Addison Rae: Inside the remarkable rise and rise of Addison Rae into ‘main pop girl’ status after Obsessed flop and bikini scandal | Explainer
It’s something that can happen to anyone, and when it does, it completely changes your life… for better or for worse.
A viral video online can make or break someone in reality – just look at how Friday turned Rebecca Black into a laughing stock when she was only 13 years old, or how Hailey Welch has expanded the cursory 15 minutes of fame ‘Hawk Tuah’ gave her into a fledging media empire.
Both women’s notoriety came completely by chance, and has seen them continue to cultivate a following on social media. For TikTok dancer Addison Rae, however, social media was a tool she deliberately used to forge an acting and singing career – and now, some would argue, she’s transcended it.
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“I think in the beginning I was so naïve and fearless, and that was a pretty nice combination to have stepping into it all, because I was willing to experiment,” she told Interview magazine in June.
“People wanted to say, ‘Oh, she’s just a TikToker’, which to me didn’t make sense, because I was like, ‘What even is that?’ Do people grow up and say, ‘I want to be a TikToker?’
“Maybe nowadays, but I grew up dancing, and TikTok was just a through line. And I already knew there were other things I was interested in growing up. Even with acting.”
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Who is Addison Rae and why is she famous?
Born Addison Rae Easterling in Lafayette, Louisiana, Rae was raised by parents Monty Lopez and Sheri Easterling alongside her two younger brothers.
She also has an older half-sister, Macye Neumeyer, whom Lopez welcomed in a previous relationship.
Rae spent her childhood dancing competitively, a skill that came in handy in 2019 when, at around 19 years old, Rae started posting to TikTok.
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At first, it was an accident – she was actually studying at Louisiana State University when she was sharing short clips of her dancing to trending songs as a hobby.
Rae joined the app in July, and by November, she had more than one million followers on TikTok. So, she dropped out of college and decided to pursue fame seriously, moving to Los Angeles to do so.
”A few people in LA reached out to me, and I was like ‘I need to go. I need to go.’ So my parents supported me fully,” she later told Elle magazine of her cross-country move.
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By January 2020, she had signed with elite talent agency WME – but as every star knows, the faster and higher you rise, the harder you fall.
And Rae would go on to weather some scandals in her pursuit of the career she wanted.
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One year after joining TikTok, Rae’s life was already looking very different. She had a weekly podcast with her mother on Spotify – originally called Mother Knows Best then rebranded to That Was Fun? – and her social media following was only growing, helped in part by her former relationship with fellow TikTok star Bryce Hall and song mentions by The Kid LAROI and Lil Yachty.
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So naturally, it was time for Rae to launch the music career she really wanted – but her single Obsessed didn’t work out as she’d hoped.
”The inevitable has happened: Addison Rae, TikTok’s highest earner, has released her first single. Equally inevitable: it’s really, really bad,” read a review by PopDust, one of many unfavourable critic responses.
As a result, Rae’s debut EP was shelved. She did not, however, give up.
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Say what you want about Rae’s debut single – and her poorly received performance in Netflix’s He’s All That (2021) – you can’t deny Rae’s work ethic.
Alongside releasing her own fragrance line and making her acting debut, 2021 saw Rae form a friendship with Kourtney Kardashian, which meant she appeared in a few episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians‘ 20th season.
What followed was a casting announcement for the as-yet-to-be-released Fashionista film by Paramount, and a role in the slasher film Thanksgiving. But with her career-making moves came controversy.
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Scandal has touched Addison Rae, but it hasn’t stuck
Perhaps the biggest controversy attached to Rae’s name is one that came with, at first glance, what appeared to be an innocent bikini photo.
In August 2022 – weeks after her father found himself embroiled in a cheating scandal, something that sparked his divorce from Rae’s mother, who then notably moved on with Yung Gravy – Rae posted a photo of herself to her Instagram account where she was wearing Adidas and Praying’s Holy Trinity Bikini
In the since-deleted photo, her bikini top has “Father” on the right side and “Son” on the left side. On the front of the bikini bottoms, it has “Holy Spirit” emblazoned on it.
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Rae’s Christian fans, needless to say, were unimpressed, with some branding her “blasphemous.”
“Nah this disrespectful to Jesus. Sad what y’all do for money,” one person wrote on the post.
“This is not okay! BLASPHEMY!” another said.
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Others called the bikini “so messed up” and one person said it “disrespected” religion.
Not everyone saw it this way, however, with photographer Mark Hunter calling the look a “home run” and singer Tate McRae writing, “Oh my God, Addison.”
Some people even defended Rae’s photo, with one person writing on X (formerly Twitter): “the way everyone is so angry at addison rae’s adidas collab has me rollingggg like she doesn’t owe a disrespectful religion respect…and even then it’s just a bikini it’s such a first world problem, don’t y’all have other stuff to worry [about].”
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Another person tweeted: “Christians when being violently homophobic and transphobic: 🙂👍 Christians when addison rae wear religion themed bikini: 😡🤬😤👎”
Rae quickly recovered from the controversy, and a year later, she finally released her debut EP – more than two years after Obsessed saw it canned, AR was unveiled to the world on August 18, 2023.
It’s ushered in a complete renaissance for Rae.
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AR saw Rae truly, for the first time, start to shed her TikTok image, transcending the label of “social media star”.
It sparked a collaboration between Rae and Charli XCX for the latter’s remix of Von Dutch, with Rae’s extended high note becoming its own cultural moment within the Brat phenomenon.
What followed was the release of her first major label single, Diet Pepsi, which was unleashed onto the world in August with Columbia Records.
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A far cry from Obsessed three years prior, Diet Pepsi saw Rae compared to Lana Del Rey and Britney Spears, perform at Madison Square Garden in New York City with Charli XCX and Troye Sivan, and ultimately enter the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the first time.
“Don’t judge this book by it’s cover especially if you have been hesitant to get into Addison’s music, this one will surely win all the people on the line about her,” read one review on Album of the Year.
Her follow-up single Aquamarine also received favourable reviews, as did her slew of daring fashion appearance – especially her ensemble at the 2024 MTV VMAs.
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“Rae is sexy, effervescent, and – most essentially – effortless. There are no real stakes. Rae is having fun, exploring her passion with a sense of levity that didn’t previously exist,” wrote Joshua Miller of her new era.
“The carefree attitude Rae displays, combined with the authenticity of someone following their true passion, is exactly what separates her from the anonymous, directionless pop flops of the past.”
“Main pop girl alert,” Rolling Stone wrote on top of their lengthy November piece dissecting how Rae pushed through the critique and cringe and got the world to root for her.
Rae’s persistence is paying off, and while her hit Obsessed didn’t land the way she had hoped, now, when people listen to the lyric “You’re obsessed with me”, it’s finally true.
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