Addison Rae is taking her VMAs 2025 snub with a grain of salt, a wry smile, and some choice words about her contributions to the MTV Video Music Awards.
The artist released her self-titled debut album Addison in June and has watched it disseminate through the culture, developing a not-so-cult pop fanbase that has led her to open for Lana Del Rey at Wembley Stadium. Most recently, Ben Platt solidified the supremacy of “Diet Pepsi” when he performed “an emotional rendition” of the song at the Las Culturistas Culture Awards and subsequently went viral.
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But not everyone has recognized the artistry she created with collaborators Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd. When the VMAs 2025 nominations came out this year, Addison was notably absent. This week, Apple Music Radio's Zane Lowe asked Rae about the snub and how she felt about it.
“Not everybody was gonna accept it and enjoy it, but I think I will never let that change the way I view creating, and making music videos or making songs and putting out different organizations of music and groups of creative decisions,” Rae said, before smiling and adding, “It definitely is funny whenever you feel like you put in a lot of work into something and it doesn’t get recognized by some place that you feel like you were contributing to.”
This is likely in reference to Rae's splashy appearance at the show last year, when she wore a controversial Madonna-inspired all-white bra and panty set with full tutu that was much-discussed after the ceremony.
Still, Rae will find other ways to spend her time. She recently appeared in Sombr's music video for “12 to 12” and is currently gearing up to tour. ("It’s gonna be so wild," she noted to Lowe.) She's also keeping an eye on how her songs continue to permeate in new ways, saying that Platt's interpretation of “Diet Pepsi" was “amazing.”
***“***It was a very full-circle moment, because some of the people who worked on that song, I had worked on my EP, which was so funny—we had worked on restructuring it and arranging it, so I thought that was funny and full-circle,” Addison Rae told Lowe. "I knew a little bit; I didn’t know exactly how it was going to go down, but I was very pleasantly surprised. Ben is amazing and has an incredible voice, so I was very honored to see his rendition of the song.”
