The Singles Jukebox

Next up, Oliver brings us a star who rose to fame from the unlikely medium of (checks notes)… TikTok!

[Video]
[5.28]

Brad Shoup: This is so Swedish it hurts. It sounds like a 2020s producer trying to make a 2000s hit using a 1980s suggestiveness. It’s uncanny. I like it.
[6]

Oliver Maier: Some obvious Britneyisms at play here: the punctuative orchestra hits, the B-chorus near the end and the siren at the very beginning, as if Rae is literally sounding the alarm about this dangerous boy. She’s blowing bubblegum on the EP cover; the genre influence is not subtle. It works though, in part because Rae winks at the camera just the right amount. There’s levity when she sings “He looks like the boy next door from my boyband poster,” stacking two outdated pop culture tropes on top of each other and almost rendering the whole thing pointless, but she never prods hard enough it to collapse into pastiche. The horned-up glee of a line like “It’s definitely something that could ruin my life” would have been subtext about 20 years ago, but now that’s just a thing we invite people to do (incidentally, the track after this one on the EP is called “2 Die 4”). There’s plenty else to enjoy in the lyrics besides all that, like the in media res opening line and the way she sings “He calls on me late at night, and he calls me baby,” her voice dripping with pride at earning such an accolade. But the most impressive thing to me about “I Got It Bad” is that it obviously apes a vibe without being overtly, offputtingly cynical, because the the songcraft is fucking there: a glossy, 500-horsepower instrumental where you can barely discern an instrument and a big fat chorus. Delightful stuff.
[9]

Frank Falisi: Nominally, the nostalgic urge is anathema to the writing of pop songs; how can something be the most monolithic feeling you’ve ever felt — and the only song your head’s ever managed — if you’re remembering something else? The pureness of plastic is how it can be melted down to cover old things and if it leaves a tacky taste in the mouth, it’s only after the song ends, which is to say, after the pop. You could say that “I Got It Bad” references, however obliquely, a certain millennium-break sound-strand: the production is visible, busy but submissive, never invisible but an apparatus that produces the voice as much as the vocal cords. Even more so, 2002 haunts the way the personal pronoun dominates the territory of the song, from the verse’s aspiration to ascension (love or lust, or somewhere on the way) to the divinity of a pre-chorus: “Take off every piece of me/until there’s only skin on my body.” Who’s who? Addison Rae is different from Addison in the same way Britney Spears is different from Britney. The former are screens and their signifiers, the latter the heat bodies give off, intake, machinate. “I” signifies a space between the singer and the listener, a space that only happens in the duration between the start of the sound and its end. Will we ever be able to remember the start of this sound without saying the words “Britney Spears”? Or is that part of the song ending: once the feeling severs, we’re left only with the ache. Restart the song or re-find the sound, it’s all relative. I got it bad.
[8]

Rose Stuart: This song violently throws you back to the 2000s, when every Disney star tried their hand at being a pop diva with lyrics sexy enough to remind you the singer is now a grown woman, but with vocals kept squeaky clean lest some emotion trick you into thinking the singer was actually into it. Everything — from the beat to Rae’s singing — sounds both awkward and bored, sliding off your brain like an advertisement’s first draft. 
[3]

Vikram Joseph: This is what you’ve all been hyping? This particular iteration of “You won’t believe this but I have bad taste in men!” in a year where we had Olivia Rodrigo? I mean, this is so competently executed and so utterly devoid of personality, I really could not pick this out of a line-up. With a gun to my head to name an interesting thing about this song I’d go for the early Britney cosplay in the delivery of “ruin my li-i-uh-ife”, or then again I might just gamble that it wasn’t loaded.
[3]

Will Rivitz: I’ve been only partly plugged into Extremely Online pop chatter the last few years, so forgive me if I’m not currently fluent enough in its current morphology to know whether or not this is a silly question: are we serious about Addison Rae? Like, yes, I get that there’s been an unceasing stream of SHE ATEs since the EP dropped, and I also get that sometimes we support camp simply for camp’s sake, and I also get that some of these people unironically go to bat for Sabrina Carpenter, so please be sympathetic to my inability to parse the semiotics of this past summer. Because the EP is indisputably mid as hell! Every song is a flimsy facsimile of a different recently relevant pop girl, the lyrics read like they were written by an AI trained on Netflix-reject teen romcom scripts, and somehow everything ends up sludging out into Disney’s pop bargain bin. “I Got It Bad,” naturally, is no different, a forgotten *NSYNC demo spruced up by Kim Petras’s producers in which every verse has about five percent too many words and a syllable or two delivered as though Rae only realized two lines didn’t rhyme halfway through the second. Rae doesn’t have the juice to land tricky constructions like “take off every piece of me/until there’s only SKIN on MY boDY” (is your skin not a piece of you? Are you wearing someone else’s???) or the pacing to make “definitely something that could ruin my life” sound like she’s delivering the words in her 20s. I love oodles of popstars who Do Not Have The Range, but Addison Rae so remarkably Does Not Have The Range that the Not Range is impossible to ignore. What gives!
[3]

