The Addison Rae Problem
By KJ Freeman
Over the past five years, TikTok has become an unexpected site of cultural discourse, a digital commons where complexity, contradiction, and vernacular critique circulate freely. Where Instagram now functions as a creative director’s LinkedIn, governed by algorithms tethered to desirability and influence, TikTok remains porous. My own experience reflects this divide. When I spoke on Instagram about sexual exploitation in the art world, the algorithm silenced me. On TikTok, the same observations initiated dialogue, conflict, and reflection. There is something productive, if volatile, about TikTok’s capacity for ambivalence.
It is this openness that has allowed artists like Arca, Charli XCX, and FKA twigs to thrive on the platform. These artists complicate normativity through aesthetic and sonic experimentation, and their visibility on TikTok speaks to a user base that is not only receptive to challenge but hungry for it. TikTok has become a space where subculture is not just archived or performed but recomposed in real time.
That said, TikTok’s infrastructure also lends itself to the extraction and rebranding of these subcultures by more marketable figures. This is precisely where Addison Rae emerges, not as an outlier but as a case study. Rae, who first gained notoriety as a white TikTok dancer adjacent to the Kardashian media apparatus, has since undergone a calculated rebrand. She has distanced herself from her surname, flirted with underground music discourse, and positioned herself adjacent to artists previously situated on the fringes of pop, particularly Charli XCX.
This transition was not accidental. Rae’s invocation of experimental artists did not reflect a sudden awakening but a cultural shift already underway on the platform. The aesthetics she now references—glitch pop, Tumblr-core, indie sleaze—had been circulating for years in TikTok’s back channels. What distinguishes Rae is not taste but access. Her whiteness, petite femininity, and institutional proximity make her a palatable conduit for niche culture. She does not enter these spaces with risk; she curates them as moodboards.
Her recent collaboration with Charli XCX, and the accompanying rollout of her debut album, marked the full convergence of Rae’s rebrand with the broader cultural recycling of 2010s indie aesthetics. What once signaled opposition, or at least ambivalence—grit, irony, the performance of detachment—has been reformatted for mass consumption. Rae’s album, while sonically referential, is structurally hollow. And tellingly, the only demographic consistently offering meaningful critique of this work is Black women.
This fact is not incidental. Black women have long functioned as the moral and aesthetic arbiters of pop culture, though rarely with credit or institutional support. Their critiques of Rae’s project have ranged from analyses of appropriation and erasure to broader reflections on how the algorithm rewards simulation over invention. Their presence in the discourse is not only necessary but exposes the asymmetries that shape who gets to play with the avant-garde and who is policed for it.
Rae’s appeal to inclusion, evident in her casting of a trans man in a recent music video, reads more as strategic compliance than substantive risk. The aesthetics of progressivism are deployed here as cover, not confrontation. This tendency is amplified by the political contradictions surrounding her cultural positioning. One can gesture toward liberation in press interviews while moving through circuits of funding and affiliation that reinforce state violence. The liberal influencer archetype: part-time revolutionary, full-time brand.
Equally telling is Rae’s stylized return to white suburban girlhood. The pastel imagery of childhood dance classes, the awkward pageantry of adolescent femininity, and the narrative of becoming “weird” as a form of rebellion. These motifs are framed not as critique but as identity. They offer the comfort of recognition, particularly for white audiences nostalgic for a girlhood unburdened by race or class. Rae’s art does not interrogate these conditions; it repackages them with winking self-awareness.
Her willingness to become a stand-in for downtown culture(via Women’s History Museum), to absorb and reproduce its codes without context, reflects a broader logic of platform capitalism. Identity is modular. Style is iterative. History is optional. Rae’s transformation from influencer to “underground” pop star is not exceptional. It is exemplary. She is not the problem; she is the pattern.
To understand Rae’s trajectory as subversive is to misunderstand subversion itself. What she performs is adjacency, not disruption. Her work signals radicality while refusing to hold any of its weight. This is not artistic failure. It is strategic ambiguity. It is how the cultural sector sustains itself in an era where rebellion is profitable but critique is punished.
If Rae appears confusing, it is because she is a composite of the contradictions the industry now demands. Marketable edge, aesthetic literacy, and plausible deniability. Her presence invites us to reconsider what subculture means under surveillance, and what it costs to play at the borders of the avant-garde without ever crossing into it.