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Although Addison Rae might be Charli XCX’s number one fan (though it sometimes seems like the other way around), it is Lana Del Rey who she most closely mirrors on her latest single, “Diet Pepsi.” If the title alone wasn’t a dead giveaway of that similarity (echoing Del Rey’s 2012 track, “Cola”), then the music video itself is sure to emphasize the LDR influence on the song. Not just lyrically, but also aesthetically.
Directed by Sean Price Williams (who also recently directed Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please”), the video follows Rae in the front seat (and sometimes the back seat) of her boyfriend’s car. Played by Drew Van Acker, who Rae said reminded her of Tyler Durden a.k.a. Brad Pitt from Fight Club when she first saw a picture of him, his James Dean thing is definitely what one could call “Del Rey-approved” (she, too, secured her own version of Dean via Bradley Soileau in the “Born to Die” and “Blue Jeans” videos). Along with the entire “riding in Daddy’s car” visual that “happens to be” très “Shades of Cool.” Because, while Charli XCX might be known for constantly offering up songs about wheels of some sort (hear: “Vroom Vroom,” “Dreamer,” “White Mercedes,” “Crash,” “Speed Drive,” etc.), it is Del Rey who imbues them with a “quintessential American” meaning (which, alas, XCX is incapable of due to her Britishness). Emphasizing that the car is the thing in the U.S. The place where everything happens, including, of course, a budding romance-turned-carnal sex act. Particularly during the fifties and sixties era that Rae gravitates toward in this video (and that Del Rey gravitates toward all the time).
The black-and-white “time capsule” (especially for someone so “TikTok-oriented”) is further lent its mid-twentieth century Americana feel by commencing with Rae opening a tape case and slipping it into the car’s tape deck as an I Love Lucy-adjacent font appears onscreen to tell us the song’s name: “Diet Pepsi.” Which is fitting since Rae can, in this scenario, be called the “diet” version of Del Rey in that she’s Gen Z to her millennial, therefore far more diluted in artistic value and originality. And while Del Rey iconically opened “Cola” with the declaration, “My pussy tastes like Pepsi cola,” Rae chooses to mention Diet Pepsi in the second verse with, “Sitting on his lap, sippin’ Diet Pepsi.” And yes, like Del Rey, she also mentions this cola just once despite naming a song after it.
In the intro verse, Rae also immediately sets the Del Reyian stage via the lines, “My boy’s a winner, he loves the game/My lips reflect off his cross gold chain/I like the way he’s telling me/My ass looks good in these ripped blue jeans/My cheeks are red like cherries in the spring/Body’s a work of art you’d die to see.” Del Rey, in fact, uses one of those exact terms on “Black Beauty”: “I keep my lips red/To seem like cherries in the spring.”
As for the visual nods to fifties and sixties-era car culture, wherein many teenagers (read: teenage girls…since boys never have to bear the same “stain” after having sex) would lose their “innocence”—this includes the common term of “necking” in the back seat—it’s also present in Rae’s chorus, “When we drive in your car, I’m your baby (so sweet)/Losing all my innocence in the back seat/Say you love, say you love, say you love me.” Of course, the girl in question would likely only do these “dirty” acts in the back seat in the hope that the object of her desire would say just that: “I love you.” As for Rae’s illicit tryst with the boy she speaks of in the song (a boy who, if the casting choice is anything to go by, is much older [also Del Rey-approved]), it’s additionally highlighted in the lyrics, “Break all the rules ’til we get caught/Fog up the windows in the parking lot/Summer love (ah, ah), sexy.”
