MUSIC
Reneé Rapp ★★★
AO Live, John Cain Arena, January 31
The festival atmosphere at the Australian Open has been well documented this year. There’s a Kia dealership in here, two Mecca Cosmeticas, and queues, queues, queues.
On the rest of her Bite Me tour, Reneé Rapp is playing normal evening shows. Here in Melbourne, she’s been folded into the tennis, playing a matinee show timed to fit before the women’s finals. Maybe they’re trying to diversify the AO crowd.
The Rapp faction, largely women under 25, scream when she prowls onto the stage to the opening of Leave Me Alone. “I’m a real bad girl, but a real good kisser,” she drawls. “Leave me alone bitch, I wanna have fun.” She’s in a T-shirt, corset and cargo pants.
Even she thinks this tennis crossover is a bit weird: “This thing might be about tennis, but for the next hour and fifteen it’s about me, bitch,” she tells us.
Rapp, who made her name in the Mean Girls musical, has left the squeaky clean world of musical theatre for the (theoretically) wilder world of pop. She’s got a reputation for being unfiltered and outspoken – just enough to send her viral.
She definitely wants us to think she’s dangerous. In interstitial videos that play on the big screen, she shrugs off the scrutiny and the pressure. Her label needs the single! Her interviews are too juicy! Shut the f— up, she screams! She joyously gives the naysayers the finger, and the crowd two fingers, her tongue in between. She’s here, she’s queer, and she’s not hiding it.
But it’s a cosy kind of dangerous. Her music has a layer of angry theatrics that, at its best, is camp and joyful, and, at its weakest, doesn’t ring true. “I’m violent when I’m drinking / I’m violent when I’m sober too,” she sings on Shy. I don’t believe her; she sounds lovely. It might not be where she’s aiming, but she’s landing at Gen-Z P!nk.
She’s a great party compère. Leave Me Alone sounds like a high-camp Fight For Your Right. The crowd joins in the sweary catharsis on Talk Too Much and Poison Poison. During the horny Kiss It Kiss It (key line: “You’re gonna kill me if you kiss it like that”), the roaming kiss-cam finds queer couples in the crowd (it’s not hard) who relish their moment. The camera lingers. The couples keep going.
The songs are a bit thin at times, though they’re given a lift here by a great band and ’80s funk-fuelled arrangements. Guitar solos slip between the thundering double-kick drums, the emotion up to 11.
It’s a bit oversaturated, but a lot of these songs are about breakups and hookups, and that’s young love. And looking around at the crowd, my male elder millennial judgment couldn’t be more irrelevant.
Songs like I Think I Like You Better When You’re Gone and Tummy Hurts inspire guttural sing-alongs. The catch-cry of her closer, “If I’m gonna cry, then at least I’m hot!” is a timeless pop sentiment.
When the show finishes, signs urge us to stay in the arena and watch the women’s final on the screen.
But there’s a mass migration to the exits. Two circles, momentarily making a Venn diagram, then dissipating.
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Will Cox writes fiction and arts criticism. He’s based in Merri-bek.
