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Reneé Rapp, star of The Sex Lives of College Girls, is destined to become a music superstar.

Reneé Rapp may be recognised from the Mean Girls musical or the HBO adolescent drama The Sex Lives of College Girls, but she doesn’t care much about becoming an actor.

Her whole life, “from the moment I had a notion,” has been dedicated to pursuing music.

“There are films of me sitting at a coffee table in my parents’ home, making up songs and playing the harmonica before I could speak,” recalls the 23-year-old.

This was always the case. It had always been such.”

The North Carolina native had written her first original song before the age of three.

“My mother is a germophobe, so I penned something for the entrance of our home,” she chortles, bursting into song. “If a person has a cold, you should not embrace or kiss them.”

My mother is a germophobe 1

Within a short time, she had established a strategy. Gain stage experience at talent events, enroll in art school, win a scholarship at the High School Musical Theatre Awards, get spotted by agents, work on Broadway, establish a reputation, and utilise it to begin a pop career.

Amazingly, everything worked.

Everything To Everyone, Rapp’s first EP, is a low-key sensation. It was streamed 20 million times in December alone, due to its mix of sympathetic heartbreak songs and catchy pop tunes.

Her first London performance sold out in two minutes. The facility had to be enlarged twice, and Rapp ended up performing for 2,300 spectators, which was four times the initial estimate.

When the day came a week ago, people began lining up in the bitter cold at five in the morning with handmade placards and bouquets of flowers.

Sixteen hours later, Rapp took the stage to the kind of thunderous screaming normally reserved for boy bands and faulty roller coasters.

The singer has already established intimate contact with her followers online, and the concert serves as an extension of their friendship in the real world. They exchange homemade presents and inside jokes, and Rapp reveals intimate details about her romantic life while posing for BeReal images.

After noticing a banner that says “Sing Baguettes or you’re racist and homophobic,” she even sings a few lines of the discarded song that has been released on TikTok.

At the conclusion of the performance, she is overcome with emotion, wiping away tears as the audience chants “strangers to lovers to foes” – the chorus of her hallmark song, In The Kitchen.

A day before the performance, Rapp told the BBC that the tear-soaked lament is “the most meaningful song I’ve ever written.”

It came precisely one year ago, while she was going through a breakup “that was incredibly personal and really unpleasant on many different levels.”

One evening, Rapp was alone in her apartment, reflecting on all the meals she and her ex-partner had prepared there.

Weeping in the living area

“I could laugh at the situation most of the time, but the kitchen hurts,” she explains, “because I’m cooking alone, and cooking is such a love language.”

“But then I’d recall how I used to cook for [his] family, who didn’t like me, and how I shrunk myself to make someone else feel at ease.

Therefore, I composed this song while weeping alone in my living room.

The song writhes with misery like an open sore, but Rapp wasn’t only expressing resentment at her partner.

She recalls, “I had just had a chat with members of my team who complained I wasn’t writing with enough personality.”

“That truly angered me. As if to say, “You’re telling me that the one thing I hold to, my approach to communication, you don’t feel it?”

“Therefore, not only was I upset about this breakup, but I was also very disappointed in everyone… And In the Kitchen evolved into such a skin-shedding. It was the most cathartic experience of my life.”

Equally essential to her is the exquisitely described What Can I Do, in which the bisexual Rapp describes falling in love with the girlfriend of the best friend of her lover.

She called it her “first openly homosexual song” despite being out since she was 14 years old.

She adds, “Gayness was so oversexualized when I was a child, so I wanted my first homosexual song to be like a lullaby – really gentle.”

She grew raised in the Southern areas of the United States when homosexuality or any sexual orientation was often linked with immorality.

Last year, she said on the Norwegian entertainment program Blkkbster, “There were websites called ‘Expose Pages’ where people would post tales about what girl had hooked up with whom, why it was disgusting, and why we should name her a whore.”

“This occurred to me often as a child, and it was quite distressing. I felt like a terrible person for a considerable amount of time.”

After Leighton came out at the conclusion of season one, playing a queer character on The Sex Lives Of College Girls helped her in coming to terms with her own sexuality.

She says, “I was terrified of how it would be received.” “However, that is my proudest acting performance to date because I don’t believe I was acting.”

To her amazement, the spectacle altered the perspectives of others at home as well.

“Some of my family members are suddenly super-allies, while they weren’t when I was a child,” she explains.

“Like, it’s easier to accept my homosexuality now that I’m on a television program because it’s so glossy and romanticised.

“Is that ridiculous? Yeah.

“Will I approve it? Yeah.”

Will I accept it

As you may have imagined, Rapp is rather transparent. She talks in lengthy, continuous streams of consciousness that are both charmingly indiscreet and heartbreakingly vulnerable.

Her Broadway breakthrough, for example, is regarded as a lengthy, painful struggle.

She chuckles, “I’m accustomed to doing my own thing, so stage work annoys me to no end.” I actually lost consciousness for a period of time.

She also admits that, as a prerequisite for taking the role, she required the show’s creators to “pinky vow” to promote her music career.

That is a daring decision for any actress making her New York debut. Especially when Tina Fey, a comedic superstar, and Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of Saturday Night Live, are the producers.

“I was so inexperienced and careless,” she groans.

“I suppose I’m a little deluded, and I’ll do whatever it takes to accomplish my life’s goal, which I believe is music.”

This year, Rapp will reprise her role as Regina George, this time in a film adaptation of the Mean Girls musical, while filming the third season of Sex Lives and completing her first album.

How does she feel now that her aspirations have been realised?

“I’m just so thrilled that I’m really doing it,” she adds, “because it implies I wasn’t faking when I praised myself as a child.”

abubakarbilal
abubakarbilal
Abubakar is a writer and digital marketing expert. Who has founded multiple blogs and successful businesses in the fields of digital marketing, software development. A full-service digital media agency that partners with clients to boost their business outcomes.
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