AOTY
A zine is coming...!
I’ve been “offline” for several weeks now, wasting my time largely by roaming around on Reddit and watching sitcoms and treading the waters of my professional life. My job has robbed me of the ability to write casually; now even my journal entries must have proper comma placement before a coordinating conjunction, and the effect is that I’d rather not bother writing for any public, no matter how small, at all.
Last year around this time I published a list of “my favorites,” a piece that intended to work against the endless gift guides that everyone seemed to be into writing at the time. This year I can’t be bothered with that, and I thought I might not publish anything at all for the rest of the year. Instead, I’ve been working on a zine of short reviews of my seven favorite/most notable albums of this year. It’s handwritten, a little homely, and will be printed on our home printer.
But it’s the giving season, and in that spirit I’ve decided to share one of the reviews therein as a sort of sales pitch for the whole thing. If you’d like a finished copy, I will happily mail you one when they’re ready. I can’t bear the thought of asking people for money so just message me via email/text/comment/carrier pigeon, ensure that I have your correct shipping address, and I’ll send one your way. Please consider sending some money that you might have otherwise spent on it (one dollar, five dollars) to one or several of the campaigns on GazaFunds.com or another charity of your choice.
I’ll write again when the books are ready with an image of one as proof that they actually exist. In the meantime, here’s my review of what I think I must call my favorite album of the year: Addison Rae’s Addison.
Addison, Addison Rae / Pop / 4 stars
For what little faith I truly have left in the establishment of pop music, I was tickled positively sunset pink by TikTok dancer-cum-pop princess Addison Rae’s self-titled (full-length) debut. Off the heels of a big, internetty collaboration with Charli xcx—and after a quietly terrible EP from a few years ago, also with Charli as a collaborator and uninspiringly titled AR, was successfully swept under the rug—Rae released a series of thought- and other-stuff-provoking music videos and the mostly brainless songs to accompany them. Only upon the release of “Headphones On” did I begin to see the forest rather than the trees.
Rae seems to have learned from the mistake of that failed 2023 EP by befriending and/or hiring a crew of experts to propel her to the upper echelons of cool-girl pop. Whereas AR seemed like a desperate grasp at a born-and-bred iHeart hit, Addison aims its scope on the girls who fancy themselves not like other ones, girls who listen to trip hop and worship Britney’s discography, girls who wear legwarmers and follow the cool trends (not the lame ones). The terminally online will recall Addison’s briefly meeting—at a WWE match, was it?—Donald Trump, during which she was exceedingly polite, an offense that still comes up in online discussions of why she ain’t shit. No matter! The PR machine fixes all—and it’ll apparently even write you a sick-ass album.
Addison is not music from the heart. A discerning listener will clock a lack of soul across the album and find in its place a series of impressive dupes—of Britney, of Madonna, and especially of Lana Del Rey. The album is an exercise in trends, and how to execute a piece of art to the ends of them. I sent the below text to a group of friends whom I had been updating about each music video after I listened to the album for the first time in full. Compare it to the headline that ran on Pitchfork’s review of the album a few days earlier, which I didn’t look up until I’d gotten a few good listens in.
I draw this comparison not (only) to gas myself up, but also to illustrate how legible Addison is as a piece of media. Any simpleton with a base knowledge of pop music from the last thirty years could pick out the influences Rae and her team were drawing on and emulating across her self-titled, to a degree that would feel absurd if the songs weren’t across the board pretty good. “Headphones On” was the song of my summer and is, if I’m feeling honest, my favorite song of the year.1 If the opener is less than my favorite, the three-song run that immediately follows it (“Diet Pepsi,” “Money is Everything,” “Aquamarine”) makes up for any ill will. This is a trifecta meant to be played on repeat in your car with the windows down, or at least one intended to make you think of that experience. (And if you didn’t, don’t worry—she practically sings about it later, on “Summer Forever”: “All my fears thrown out the window makes it feel like summer forever,” she whisper sings in the chorus of what feels like such a blatant copycat of a Lana Del Rey song that it becomes endearing.)
Whatever reservations I harbored from the slow drip of music videos and singles that percolated in my YouTube algorithm all year, they turned to being enamored once I had the whole package in my hands. Authenticity? Consistency? Originality? One needs none of it when one has a mixable enough voice, big beautiful batting eyelashes, and friends with connections. Rae seems to prove her passing thesis that money loves her—or, at the very least, she can make money work for her the way charm or raw talent or sheer will worked for those who came before her. 🐁
Incidentally it was also my most listened to song of this year, per Spotify’s horrible no-good “wrapped” feature. Talk about PR!