Will Adams: I have little interest in indulging the “um you guys Addison Rae’s music actually kinda slays??” bit as much as it attempts to grab me (look! a Charli feature! an exhumed Gaga demo!). But it’s hard to resist the charm of “I Got It Bad”. The Max Martinisms are off the charts — orchestra hits, alternate final chorus, the “it’s gonna, gonna gonna” vocal stacking, absolute nonsense lyrics — and Addison’s blankness makes way for all of it to shine.
[6]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: A terrific song performed so listlessly that I am absolutely unconvinced that Addison Rae does, indeed, have it bad. 
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: The arrangement is great: a little freestyle, a little 2010s-era Max Martin electro, a little 2000-era Max Martin staccato stabs and final counterpoint chorus. (It’s produced by Rami Yacoub — close enough.) Everything else is not: Addison Rae’s vocal nonpresence, the incompetent lyrics (Addison is credited; I believe it), and a supposedly magnetic crush that makes Taylor Swift’s undangerous lovers seem like goddamn incubi.
[5]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: “I don’t want something right down the middle,” Addison Rae shrugs on this middling track. “I Got It Bad” isn’t bad, just mediocre with its anonymous pop vision. 
[4]

Ian Mathers: “Generic” is not necessarily a synonym for “bad.”
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: It’s definitely something.
[4]

Kayla Beardslee: First time listening, and I can see why this release made noise: it’s a surprisingly good Pop Girl Song from an artist whose TikTok background wasn’t guaranteed to translate well to pop music. Of course, once you get past the “oh, it’s good” phase, it just sounds like a run-of-the-mill pop single — nice chorus, but there are a thousand other songs that do the same thing.
[6]

Michael Hong: “She’s definitely improving,” goes the top comment on YouTube and you can definitely see “I Got It Bad” as something in Addison Rae’s transitional stage between “Friday” and whatever the hell Rebecca Black is doing right now.
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: What does it say about the continued hegemony of the Long 1980s that, even in a song with those signature Max Martin orchestra stabs and a clumsy “boy band poster” line, there’s still a perceived need to drench it in a blanket of heady synthwave fog? Like, if we’re going to be doing anachronisms like that, can we at least skip to the point in the nostalgia cycle where we can start having gratuitous dubstep interludes in pop songs again? Because the 2:09 mark here would be the perfect place for one. 
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: The drums in this song sound like they were made by Adam Feeney for the 1986 electro pop pack. BTW, pls check that out, and if you find any drum packs or loops in it, use them better than just looping them at the bottom of the track and not doing anything with them. Who did produce this btw – one of them made “My My My” and another made “Stars”? rage quit blurbing, pls finish with joke about rami youssef is the one true Ramy –
[2]

Claire Biddles: Not to sound exactly like a 36 year old who always has to check if the second “T” in “TikTok” has to be capitalised, but I had no idea of the vast lore behind Ms Rae’s pop career. “I Got It Bad” has the whiff of a lost golden era of pop that could easily cause commotion in parts of the internet, but it’s not specific or muscular enough to carry it past pastiche for me. Still, points for the pitched-up orchestra hits and points for the unexpected body horror of “Take off every piece of me/Until there’s only skin on my body.”
[5]

Alex Ostroff: Your enjoyment of this will entirely boil down to how easy a mark you are for retro Max Martin 1.0 tricks that he’s long since moved on from but which his old Cheiron Studios colleagues and his newer students nostalgically wheel out every so often. Addison herself is completely blank and uncompelling — a delivery mechanism who does nothing to get in the way of the hooks but nothing to sell them either. Some of the lyrics are genuinely terrible in ways reminiscent of the Swedes’ early work with Backstreet. “He gives it to me more than a little”? “He got me close, but now it’s official”? But “He looks like the boy next door from my boyband poster” is a pop music snake eating its own tail that verges on charming. And then the bridge ends with those gradually stacking *NSYNC vocal harmonies ascending up to pop music heaven, then slides right into a Britney-style B-chorus! None of it is as impeccably constructed as its inspirations. For one thing, Max would have had the B-chorus repeat as a counterpoint harmony under the final reprise à la “…Baby One More Time,” “(You Drive Me) Crazy,” and “Oops!… I Did It Again“. The last time he wrote an alternate chorus without immediately repeating it as a closing harmony was Robyn’s “Show Me Love” (and he could have — try singing it over the final chorus for yourself and you’ll see that it marries up just as smoothly as Britney’s!). In the hands of a real Pop Star and with a bit more work, this would be excellent. As it is, it’s merely a very good pop song performed by someone utterly unable to convince us to make it as massive a hit as it would be in an alternate universe. Which should probably merit a [4] or a [5], but… Your enjoyment of this will entirely boil down to how easy a mark you are for retro Max Martin 1.0 tricks that he’s long since moved on from… and unfortunately when it comes to classic era Max Martin pop music tricks, “I knew I should walk away, but I went closer”. It’s definitely something that could ruin my life… cause I… I got it bad.
[8]