The End of Authenticity...and thank God

+why addison rae works

“This is what comes from the wrong kind of attentiveness. People get brain fade. This is because they've forgotten how to listen and look as children. They've forgotten how to collect data. In the psychic sense a forest fire on TV is on a lower plane than a ten-second spot for Automatic Dishwasher. All the commercial has deeper waves, deeper emanations. But we have reversed the relative significance of these things. This is why people's eyes, ears, brains and nervous systems have grown weary. It's a simple case of misuse.”
— White Noise (1985), Don Delillo

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Before there was “brain rot,” Delillo described “brain fade,” a condition by which the excess data and increasingly convoluted systems of the postmodern era seeped into ones consciousness, constantly emanating a near-imperceptible buzz of psychic disturbance. It’s almost quaint, imagining the children of 40 years ago sitting enraptured in front of a television advertisement, Don Delillo scribbling just out of frame: “THIS MUST BE STOPPED!”

Nowadays, of course, television advertisements are not an exciting source of consumerist wonder, but something passed on to the underclass so that the rest of us can continue looking at our tinier screens, our further camouflaged advertisements. Television advertisements are at coin laundromats, on the lowest tier of subscription services, at the gas station pump, on the subway. Bold-faced advertising makes us feel poor. Brands had no choice but to become people.

Corporations already have the rights of a person, and after the social media boom of the 2010’s they had the opinions of one, too. Denny’s Diner tweeted edgy memes. The DuoLingo Owl was successfully radicalized into posting anti-Amber Heard TikToks. Wendy’s asked to send Katy Perry back to space, and “what’s worse is that the face of Wendy’s is a woman, which makes this decision not just hypocritical, but painfully ironic” (quote from Perry’s team).

Are you in pain? I’m in pain. It’s not working, and not because Wendy’s, as an implied woman, is doing misogyny. When brands became people, people became brands. The human beings are working in Amazon factories and the corporations are “experiencing summer vibes.” There’s an old quote about poor, pro-capitalist Americans seeing themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Since we’re beyond hoping for millions, the goalpost has shifted — we’re all temporarily embarrassed influencers.

Because I am opposed to it intellectually, I will keep the buzzwords to a minimum, but one scroll around your social media feed of choice will illuminate the constant encouragement to upkeep one’s “personal brand”. And, because the parameters of successful brand management have developed over time, as have our application of those parameters to our own lives. We are not imitating a brand advertising a product. We are a person imitating a brand imitating a person.

We are currently in the uncanny valley of online expression. “Be yourself” has gone from a well-meaning kindergarten encouragement to a genuine threat. If you look closely, behind every front-facing-camera-short-form-video is a person making extreme calculations about their own authenticity. After all, we want “CREATORS” who are “REAL” ! We want the people whom we experience purely through the mediation of a data network run through cybernetic chips to come to us entirely Real™. It’s no wonder we all feel like cyborgs.

You know what’s comforting? Watching the old Star Wars movies. “Look here,” I say to my imaginary future child who, in all likelihood, will be raised in an underground bunker having never seen the sky, “robots used to look like robots!” I love watching R2-D2 roll around in the film grain. I hate thinking about humanoid androids and deepfake porn of myself.

What I’m trying to say is that Addison Rae is a robot who knows she’s a robot. Which is to say that she is a pop star who knows that she is a pop star.

Addison Rae in her music video for “Headphones On”

The good news, I think, is that we are getting fatigued with brand-as-person and person-as-brand. The breakout success of Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, two of our most visually produced and meticulously branded celebrities of the era, was our first sign. Addison Rae, TikTok dancer turned genuine pop musician, is our second.

Do I believe that Addison Rae personally creative directs each and every visual accompaniment to her music project? Do I even believe that Addison Rae is the main creative force behind her own music project? These are questions I haven’t even cared to think about because the music is good and the worldbuilding is there. The pop star is a spectacle.

The thing about Addison Rae is that she has the sauce. She knows her references and she REFERENCES THEM! She’s biting Britney, she’s biting Lana, she’s biting Madonna, and she’s not pretending otherwise. She is not performing the faux-spawn of a nubile artistic integrity, straight from the classically authentic brain of Just A Normal Girl. Of course she’s not real. That’s why she works.

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Here’s something else Delillo writes, towards the end of White Noise: “We start our lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram.”

As the world hurdles towards absurdity, I must move away from authenticity as a value, if only for my own sanity. It’s comforting to embrace the machinations, to be most honest with each other by saying of ourselves: “look at this, here’s something I just made up.” It’s comforting to look at your own mind this way, as the plots and diagrams of a person with limited information who is only making up stories. It’s comforting to listen to Addison Rae and not care if she’s “faking it,” only imagining myself wearing a pink wig somewhere, accepting the pain.