“TikTok made Addison Rae famous,” went a New York Times headline last week, “Pop made her cool” it concluded. This is perfectly standard coverage for Rae, who was once a TikTok dancer, and has made a sudden U-turn into avant-garde art pop. But the music, while very good, is far from the full story; her coolness comes from a mass of deliberately-curated cultural associations. Almost all of them can be traced back to one specific, storied publication. And the publication itself is in on the scheme.
Wherever she goes you can generally find someone from Interview magazine, the New York culture bible founded by Andy Warhol and revived after a brief financial collapse in 2018. Rae’s first Interview appearance was in 2021, but since the beginning of her leftfield rebrand last summer the magazine’s staff have made a distinct imprint on her public image. Mel Ottenberg, Interview’s editor-in-chief, has interviewed her twice for his own magazine, styled her for an Interview shoot, styled her for a Rolling Stone profile, interviewed with her for Vogue, and creative-directed two of her music videos (Diet Pepsi; Aquamarine). Dara Allen, Interview’s current fashion director, has styled four of her music videos, as well as multiple red carpet and stage appearances.
Richard Kern, who shot the notorious Ssense fashion campaign in which Rae holds a cigarette between her toes(!), surfaces regularly as an interviewer and photographer. The styling assistants on Interview’s masthead have followed Rae to almost all her music video shoots; her hair and makeup teams also work frequently on the magazine. She’s contributed playlists and runway commentary; at the end of last year she was profiled “crashing the Interview staff holiday party.” Rae is not the only singer to get a stamp of approval from Interview. But this is different.
Addison Rae’s new public persona is supposed to be that of a starlet propped up by a Warholian cabal. Everything about her debut album points towards this bit of reimagined history. The 1970s-tinged Fame is a Gun video seems to draw from Warhol’s heyday of Studio 54 and the Factory, complete with nightclub mezzanine, Debbie Harry cosplay, and lurid gold costumes; a real crystal ball briefly conjures up the mythos of Interview. In Aquamarine, we get another hit of bizarro New York by way of the cult ritual from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
The parts of Rae’s visual work that seem new to onlookers are actually very old; they’re part of the continuous and distinctly gay cultural canon preserved, for the most part, by Interview. Softcore filmmaker Russ Meyer was both an early influence on John Waters and a major visual reference for the Diet Pepsi video; the video for High Fashion, which cuts between ruby slippers and piles of cocaine, is a Hollywood Babylon-style nod to Judy Garland’s dark side.
Almost every critic so far has pointed to Madonna, whose various sonic and visual phases are referenced constantly on the album. The singer was a personal friend of Warhol and has been part of the Interview universe since the early 80s. She used the same tactics as Rae to engineer her alternative crossover: much of her cultural power originally came from relentless visual injections of arthouse cinema, Old Hollywood and the last days of disco. It worked for her in the days of monoculture, when there was only one MTV and a comparatively limited number of press outlets. It is set to work even more effectively for the TikTok age Rae once stood for; her sort of viral fame was easy to engineer from a bedroom, but it carried no longevity or cultural legitimacy. Cavorting with a megalithic institution like Interview might be the solution.
Almost every other pop star has taken from the past, but the references on Rae’s debut album are special; they distinguish her by linking to a coherent historical inheritance, the way Chinese dynasties jostled for heavenly approval by modelling themselves after each other. Everyone wins. The Interview editorial team get to bid for legitimacy as a Hollywood-style star machine; and like Madonna, Addison Rae gets to write herself into history.
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