Tate McRae, Addison Rae and Who Gets to Escape the Khia Asylum

Words: Elif Türkan Erisik

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A spectre is haunting the X timeline – the ghost of the pop ingénue. Between middling hot takes on nepo-babies and the constant lambasting of the earnest mediocrity of Gracie Abrams, the stan Twitter debate on who the next 10-years-in-the-making “breakout” pop girly will be continues. Lucky is the wide-eyed and Instagram Faced twentysomething, picked out of the one-hit-wonders and chart-topper-has-beens locked up in the Khia asylum, who will get a taste of sunshine, until her inevitable downfall and subsequent trip to the gallows to be Woman'd. 

Does the So You Think You Can Dance finalist-turned-viral-hitmaker Tate McRae have what it takes to fill Nicole Scherzinger’s 6-inch heels? Will Madison Beer’s cult following of pre-adolescent girls – who seem to be more interested in her beauty routine than her music – be enough for a successful crossover into mainstream pop, á la Disney star-turned-pin-up Sabrina Carpenter? Or does our current irony-poisoned cultural moment require an altogether different type of manufactured authenticity? One that is simultaneously self-aware and spectacle-friendly enough to hold our attention longer than it takes to doomscroll through the latest crop of AI-generated cat videos and ASMR fridge restocks? 

Enter Addison Rae: a Louisiana born All American Girl™ with the face of a Southern belle and a happy-go-lucky demeanour, who initially made a name for herself posting dancing videos on Tiktok during the pre-pandemic boom of the app overseas. Her career blossomed in a calculated series of sponsored content and personal brand ventures – from launching a Spotify-exclusive podcast with her mom to haphazardly slapping her face on a celebrity beauty brand that failed to deliver on its promise. 
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Typically of the trajectory followed by the dancing teen turned viral sensation of the TikTok era, Rae eventually decided to dip her foot into the murky waters of commercial pop, dropping her first single “Obsessed” in the March of 2021. Suffice to say that the single wasn’t received well. It came across as an internet starlet’s blatant cash-grab attempt at diversifying her income streams by capitalising on her budding fame and the eyeball attention of her 80+ million TikTok followers. So how to account for Rae’s return to the limelight three years after her disastrous debut, as the digital era’s most promising pop ingénue, demanding to be taken seriously via the sheer scope of her contemporary references? 

The pop ingénue can be defined as a female pop newcomer who embraces her youthfulness as a part of her authentic popsona. She is conventionally attractive yet possesses a unique look that can be reduced to physical markers of a distinct brand identity (i.e. emulated). She is malleable enough to function as a vessel of wish-fulfillment for a wide array of audiences ranging from super fans (or stans in the digital age) to casual listeners. She doesn’t need to be breaking any new musical ground but has to have enough of an ‘it factor’ to distinguish herself within the oversaturated market of hopeful wannabes. This may be through sheer force of personality, self-written songs, nostalgia-bait melodic references to by-gone eras of pop, or viral marketing gimmicks. 

“Why not come clean about the fact that the internet gig economy has made cyborgs of us all? We are living through unprecedented times of mass authenticity fatigue, where simulacra touts its originality and simulations threaten to replace reality all together.”

With the mass commercialisation of pop music in the 80s the pop ingénue became a mainstay of popular music as well as pop culture, capturing the attention of poptimists and the radio-listening public alike. The 80s had Madonna, with her acid wash jeans, fishnet stockings and radical embrace of female sexuality. The 90s saw the tentative rise of countercultural female acts such as The Sugarcubes’ lead singer Björk who made ‘high-brow’ pop for people who owned a coffee percolator and read The New Yorker,  by incorporating a diverse array of musical influences into an eccentric yet radio-friendly sound. But the defining moment of the pop ingénue industrial complex emerged in the early 2000s with the rise of one Britney Jean Spears.

Following the renewed interest in her infamous conservatorship case, Spears’ rise as a childhood star turned teen global pop sensation, vilified by the misogynistic mass media have been covered by a myriad of retrospective think pieces and documentaries. This has all been in an effort to right the wrongs of the past and give her artistry as a pop icon the merit it is due. 

Spears was the quintessential 2000s pop ingénue within the collective cultural imagination because of her combination of youthful naivete with sexual precociousness under the ‘sex sells’ mantra of y2k music marketing. Important, too, was the mainstream appeal of her every-girl brand, which cut through the pristine sheen of label manufactured girl groups, and offered somewhat of a more ‘personal’ touch. Here was a young girl who didn’t just sing about unrequited crushes and budding relationships gone wrong, but also about the struggles of navigating the in-between stage of neither being a girl nor a woman. 

Flashforward to our current era of Swiftmania, where artistic integrity has become increasingly equated with  confessionalism (i.e. the willingness to give up a certain amount of privacy to keep up the performance of authenticity for the watchful eyes of the digital panopticon). How else to reckon with the newly defined genre of Tiktok sad-girl-music, consisting of Phoebe Bridgers-copycats spilling their guts on their bedroom floor in an attempt to make it into your next AI-curated Spotify ‘sad girl’ playlist? When what was once personal becomes ubiquitous, ‘authenticity’ loses its meaning and the pendulum swings the other way. We start to crave the artifice of the spectacle as an end in and of itself. 

Every indignant “industry plant” accusation is a testament to how tired we have become of being exposed to people who look like they’ve been made in a lab and boisterously claim they’re just like us to get into our pockets. Why not come clean about the fact that the internet gig economy has made cyborgs of us all? We are living through unprecedented times of mass authenticity fatigue, where simulacra touts its originality and simulations threaten to replace reality all together. The winks and nudges of self-aware pop aren't enough to function as a shorthand for ‘genuine’ artistic expression anymore. That is to say a captivating pop ingénue has to be in on the joke of the machinations of her making without worrying about coming off as inauthentic. 

This is precisely why the once-ridiculed Addison Rae is heralded as the chimeric saviour of mid-budget pop, as opposed to her dance prodigy turned Gen Z up-and-comer counterpart Tate McRae. Rae has curated a calculated brand out of her pop ingénue influences, whereas McRae has been trying to break into the mainstream as the second coming of Spears by displaying her dancing chops and ticking the obligatory box of performative authenticity by penning her own songs. 

Towards the end of one of McRae’s music videos – the majority of which she spends flexing her immaculately polished legs in a series of impressive dance moves – she breaks down in tears, seemingly in an attempt to break the illusion of artifice and give a glimpse into the sad girl behind the popsona. But this choice falls flat simply because its intention of conveying the down-to-earthness of a modellike pop star is at odds with the fact she has spent the majority of the video’s 3 minute runtime showcasing all the ways in which she is indeed not like us. 
The spectacle need not be relatable to have artistic merit: its appeal is its insistence upon itself. As Eliza McLamb writes in her phenomenal Substack essay on the end of authenticity: Addison Rae works because she is a pop star who knows that she is a pop star. She reflects back something we all know to be true about our increasingly stratified AFK lives and fragmented digital identities. She is a cyborg who isn’t ashamed to admit that she has no home to return to, just an endless sequence of pop culture references to pull from to become the spectacle of herself. She might not be the pop star we need, but she is the pop ingénue we deserve.