Addison Rae, or: When Gas Is Mid and Mid Is Gas

in search of smartdumb: Max Martin's voice memos; good vs. believable; pop stars become celebrities vs. celebrities who become pop stars; Ron Perry's Tiktok swan song

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A few years ago, when I was hocking a music collaboration app around town, I ended up at the Beverly Hills residence that Max Martin uses for his studio. Martin has a publishing company called MXM that signs mostly young, mostly Scandi writers and producers. In the industry they benefit from the mystique of Martin’s pop god afterglow, though what actual secrets he’s taught them, who knows. If it’s like most other famous producers’ publishing companies, you see him at the champagne toast signing and never hear from him again unless you make him a lot of money.

Martin was not there, as far as I know, when I visited. I remember a few stories about Martin though, readily told by his staff. These are all thirdhand — correct me if you know better.

From 2015 until maybe Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights”, Martin was not exactly on top of the charts. He was no longer the Max Martin of the Katy Perry era just a few years prior. Rap had become the dominant sound of pop music, and the airtight mathematical polish Martin had been known for as a songwriter had fallen out of favor for a style that was looser and (everybody’s favorite word) vibe-ier. “Technically better songwriting” was immaterial to the conversation. Martin had to adapt.

A notorious editor and rewriter and polisher, Max first had to control himself from getting too caught up in the details, his staff said. He had to focus only on the broad strokes. So the first story I was told, which was relevant because I was trying to get this guy to use my app, was this: Max would probably never use my app because Max didn’t even print WAV files of his bounces. Instead, he recorded back the playback from the monitor speaker and listened to the recording of the recording on his phone. Like, voice memos. The song was flattened twice, first by playback, and then by quality reduction, then by the speaker on the iPhone. Whatever details couldn’t handle that translation were not important to him. He wanted broad strokes only. Those were the only things worth paying attention to.

The second story, which I heard because my brilliant app allowed for rigorous A/B testing from one demo version to another: Max wasn’t doing a million versions of every song lately, because he tried not to work more than four or so hours on any one production. The most popular music at the time sounded tossed off, maybe a little even unfinished. Martin found that any work done after four hours not only had diminishing returns, but actually seemed to hurt reception of the recording. Polish, it seemed, had an audible, discernible sound.

Again: We’re talking about 2016-2020 or so, that span of time when rap was pop music. Rap music had made an art out of what I call the sound of velocity – when a record sounds like it was made quickly, and that’s part of its emotional appeal. The drums are just a two-bar loop. The chord progression doesn’t change. There aren’t whooshes and whirrs in and out of sections. The vocals are upfront and unfussy, you can hear the Autotune working, the top-end isn’t too hyped. The record is wall to wall words, but no one word arguably matters more than the song’s title. The lyric book is a cascade of images and obsequious flexes that serve the melody’s contours, though the content of the verses doesn’t seem to have any clear relationship to the choruses. The loudness war had supposedly ended, but every record was smashed, and the low-end was shredded – which is how you print your day-one demos if you want any chance of the music making the project. Popular records didn’t end so much as run out of time — the final chord of the progression just hanging there unresolved. Pop music around then sounded fussy by comparison, if not outright corny.

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I suspect the Max records for Ariana Grande’s Sweetener era are examples of this looser, rougher, sound of velocity sensibility — lessons learned perhaps from the relatively dismal reception to the work for Katy Perry’s Witness singles like “Chained To The Rhythm” and “Bon Appetit.” By Martin-ish pop math standards, was “Bon Appetit” “technically better” than the Sweetener singles? Regardless, “technically better songwriting” wasn’t what was working anymore. Something had shifted. “Is this good?” was a secondary concern. The new more pressing concern was, and is, “Is this believable?”

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No song will ever be as believable as a person talking straight to camera. To sing is to perform, and to perform is, to some extent, an exercise in not saying what you mean, at least not directly. Tiktok has created a reality hunger that only it can satisfy. It’s laid bare all other entertainments’ formalities. I hate myself for saying this, but the feeling I get when I watch a “technically great” film or listen to a “technically great” album is not that different from sitting through the religious ceremony of a friend’s wedding. I’m distracted by the formalities. I just want to get drunk and yell.

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It’s a credit to Addison Rae Easterling that she waited as long as she did to release music commercially. The Louisiana native found her following on Tiktok by posting dance videos to trending songs on the platform – a million followers in just a few short months. She quit college and moved to Los Angeles, signed with a talent agency, and quickly cashed in on the moment when Spotify was giving seemingly everybody half-famous an outrageously lucrative podcast deal. She shilled makeup products, then launched her own beauty and fragrance lines. She played bit parts in a few films, but like so many social media stars, her shine did not translate to more traditional forms of media.

I think that’s because, in traditional forms of visual media – movies, tv – things kinda still need to be technically “good”. “Good” requires a vastly different set of artifice and technique beyond what’s required for success on social media. Lily Singh was very believable in the context of Youtube comedian with an enormous following; in a way, it would have been unbelievable if she had actually been funny as the late night TV show host she briefly aspired to be. Her undeniable presence could not make up for her lack of skills as a writer and interviewer and showrunner. Or more charitably, perhaps it’s just a different set of skills.

Either way, music is no different. The last five or so years, the biggest companies in the recording industry have tried to translate the amorphous “social media personality” into the more traditional form of “recording artist.” For one, it would save them a hell of a lot of money. The industry can surround you with the best writers, producers, vocal coaches, etc. – it can Weekend at Bernies you into an afternoon slot at Coachella no problem – but what remains incredibly difficult is getting the public to give a shit. That costs real time and money. Meanwhile, social media personalities only have audiences. It doesn’t matter if they have no traditional musical talent or point of view – the industry can finesse that. Talent is not the limited reagent for success here. It’s why major labels stopped signing artists, and started signing audiences.

