On stage, two grand wrought iron-style gates merge seamlessly with the Forum theatre’s famous Greco-Roman statues. Their curlicued bars twist into a giant A, seemingly inspired by the scribbles teenagers have inked in notebooks everywhere since Edward Scissorhands mainstreamed goths in 1990. Silhouetted muscle men open the gates and the screaming begins.
Addison Rae comes out to Fame Is a Gun, a single from her overwhelmingly praised debut album, Addison. The track’s second verse lays out Rae’s determination, which is also her charm: “There’s no mystery. I’m gonna make it … and when you shame me, it makes me want it more.”
Rae isn’t a naturally gifted live singer but she is an incredible performer, having leveraged her competitive dance experience into a colossal TikTok following in the platform’s gestational phase. She has the fifth-largest individual following on the platform with 88.3 million followers but, when she attempted to convert that audience into a pop career in 2021, her debut single, Obsessed, was unduly savaged. Sure, there’s a big gap between Obsessed and Addison’s pop perfection but the criticism’s true undercurrent held a whiff of misogyny: “Who does this TikTok girl think she is?”
It’s a tale as old as the charts. Every pop idol – Britney, Christina, Miley, Ariana – has variously been lambasted for being fake or labelled industry plants at some point in their career. And into this starry lineage comes Addison Rae.
Before doors open I meet Chiara, a 20-year-old devotee who has followed Rae on TikTok since lockdown. Chiara has been lining up since 6am, one of many fans sporting fluorescent pink wigs in reference to Rae’s Headphones On music video. She and her friend Astra are taking pictures of each other on a vintage digital camera no bigger than the palm of my hand: gen Z’s version of millennial 35mm nostalgia.
“She really encapsulates girlhood and growing up,” Chiara says. “A lot of the time we just have to dust things off and romanticise to get through it.”
The pair let out an unbridled squeal remembering Rae liking one of their comments on an Instagram post. It’s the first of many from the crowd, whose screams greet each song in Rae’s setlist, encompassing almost every track in her short catalogue. The biggest noise comes when Rae invites everyone to recreate her now iconic howl from Charli xcx’s Von Dutch remix.
Addison’s producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser, who co-wrote the album with Rae, are signed to the publishing house of Max Martin, the Swedish super-producer behind dozens of hits from Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry, the Weeknd, Taylor Swift and more. But it’s his earliest work with Ace of Base that feels like the nostalgic 90s inspiration here, colouring the walls of Rae’s on-stage fantasy mansion.
She mounts a staircase and parties under a giant crystal chandelier with her back-up dancers. Rainbow lasers light up the room. When balloons cascade from the ceiling, it feels like you’ve snuck into a rich kid’s house party. You can’t help but root for Rae, an artist who refuses to quit. During an interlude a dancer floats across the stage under an umbrella, before thunderclouds break and she launches into the emotional drama of In the Rain. She closes the set with early single Diet Pepsi, resplendent in a voluminous wedding dress. Rae’s live show is delirious, slightly unhinged fantasy.
If you’re coming to an Addison Rae show to complain about her singing over a backing track you’re missing the point. Who could begrudge young people like Chiara and Astra – who’ve spent their adolescence and short adulthood overwhelmed by the world’s omnicatastrophe – from craving a little escape? Miserable pop refusalists were never welcome through Rae’s resplendent A gates in the first place.
As she sings on Money Is Everything: “Can’t a girl have fun, fun, fun?”
Addison Rae is touring Australia now: Melbourne on 12 November, Brisbane 14-15 November and Sydney 17-18 November.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.theguardian.com ’
