Addison Rae – Fame is a Gun

Never bring sympathy to a fame fight…

[Video]
[6.87]

Julian Axelrod: Now that the pop cognoscenti have caught onto the genius of Addison Rae, early Addistans are left grasping for cred. But I’ll settle for being an early advocate for “Fame is a Gun,” which has the distinct honor of being the second-best of her impeccable five-single run. (“Diet Pepsi” undeniable.) The urgent, seasick synth line zags against Addison’s usual blissed-out vibe, and her voice is so filtered she might as well be beaming in from another galaxy. If her pop predecessors sang their laments from a gilded cage, Addison Rae sings like she’s submerged in a giant tank of water like David Blaine: Did you know I could do this?
[9]

Joshua Lu: There are two questions that every Addison Rae song forces you to answer. 1) Which turn-of-the-millennium artist does this remind you of? Here, it’s Annie and some In the Zone Britney, inspirations that stand out in an increasingly crowded landscape of Y2K-inspired tracks. 2) Is the song wistful or just genuinely vapid? The answer, as with most of her songs, is that it’s a little of both. There are clever bits of phrases as she sings about her self-destructive desperation for fame, but they don’t lead anywhere particularly interesting. Maybe there’s a reason she outright says, “Don’t ask too many questions.”
[6]

Claire Davidson: I’m inclined to like the artist formerly known as Addison Rae’s pivot into pop: say what you will about her TikTok origins, but she always seems to enjoy whatever project is consuming her time, and her voice is expressive enough to convince me of that earnestness. Yet for all the marketing savvy surrounding her Columbia push—the Charli XCX collaborations, the visual and sonic nods to Madonna—I’m left thinking that, as a performer, she’s a square peg being pushed into a round hole. Case in point: “Fame is a Gun,” essentially a rewrite of Lady Gaga’s “Applause” without the bombast or winking art-world nods. Addison sells the verses’ pointed provocations with blasé confidence, smartly observing that any audience projection onto her artistic identity ultimately ends up serving her. But while her sultry mid-range is compelling—one reason why “Aquamarine” is by far the best song from her debut—she doesn’t have much of a vocal presence beyond that, and she resorts to a shrill, cooing delivery on a chorus that demands confrontation. As Addison’s artistic foremothers knew, true pop stardom requires disruption.
[6]

Alfred Soto: “I’m gonna go down in history/Don’t ask too many questions,” she announces in an electronically manipulated coo. Each line in this expert blip-blip has the inevitability of an instant classic, and if the silk-lined urgencies of a TikTok star bother you, then erase those Britney and Madonna songs from your hard drive. 
[8]

Jel Bugle: Wasn’t particularly impressed by the Addison Rae album — I find the vocals a bit too wispy. This song doesn’t do much: a bit of album filler, drones away, not much that grabs the listener.
[5]

Tim de Reuse: Addison Rae sings with vocaloid precision through a haze of woozy, droning synths in a performance that’s spirited but dead behind the eyes. When she says “I always wanted more” it rings true; when she says “Nothing makes me feel as good as being loved by you” it’s with a deep indifference that makes it clear she’s lying for the camera. She seems barely a person, totally unreachable — an uncomfortable but uncharacteristically honest entry into the pop-song pantheon of famous people complaining about fame.
[8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Vortexing production that only allows one line to stand out: “I got a taste of the glamorous life.” Her unconcerned delivery, obviously indebted to Britney, carries this anonymity where you can sense the seduction and numbing torture of being in the public eye. All that remains is the idea of Addison Rae, which is funny because her music didn’t really shed light on who she was beforehand. This stripping away of identity actually enriches it—a clever trick.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: She’s somehow even less of an entity here than she was on “Diet Pepsi.” We hear her disappear fully into the shape of pop stardom; the lyrics are all throwaways, recapitulations of half-remembered pop lines, but she does lead off by asking us listeners to tell her who she is. Elvira and Luka, the braintrust who produced the entirety of Addison, cloak her in layers of synths, processing her vocals to sound like just one more electronic bauble in a glorious mix of them. To answer her own question, she becomes the song itself, falling away into it with every note.
[9]

Will Adams: “Do I provoke you with my tone of innocence?” is an amusing opening line for someone whose entire discography sees her melting into songs like a Ditto. As with her Max Martin pastiche, it’s Elvira and Luka’s left-of-center production (those over-loud chimes!) that holds your attention, not her.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Luka Klose hit challenge: …failed. But good try!
[5]

