Addison Rae, a Tik Tok influencer, appears on the red carpet at Wintrust Arena before the Celebrity Game on Feb. 14, 2020.
USA Hilary Higgins / Chicago Tribune
Singer Addison Rae seems to be one of the next “it” girls of our generation. From the success of her newest single, “Diet Pepsi,” released on Aug. 9, to presenting at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, Rae has been making headlines left and right.
Rae, whose full name is Addison Rae Easterling, first rose to prominence in 2019 through the social media app TikTok, amassing millions of followers from doing trendy dances on the app.
Rae was a freshman at Louisiana State University when she began blowing up on TikTok, and it was soon thereafter that she dropped out of college and moved to Los Angeles to become a full-time social media influencer.
After that, she became a part of the TikTok “Hype House,” which consisted of a group of influencers who lived in a mansion in southern California and used their platforms to boost each other’s social media presences.
As Rae’s TikTok presence grew quickly by the millions, she began joining brand deals with a variety of companies; even as she made a copious amount of money online, Rae wanted more out of her career than dancing to trendy sounds on TikTok and posting ads for her brand deals in between.
Despite her large following, Rae’s status as a TikTok star caused her to not be taken seriously as an artist when she released her first single, “Obsessed,” in March 2021, which was widely panned by critics.
It was not until two years later that Rae released “AR (EP),” an EP containing four tracks, one of which featured pop icon Charli xcx.
It could be inferred that Rae may have waited so long to release the EP due to the intense criticism she received from “Obsessed.”
Rae revealed in a 2023 interview with Vogue that the hate “Obsessed” got caused her to question her musical abilities.
“I just thought, maybe I’m not good enough to do this,” Addison stated in the interview, recounting the insecurity she felt following the release of her debut single.
“AR,” unlike “Obsessed,” received mostly positive reviews from critics. Something that could have contributed to the Ep’s success was the fact that Rae teased snippets from some of the tracks over the course of almost two years before the EP actually released, causing the project to be highly anticipated by fans.
The critical acclaim “AR” received undoubtedly encouraged Rae to further pursue her dream of becoming a pop star. She soon thereafter signed with Columbia Records in 2024, “Diet Pepsi” being her first song under the label.
In March of this year, Rae was featured on a song for the very first time: a remix of Charli xcx’s “Von Dutch,” also to immense critical success.
In addition to a music career that is seemingly growing into something huge, Rae has also taken a dive into the world of cinema.
She made her first appearance on the big screen in 2021, in a film heavily inspired by the 1999 classic “She’s All That,” titled “He’s All That.”
Much like Rae’s debut single, the film received mostly negative reviews; the acting as well as the writing were subjected to a copious amount of criticism from critics and fans alike.
It seems that 2023 was a year of turnaround for Rae’s career. Shortly after the release of her EP, she appeared in a second film, “Thanksgiving,” a horror movie which received widespread acclaim from critics.
I personally saw one of the first showings of “Thanksgiving,” and was astounded by Rae’s ability to showcase true terror and was greatly impressed by her acting skills.
Rae is also scheduled to appear alongside actor Ryan Reynolds in an upcoming film titled “Animal Friends,” set to release in 2025.
As Rae stated in “The Von Dutch Remix,” her haters sure did have “a lot to say about [her] debut,” but aside from this, Rae is seemingly not going anywhere anytime soon, and we definitely don’t want her to!
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