With regard to describing, euphemistically, “losing all [her] innocence in the back seat,” not only does it channel Del Rey on “Gods and Monsters” repeating, “It’s innocence lost, innocence lost” (herself riffing on John Milton, who famously declared in Paradise Lost, “Innocence, once lost, can never be regained”), it also harkens back to the Sandy Olsson (Olivia Newton-John) and Danny Zuko (John Travolta) dynamic in Grease. While Zuko is the proverbial leather jacket-wearing bad boy with a convertible, Sandy is the virginal girl he tries to “defile” in it while the two are at the drive-in movie theater (the car, again, being like a “bedroom on wheels,” particularly for teenagers back then). Unlike Rae, however, Sandy isn’t amenable to losing her innocence in the front or back seat, berating Danny when he keeps trying to “do sex” with her, “You think I’m gonna stay here with you in this sin wagon?” before running off and leaving Danny “stranded at the drive-in” (even though he’s the one with the wheels to leave).
Rae, on the other hand, wants nothing more than to stay in Van Acker’s “sin wagon” all night. Only getting out, at one point, to showcase some scenes of herself in a bikini as an American flag materializes to drape over herself—again, Lana Del Rey-style. In fact, it was Barrie-James O’Neill, Del Rey’s ex-boyfriend, who succinctly stated, “You American girls walk around as if your pussies tasted like Pepsi-Cola [yes, he inspired the lyric], as if you’d wrap yourself into an American flag to sleep.” Del Rey speaks of “sleeping” in something entirely different on “Fucked My Way to the Top,” commanding, “Lay me down tonight in my diamonds and pearls.” The motif of diamonds is often present in her lyrics; case in point, “National Anthem,” during which she speaks in the same kind of baby voice as Rae on “Diet Pepsi” by cooing such “isms” as, “Um, do you think you’ll buy me lots of diamonds?” and “Everybody knows it, it’s a fact/Kiss, Kiss.”
Rae also gives the “Daddy’s girl” aura Del Rey perfected in the “Ride” video by describing, “Sitting on his lap, sippin’ Diet Pepsi/I write my name with lipstick on your chest/I leave a mark so you know I’m the best.” Here, too, one can’t help but think of Del Rey assuring, “Baby, you the best” on “Summertime Sadness.”
What’s more, in the spirit of Del Rey, the imagery that Rae wields throughout the limited location video is a postmodern parade, from the image of a hand wiping steam away from the window (Titanic-style) to Rae going wide-eyed over a banana split (innuendo indeed)—while doing the splits, naturally. To boot, no nod to Del Rey, ergo Americana, would be complete without draping the aforementioned American flag over herself at some point. Or, for that matter, finding herself in a convenience store (another favorite milieu of Del Rey’s in both song and photoshoot output) where she pulls a Diet Pepsi out of the refrigerator section and sips on it—which, obviously, leads everything to turn into color (sort of like how it did for Betty Parker [Joan Allen] in Pleasantville when she had her first orgasm).
During one of these final color moments, Rae is also shown biting on a pearl necklace “Lana-style,” which, in reality, is Marilyn Monroe-style—with one of her most famous photoshoots by Bert Stern finding her posed on the beach with pearls all around her and, in one photo, biting the necklace.
But Williams doesn’t cite Monroe or Del Rey as influences on his aesthetic choices. However, his eye was key to assembling the necessary “collage of homages” that gives “Diet Pepsi” its Del Rey feel (particularly “Shades of Cool” and “Music To Watch Boys To” [namely, when Rae dons headphones…even if the earpieces aren’t crafted in the shape of flowers]). But at the base of that is what Williams characterizes as: “Visually, Russ Meyer, plus the driving sequence in Fellini’s Toby Dammit, plus Bruce Conner’s Breakaway equals ‘Diet Pepsi.’” And, of course, like any adept payer of respect to postmodernism, Rae also weighed in on one of the most important sartorial decisions: wearing a cone bra. For, as she herself mentioned, “I love Madonna so it only felt right to include a cone bra in the video.”
However, while Madonna’s influence always ends up creeping into every subsequent “pop girlie’s” music and videos, it is Del Rey that outshines all other influences on “Diet Pepsi.” Which works out since the world is apparently in need of a new “sultry soda song” after Del Rey has said she will no longer perform “Cola” after the whole Harvey Weinstein thing…
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Genna Rivieccio
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