Ian Mathers: The lyrics and the way Addison performs them manage to blend two things I’ve seen plenty of times, but maybe never in the same place before: “I know writers who use subtext” and “Charlie Brown had hoes.” Somehow too on the nose and yet simultaneously completely unbelievable. I’m not even saying that the titular metaphor is bad! But the way it’s deployed here makes my eyes roll back into my head.
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: I’m not too sold on the central metaphor, but I don’t think we’re meant to be, at least not as advertised. Its purpose is not to render fame as some hyperkinetic, out-of-control force, à la Reznor or Gaga, but rather as something handheld and concealable that can be drawn or put away at a moment’s notice. As gauche as it would be for her to ever lyricize about TikTok, Addison can’t prevent the ambient ethos of micro-celebrity from seeping into this song’s creation, and to her credit she doesn’t seem inclined to. The lyrics could be from a Britney refrigerator magnet kit — “innocence,” “wanted more,” — but even this perfunctoriness seems part of the point. She’s more interested in studiously cribbing from Britney’s coy vocal inflections than in fully stepping into her fraught mythos, and in any case the sound is far more Black Cherry than Blackout. Viewed in this light, “I got a taste of the glamorous life” comes off like a premature declaration of victory, if not future permission for an early retirement. Addison doesn’t seem the type to rely on pop money to put food on her plate.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Invoice No.: Infinity
Bill To: Columbia Records
Vendor: Katherine St. Asaph
Fee: A shit-ton of money
Line Item: Positive blurb about Addison Rae
Description: Addison Rae’s official debut received mostly positive reviews, which sent writer W. David Marx into a newsletter conniption fit about how Poptimism Has Won And That’s Terrible. “The [New York Times] review doesn’t contain a single negative statement,” he gripes, oblivious to the fact that his 2,500-word thinkpiece contains only one statement (the “Club Classics” bit) that indicates he actually listened to the music. I mean, why bother describing it? The contempt isn’t limited to pundits; there’s unending online scuttlebutt that Addison’s team paid critics for their positive reviews, sourced if at all to “trust me bro.” (Weird how so many music journalists are changing careers, given this bounty of payola they apparently enjoy.) These complaints, like the thousands of identical anti-pop complaints before them, rely on the same unstated assumptions assumed to be common sense. One: Pop music is self-evidently bad (except the pop that’s not, a distinction with terms never defined) and thus impossible to enjoy unless one is delusional or stupid. Two: Pop music is also morally bad (except the pop that’s not, a distinction that need not account for manufacturing conditions), and thus forbidden to praise without being a useful idiot. (Principle two often depends on another lemma: Anything I dislike is morally bad.) Until people stop arguing from these first principles, poptimism has not actually won. What is a critic supposed to do if she likes this record? Recuse herself? Lie? Avert her ears in an auditory equivalent of the Christian eye bounce, in order to remain musically pure? I like this song for the exact same reasons that I like, say, Pride Month Barbie’s “Over It“: a song with a similarly slippery soprano line and tense synth backing, and with 71 YouTube views as of time of writing, which means enjoying its very similar sound won’t get me scolded by association. Can I get the check?
[8]

Al Varela: A decent slice of “PinkPantheress at home,” but one that, like many Addison Rae songs, is a better showcase of Elvira and Luka’s talents as pop producers than of Addison Rae’s talents as a pop star.
[5]

William John: Addison Rae’s ascent has been morbidly fascinating, if for no other reason that it has forced me to question my own thoughts about the privilege of taste. Prima facie there is dissonance between her provenance as a TikTok dancer and her current station in the zeitgeist as a niche pop nostalgist (which I will admit, at times, had me thinking her A&R person was the guy from the “As a gay man who is 50” meme). But she explains away this contrast as cause and effect. The “intricacies” of her connoisseurship, she says, have always been present, just not shown to the world at large; for someone like her, TikTok was a means to escape Louisiana, a necessary sacrifice in order for her big dreams to come true. (It’s not exactly the same path that her Louisianan forebear walked, but it’s similar enough to come up in most interviews.) So while my initial reaction to earlier singles like “High Fashion” was surprise — how is this artist making something that sounds like this? who told her it was OK to be weird? –– maybe the bigger surprise on reflection is how I, a person not averse to describing myself as a poptimist, nevertheless allowed myself to doubt her authenticity. Now fully apprised of all context, I can now only see a single like “Fame Is A Gun,” which transposes the themes of fixation explored on debut single “Obsessed” from lust to celebrity, as a gift: not just because it sounds like various occupants of a Xenomania mausoleum banding together to make electroclash, but also because the presence of its tasteful attributes forced me to confront the extent of my own biases.
[10]