Outside of the Lil Nas X story, the strategy has been an enormous bust. But not for the reasons you might think, e.g. quality of the music. So few of these social media personality bets have succeeded in the music arena, I think, precisely because the music was too good – relatively speaking.

If "believability” and “likability” are why these personalities gained followings in the first place, there is something undeniably unbelievable about them all the sudden having a song written by, say, Madison Love or Amy Allen – two incredibly talented songwriters I’ve been lucky enough to see do their thing in the room. These writers are powerful winds to have in your sails, and help artists find their point of view. But perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps it simply isn’t believable for a social media personality to have a strong artistic point of view.

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Addison Rae’s first foray into commercial pop was “Obsessed” in 2021. The song is incredibly clever. It doesn’t skirt Rae’s celebrity status — it makes it the centerpiece. Stick to what you know! As for point of view: She will be unapologetic about her success. Love it! What seems to start as a trad love song in the verse shows its teeth in the chorus: “I’m obsessed with me as much as you…” Some of the most talented name writers and producers helped bring it to life, including Benny Blanco, Blake Slatkin, and Madison actually. This should have been a slam dunk.

The problem wasn’t the song, I don’t think. It was the vessel. People wanted this song to exist in some way, just not as the debut song of Addison Rae. Thankfully, they’d only have to wait two years for Tate McRae to release “Greedy”, a song with curious resonances beyond the Rae and McRae of it all:

“You say you’re obsessed with me so I took a second and I said, ‘Me too’”

“I’m obsessed with me as much as you” (Rae)

vs

“Can’t you tell that I want you? I say ‘Yeah’”

“I would want myself baby” (Crae)

(And while we’re here: Tate McCrae’s boyfriend, The Kid LAROI, got his break with a song called, “Addison Rae.”)

I am of course passing over the many differences between those songs, but I do think vessel matters way more we songwriters like to admit. By the time “Greedy” had come around, Tate McRae was two EPs and a full-length into a recording artist career, and light-years beyond her beginnings as a contestant on the reality television series So You Think You Can Dance? and backup dancer and choreographer. She had bona fides. She was believable as a recording artist who could perform a song like “Greedy” or “Obsessed.”

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So what does a believable context look like for someone like Addison Rae?

Charli XCX did the industry’s work for free: The context would need to be meme. Rae’s appearance on the “Von Dutch” remix was textbook smartdumb. She appeared as a novelty, like when Rodney Dangerfield released a rap album. There was no pretense of Addison Rae being an artist per se – she just got drunk and yelled, if you will.

Forgoing the pretense of being an artist is also how Charli XCX was able to go from being a mere recording artist to a social media personality. Nothing is “technically good songwriting” on Brat, which is a large part of why it was so believable. “I’m just living my life…”

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Which brings me back to Martin. Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd – two MXM writers, are the songwriting and production team behind Addison Rae’s post Charli run of songs. I admire both of them so much and appreciate how quietly provocative their new work with Addison has been. I don’t even need to seek it out, to be honest. I know there’s a new Addison Rae song because I will receive at least five to ten messages from friends, all more or less asking the same thing: “Is this gas? Or is this mid?”

What is true for Addison Rae, and perhaps for more artists in the age of social media than not, is that gas is mid, and mid is gas.

This not a qualitative judgment about “Diet Pepsi” or “Aquamarine” or any of these songs or productions. I am saying that gas, as a quality, is perhaps at odds with success in the social media personality becomes pop star world, where you first and foremost must be believable. (This has always been the case, in my opinion, in the more rarified corners of underground dance music where I’ve made my mutton, but that’s a different piece.) Mid – when perfectly calibrated – is its own kind of gas.

It is believable for a Tiktok personality who got her start making dance videos to make vibey music with no clear point of view – by any traditional metric, the definition of mid. It is believable for Rae to put on genres like makeup tutorials, to wear references like the t-shirts of post-punk bands. I’m relived to see I’m in agreement with Meaghan Garvey, who recently wrote about “High Fashion”:

“On first listen, [it] feels a little uneventful. But on listen two, I kinda like it that way.”

The more Martin-ish, more clever LA pop approach clearly didn’t work for Addison – she wasn’t an industry plant, but whenever the music mismatches your status, you are effectively botanical. And if the music was too naive, which is to say not resembling contemporary pop music, Rae would have run the risk of alienating the 90 or so million followers she’s won in part because she’s just like them.

Each new Addison Rae song hits like a lovingly curated Pinterest board – less an artistic expression, though not exactly a strict recipe of things to rip off either. More than anything, the music seems to wink at its references — acknowledge the ‘debt’ but also to look askance at the very idea of musical history.

“Diet Pepsi” is a clear paean to early Lana Del Rey, from the throwaway line about ‘blue jeans’ in the verse to the vocal stylings to the title itself, a humble nod to “Cola.” One gets the sense that “Aquamarine” exists solely as a word to allow for the Arca remix, “Arcamarine,” a way for Rae to signal her status as a Fan of Underground Music without subjecting her fans to the blistery realities of Arca’s aggressive sonics (cf. Björk vs. Björk Swan Dress). Her latest song is titled “Headphones On”; it is a song with word salad for lyrics, which is believable, and a chorus about listening to music when you feel sad and lonely and confused:

So I put my headphones on/ Listen to my favorite song…

Which is believable too.