Is anybody media trained anymore? Do a YouTube search for your favorite pop star of the decade, and there’s a decent chance you’ll get an exhaustive 30-minute video of every chaotic, unfiltered thing they’ve said or done on camera — at least, unfiltered in the eyes of the person painstakingly compiling the clips. The idea that an artist might engage in a little recreational reputation-torching and blurt out whatever shit at whatever time is becoming less of a professional liability than a status symbol, an aspirational messiness: As media trainer Bill McGowan told The New York Times, “unhinged has become the new authentic.” And just like “authenticity,” it’s a performance and a fantasy; one wonders how it is that, if so many artists are unafraid to ruin their reputations, so few of their reputations seem noticeably ruined.

Renee Rapp, though, actually might not be media trained — except in the extended universe of SNL, where she joked in a skit that she’d been sentenced to 40 court-ordered hours of it. A former theater kid from North Carolina, Rapp spent her early career pingponging through the performing arts: first scouting out record deals, then winning awards on Broadway, then landing a breakout role on Mindy Kaling’s HBO Max series The Sex Lives Of College Girls. Then, after two seasons, she abruptly announced she was leaving the show; even at the time, most people could tell it was on bad terms.

Rapp’s response to the surrounding drama was actually pretty PR-ified, but she followed it up with a yearslong campaign of the opposite of crisis management. On Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang’s Las Culturistas podcast, she indignantly recapped “an altercation” with a Hertz rental car employee, whom she called out by name. She wished arson upon the owner of a tour bus company (also called out by name). She starred as Regina George in the remake of beloved millennial film Mean Girls, then (jokingly) boasted about being “ageist” toward its target audience. Here’s her stance on that remake: “We made a fucking movie musical in a fucking abandoned high school. This is not God’s work.” And here’s her stance on her current lead single, “Leave Me Alone”: “[It’s] not the best song on the album… I wouldn’t even put it in the top five probably.”

If you weren’t familiar with all the lore, Rapp gets you up to speed on that single, beginning her album Bite Me with: “I’m a real bad girl but a real good kisser.” She delivers her verses with so much vocal fry that it’s like she’s trolling the very idea of singing, then flips off one by one the haters, the tabloids, the adult responsibilities, and most of all the industry: “Sign a hundred NDAs, but I still say something.” But the provocations come with a hook, which recalls several time-tested hits at once — “Cherry Bomb,” “You Really Got Me,” “Voices Carry” — and perhaps more so, the ambient ever-present pop-rock sound of the mid-2000s and its movie soundtracks. It’s Hoku-esque, Katy Rose-coded. (Translation for ageist non-millennials: Elle Woods’ walk-on music and the song Regina George grills Cady about.) It taps into a well of formative sonic nostalgia that listeners might not even know they had; as a media trainer might put it, it’s a hell of a pitch.

The farther you get through Bite Me, though, the more it goes off-script, and the more you start to understand why Rapp feels so stifled by the industry. Rapp’s stated influences are the kind you’d expect — Joan Jett, Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill — but those influences are mostly at the level of vibe and attitude. Meanwhile, even standout tracks like summer slinker “Hot” make it obvious what other recent hit they’re copying: in that case, Estelle’s “American Boy” plus Luciana‘s vibe. “Kiss It Kiss It” is exhilarating and has some great lines (as well as one implying North Carolina is a yeehaw state); it is also basically Ariana Grande’s “Yes, And?” with new wave riffs. Sometimes those other hits are strange choices, like Rapp and her team took someone else’s demo and tried to trash its proverbial hotel room. “Good Girl” has a bubblegum sound more suitable to someone like Carly Rae Jepsen, and lyrics like “leave like a grownup” or “she’s gonna disappoint her father” sound like a former Disney star taking her first calculated tiptoes into adult material. “Mad” has great mid-aughts sass, but it’s wasted on the same fake-out wordplay used on Meghan Trainor’s unfondly remembered heteropessimist anthem “Dear Future Husband“: “You could have been getting — all of my time…” The coyness made sense on the tradwife song, but would someone as proudly unapologetic and forward as Rapp really tiptoe around saying “getting head”?

To be clear, there’s plenty of good material on the album. The teasing spoken-word interludes and jokey asides that show up throughout are very of this era, but they play perfectly to Rapp’s acting strengths. “You’d Like That, Wouldn’t You” and “Shy” not only outdo anything from the Regina George era in sheer hook firepower, but in Rapp’s telling, they’re much raunchier and thus more fun. (I do wonder whether Rapp, as a Broadway kid, was thinking of the suddenly extroverted chorus of the Once Upon A Mattress audition staple “Shy” on the latter.) And in a very un-2000s twist, the ballads are the strongest material. “I Can’t Have You Around Me Anymore” is deceptively emotionally tortured for how unassuming it sounds, and at the other end of the volume spectrum, “That’s So Funny” crescendos to a tremendous bitter wail, a reminder of why Rapp got herself a tattoo of the French for “more vocals.” (Probably not coincidentally, it’s the song Dan Nigro and Luka Kloser cowrote.)

But I suspect this has less to do with Rapp’s talent and more that we’re in a pretty good era for pop, so the default pop track will sound pretty good basically by default. Jagged Little Pill didn’t become the album everyone tried to imitate by imitating other artists; it was Alanis making the record she wanted to make, after making several records that she didn’t. That’s less clear for Rapp. No doubt a lot of the material here comes from her life. She’s hinted, trollishly, that the events are maybe a little embellished, but Rapp broadcast her status as lesbian on SNL recently, and her music was bluntly open about her relationships well before that.

Obviously that’s a sign of progress; there have been so, so many decades of messy hetero confessionals, after all. And another sign of progress: When Rapp addresses her reputation, it’s not with the defensive panic of her 2000s predecessors — Blackout, Lindsay Lohan’s “Rumors,” etc. — but with a sense of agency and unbotheredness they never had. That’s usually what artists really mean when they talk about rejecting media training. It’s not that they don’t want to be filtered, but that they want to be the ones filtering themselves, setting their own boundaries of what they will and won’t engage with. Rapp has said as much: “I give you the things that I’m okay with you knowing.” It’s an admirable attitude, but how far does it extend beyond the press circuit into the studio? Maybe we’ll hear all about it in five years.

POP TEN

CLOSING TIME

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— may (@may.meangirls.online) August 13, 2025 at 9:39 PM