Addison Rae Is the Pop Star at the End of Time

The rising pop star returned to the stage where it all happened last week, gracing The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon once again with dance moves that will irrevocably change the culture around her — a culture that now bends entirely towards the center she twirls in. Notably, she wore a dress once owned by Lee, a shimmering golden gown with tiered fringe and a sequined bustier.

Her stylist, Dara, sourced the piece from the archive of The Way We Wore. I once said Rae had sprung into existence like an imaginary pop star made manifest by Dara through a similar wish to Lee's. It was foolish of me, seeing now that the sheer force of her own willpower contributed to that joint sorcery.

Last fall, ahead of the release of her debut album Addison and well after "Diet Pepsi"and "Aquamarine" had hypnotized a million hags and their gay best friends, I wrote that Rae was "Almost like Eve in the Garden of Good and Evil, poised to take a bite of the fruit of forbidden knowledge and alter our world forever." Those first two singles held a potent edge to them that fully actualized on Addison; the album crackles with charged sexual energy and a wild playfulness that had rarely been seen since Britney Jean Spears made her own pilgrimage out from Louisiana.

But it was also laden with reference, perched on a cliff at the very precipice of time. Madonna, Lana Del Rey, Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Björk, Marilyn Monroe. Ray of Light, Born to Die, Brat, Debut and even Post. She stands there on the edge firmly transfixed as the cumulative pop iconography crashes into her, through her. It does not overwhelm her, or throw her over the edge. Instead, she smiles, laughs even, and jumps headfirst into Gypsy Rose Lee's glittering column of light.

What struck me then, and strikes me now twice, is the way her boundless creative energies seem to spring forth from a fervent, near-insatiable desire to be entirely herself. The woman she claws her way towards is a singular pop sensation, loosened of expectation and set free — by chance and privilege both — of the queue her peers stay lined up in. The freewheeling talent before me came to this on an unconventional path. Sure, that there are two pop stars of similar note up from Louisiana bears a second mention, but she was also bolstered by the desires of salivating label executives prone to the blindness inflicted by her high follower count.

This is of her own admission. As Rae puts it, she entered the meeting that led to her eventual record deal with what was quite literally a binder full of colors and a dream. “I was like, ‘I don’t have music because I haven’t been able to go into the studio, but I know exactly what to do. Here’s 50 words describing how the music’s going to make you feel and here’s 10 colors.’ And they believed in me.”

This is not to dismiss the shroud of luck and dreams that envelopes her. Lightning doesn't strike twice, unless you're Addison Rae on The Tonight Show. Her first appearance has become something of a folk hero's origin story. It is delightfully of its time, with Rae in ripped blue jeans, white sneakers and a crop top. She walks Fallon through various TikTok dances popular in the moment, spawning near endless memes and edits and revisionist narratives on how it's actually the most charming thing anyone had ever seen.

This second appearance has reached back through time and made that true, actually. After a conventional rendition of "Diet Pepsi," she swaps the song's meticulously arranged key change for a hard transition into her synth-heavy album opener "New York." The song works on a variety of levels — she wrote it about her first experiences in New York, as she fell down the well with Dara and her coven of Downtown mysteries.

It's also a nod to that very first performance on the show. The excoriation she endured from critics in the wake of it seems to have crystalized into a fervent desire to do whatever she wants in this next chapter of her career. It unburdened her on the trek back to this very stage. That Jimmy Fallon crawled around on all fours like Rae's dog says much, I'd say, of the star power she's accumulated on her journey.

In a recent W cover story, Rae explains that even in the depths of viral infamy, "There was something inside me that I refused to let disappear." She says that "By nurturing it consistently—whether by posting on TikTok, Instagram, Tumblr, or whatever outlet I could find—I wasn’t going to let that go.” The next bit is particular evocative, if plainly telling of the wish she made to become a pop princess. In an industry ran by the algorithm she's untethered herself from, “the magic really happens when you start creating purely for yourself. [...] I seek fearlessness. I want to be honest. I want to follow my gut.”

What I return to again is the unlikeness of the moment. The improbability that now she appears, in a music industry broken to pieces by the footsteps of warring titans and robbed of its senses by algorithmic data. She is not alone amongst her peers, of which there are many — PinkPantheress is Rae's most immediate contemporary, a singularity herself at the helm of the emerging pop zeitgeist. But Rae is alone on this particular path, up from the bowels of TikTok and into the sun. The global, sold out debut tour she's careening through says much of this moment. Back in W, she says: "Maybe I just dance for myself. Maybe I create for myself, even if no one ever acknowledges it.”

There is a moment, partway through her performance, when she becomes tangled up in the microphone. The limitations of this naked stage is made excessively obvious; it is absent the props and set dressings rising pop stars burden themselves with. It is her against the music against late night entertainment. The beat builds, silence kicks in and is only broken by the crack of a Diet Pepsi. She suddenly spins out from the clutches of her microphone. The beat drops again. Rae is golden blur as the strobe lighting devolves into sheer chaos. Past crashes into the present and she basks in the moment, arms wide, before striding towards Fallon's desk and rolling around on top of it. There she is, the pop ingenue herself, legs up on the desk where Hollywood makes it happen.

Rae slides her way onto the floor, deliciously cloaked with innuendo. Fallon gets on all fours and follows behind her, an audience surrogate robbed of his senses. She laughs, and Rae's smile cannot be hidden behind the tangle of blonde that flies free all around her flushed visage.

Addison Rae could be a star without any talent at all; Addison Rae could be a star without any time left in which to prove it. Here at the end of history, with the walls of pop music caving in around her, watch her make that ascent to superstardom all by herself, enveloped in the light of a million wishes.

Image via Getty