The Review: Addison Rae's "Diet Pepsi" and Super-Sweet Seedy Americana

With her latest single, the star officially transitions from TikTok star to bonafide pop girl, asking the rest of us to abandon our malaise and join on the fun.

Welcome back(!) to Top Shelf, Low Brow. More on that at the bottom of this piece, but for now: this is The Review, a regular edition that looks closer at movies, music, and television. First up is Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi,” which is closing out summer with a sultry new spin on classic themes.

What the fuck does “Americana” even mean anymore? I found myself pondering that question just the other day, after watching a little movie called Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. If you’re not intimately familiar with the work of Werner Herzog, get crackin’. (Similarly, this is what Nicolas Cage does in this movie, where he smokes a lot of crack!) But regardless, I’ll elaborate for anyone who isn’t a devoted Herzog Honey. 

In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans—or BL:POCNO—Cage plays a crooked cop named Terence who spends more time getting high and shaking down club kids and businessmen for their own stash than he does investigating the quintuple homicide case he’s assigned to. Terence has an addiction to painkillers that’s slowly killing him, a rampant amount of gambling debt, and a stack of workplace code of conduct violations that should really have him thrown out on his ass. But no one cares. Terence ultimately gets the job done and gets his rank bumped up to Captain. Sure, that’s what one “might” consider a “spoiler,” but is a thin little plot detail really going to stop you from pressing play on a movie where Nic Cage breaks out his lucky crack pipe? It shouldn’t, the movie’s wonderful.

Aside from being a fantastic film, BL:POCNO is also a scathing indictment of America and its failing public systems. Set shortly after Hurricane Katrina, Terence and all of the other characters in the film are deeply affected by the lack of aid in the city. Housing displacement fuels crime, which in turn generates more leads for the crooked cop to prey on. Big pharma keeps Terence under its thumb, while others choose sex and booze as their vices. And, in the end, a bad guy who does terrible things is given a major promotion. 

Screw apple pie and baseball, that is Americana.

This kind of skewed patriotism is the same one that proliferates “Diet Pepsi,” the new single from TikTok-dancer-turned-pop-savior Addison Rae. In her short time making music, Rae has released one middling debut single, a terrific yet conventional EP, and now, what will undoubtedly be known as one of the finest songs of her promising career. “Diet Pepsi” is Rae’s most interesting and arresting work to date, a distinctly American, hypnotic midtempo lullaby about young lust (not young love, as Rae is keen to specify), in the vein of pre-Born to Die Lana Del Rey. With its accompanying music video, Rae drives home her thesis, basking in the few remaining spoils of the American dream. The song and video are a one-two punch that solidifies Rae’s pop prowess, and the perfect antidote for any Coke-lovers experiencing Brat Summer fatigue. 

That comparison between Rae and Rey may seem obvious given a few key lyrics and themes—loss of innocence, fast cars, sexual naïveté, fizzy colas, blue jeans, gold chains, the word “baby”—but it’s a warranted one. Rae has already proven herself a scholar of the pop star, bringing out her wilder side for a Charli xcx collaboration and picking up a lost Lady Gaga demo. There is no “Diet Pepsi” without Lana Del Rey, who cultivated a space for these kinds of sexy, half-sad songs in the early 2010s with songs like “Radio,” “National Anthem,” and, of course, her own ode to soda for the calorie-conscious: “Diet Mountain Dew.” (This similarity should be viewed as an ode, not a coincidence.) 

Rae’s breathy vocals on “Diet Pepsi” recall the sensual gasps on early Lana songs like “Serial Killer” and the lovesick yearning in “Paris.” But unlike Lana, whose visions of classic Americana gone sour were always downtrodden and melancholic, Addison’s are upbeat, almost hopeful. Think of it like the difference between Coca-Cola and Pepsi: The former is classically American, but holding onto the last vestiges of that once aspirational idea with a white-knuckle grip, while the latter represents a more modern idea of Americana, propped up by multimillion-dollar campaigns starring Britney Spears and Beyoncé.

 By its name alone, “Diet Pepsi” suggests something different than the traditional slice of Americana we’re used to. This is a Coke nation (Charli xcx has been seeing to that all summer long), a place where the service workers wince every time they have to ask if Pepsi is okay instead of Coke, knowing it’s a substitution that few people would ever be truly content with. By naming her song after the third most popular soda in America, trailing behind Coke and Dr. Pepper, Rae actively separates herself from modern notions of mainstream pop stardom. Her goal is not to fit in, but to stand out. 

And, as if that wasn’t already abundantly clear, Rae tapped indie director Sean Price Williams to helm the video, a cross between the beautiful digital grayscale of Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City films and pin-up posters of the 1940s. In the visual, Rae gyrates and mugs for the camera, tossing herself over leather seats before licking whipped cream off of ice cream sundaes. It’s sticky and sensual, the perfect companion to a song about canoodling in cars and getting turned on by the taste of second-rate cola. 

If Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans believes that America is rotted and beyond repair, Good Singer: Port of Call Addison Rae, aka “Diet Pepsi,” is a little more optimistic about where we stand. Rae finds mindless pleasure in the hedonism, implying that there’s joy to be found among the dilapidated state of the American dream. In the video, Rae drapes herself in the American flag, lifting it up and down to play peek-a-boo with the viewer. She waves to no one and laughs to herself. For her, it is simply enough to be alive at the same time as cute boys and cold cans of soda. Anything else is of no concern, at least for the three minutes that the song is playing. While Lana Del Rey’s early work was more concerned with how youthful indiscretions have long-term effects, Rae’s single isn’t so sure. She makes “losing all my innocence in the backseat” sound exciting and charming, not traumatic. Just because the country is falling apart around us doesn’t mean that we have to go to pieces too. 

Amid all the decay, the youthful glow from Rae’s cheeks, “red like cherries in the spring,” remains. She invites the listener into this world, to match her lack of concern for anything other than physical touch and caffeine. Rae can’t be bothered to take any of this so seriously. She can barely keep a straight face when the camera’s on her. And why should she? Life should be joyful and beautiful. We should touch each other all over, all the time. Before we know it, it’ll be over, and we’ll regret all the windows we didn’t fog up and all the aspartame we avoided. Rae is looking to the future, seeing that bleak reality and twirling in the other direction. Her mesmeric voice demands you do the same, droning into a rallying cry by the song’s end. “Say you love me, losing all my innocence in the backseat. Untouched, young lust, XO, let’s…go!”

---

A proper relaunch post is soon to follow, but I wanted to lead with a little taste of what you can expect from the newly revamped Top Shelf, Low Brow. So much has happened since the newsletter went on hiatus in 2022 for me to leave and join the staff at The Daily Beast as a critic, and I’m excited to bring all that I’ve learned to your inbox again. See you soon!