Stardom is a cycle. After years in the firmament, they sometimes burn too bright and explode. Newer, more industrious entities must make meaning from the resultant debris – and it’s the same in Hollywood as it is in space. When the star system collapsed in the Sixties, its aging alumnae were forced into hysterical, low-budget bits of psychological horror. Joan Crawford brandished an axe; Hedy Lamarr became a vengeful cougar. Now ex-TikToker Addison Rae is off on her first world tour – The Addison Tour –and she has a constellation of her own to mess around with. Britney, Kylie and Madonna, the old inheritors of Hollywood’s star system, are about to get their turn in the fog.
Rae’s crowd at the Brixton O2 is mostly made up of teenage girls, who are dressed for a summer’s day in the mid-2000s. We’re in the age of referential concert dressing, but every throwback looks short-sighted in front of Rae. She is a postmodern pop star, jumping between historical touchpoints on double speed and coating them in sinister glamour. A wrought-iron gate with a massive “A” on it stands centre-stage, swathed in dry ice. Modelled after the prop from Citizen Kane, the associations are meant to be obvious. Fame, money, mystery, and corruption, all in legendary excess. A girl in the crowd is on TikTok, looking up videos about what it is like to go to a concert. “I’ve got a taste of the glamorous life,” Rae sings, shedding her 1950s dress for a neon lingerie set.
The songs, like the references, are all over the place. Rae brings two fans on stage to screech along to her feature on Charli XCX’s von dutch, there’s a competent Lana Del Rey pastiche on Summer Forever and a hint of mid-90s trip-hop brilliance on Headphones On. Every few songs she puts on a breathy Marilyn affectation to speak to the audience. We’re asked to cheer; she feigns surprise when we oblige. It’s been a completely unexpected path to stardom, we’re reminded; she’s really just a humble girl from the Deep South, which means she is also conveniently adjacent to Britney Spears, the mythological Dorothy Gale, and the protagonists of countless films about Hollywood stardom.
For her finale, the breakout hit Diet Pepsi, she puts on an enormous white dress and reclines head-first on the tiered steps. She is referencing Madonna’s very first performance of Like a Virgin. Her older gay fans, dotted throughout the Zoomery crowd, are supposed to get the message: a star is born. Her few years of enormous TikTok fame may as well have never happened; this cosmic lineage is all that matters. Rae’s show ends before an hour is up. Her dancers pull the gates closed; the camp superstructure crumbles before us, shedding stray megastars as the lights come back on. Her historical exercise is over. Nobody else would have taken it as seriously.
[See also: Sabrina Carpenter shows us a good time]
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