sang “She’s got a cell phone universe, gone quickly,” not “She’s got herself a universe, gone quickly.” I’ll admit that “tantos spice” never made much sense, but “She’s got a cell phone universe” feels prescient and poetic.
In 1998, Madonna wondered how the human race would fare in a “cell phone universe.” In 2025, Addison Rae is a cell phone universe. Born in 2000, she catapulted to fame on TikTok during the covid pandemic, when the world hit pause on the “Ray of Light” rat race and devoted themselves to their screens. This all reminds me of “Quibi,” the short-lived short-form streaming platform founded in 2018. Funded by the major Hollywood studios, Quibi promised to revolutionize our commutes by producing short, high-quality streaming content designed to be watched on a phone. The only QUIck BIte I remember was Survive, in which Sophie Turner stars as a depressed girl who survives a plane crash. I don’t think Quibi would have survived even if the pandemic hadn’t happened. TikTok exploded into the zeitgeist during covid because of beautiful yet ordinary girls like Addison. If we’re going to live in a cell phone universe, we want our content and pop stars to be authentic. If we’re going to sacrifice our souls to our phones, we want to spend our final conscious moments consuming content made in Louisiana State University dorm rooms by girls who didn’t make the dance team. Addison is on the cover of this month’s Elle, announcing that she’s dropping “Rae” in pursuit of mononymity, and offering up this nugget of wisdom:
“I wasn’t going to let being cringe and posting a million videos stop me. And now that I look back at it, I don’t feel embarrassed about anything I ever posted. I can appreciate that girl and say that was a girl who was going to make it happen, no matter what that meant doing.”
I sent this to Madeline as a reminder that we should fearlessly chase our dreams, even if it means posting all of the time. Speaking of which, maybe I’ll start a new column on Substack dedicated to my most current fascinations? How about that? Would you read it?
XOXO,
Mabel