Review: Snow Angel by Renee Rapp
This review is about an okay album by an okay pop musician, but it’s really an attempt to understand how women think about love.
Men underrate the value of listening to music made for women. We often claim that women make no sense, but the underlying thoughts and feelings behind seemingly erratic behavior are spelled out in singer-songwriter music written by young women for young women. Take Reneé Rapp’s “Talk Too Much” as an example:
I’m taking everything I see as a sign
I know it’s crazy—but what if it’s right?
I’m here again! Talking myself out of
My own happiness
I’ll make it up ‘till I quit
I wonder if
We should just sit here in silence ’cause
I think I talk too much
If your ex broke up with you out of nowhere for bizarre reasons, here’s an explanation, flanked by early-aughts girl-rock guitars.
I recognize that Rapp’s songs are not strictly autobiographical—she wrote a song called “Gemini Moon” despite being a Pisces Moon—but singer-songwriters make their money by writing relatable music. Note that Rapp’s debut album Snow Angel breaks zero new ground. The core subject matter is perennial angst, the lyricism is unremarkably competent, and the production is mostly Breakaway-era Kelly Clarkson with 2020s studio tech and a chamber orchestra for flair. The art itself is not what made this album debut at #44 on the Billboard 200.
No, the reason that Reneé Rapp is selling $35 T shirts, $40 tote bags, and $75 hoodies is that her music speaks to young, educated, and urbane women. The specific fictions of songs like “I Hate Boston” underpin emotional truths that a listener can relate to if she has felt that way before. And that emotional truth is accessible on Spotify to any man who wants to know why women are Like That.
In 2016, evolutionary psychologist David Buss wrote an essay outlining a “mating crisis among educated women.” His core argument is:
Women typically seek out men who are their age and older and are at their level of education, intelligence, and achievement or higher. This replicates across a wide range of cultures, suggesting a biological underpinning.
In North America and Europe, women are getting educated at higher rates than men.
Men, however, are typically less concerned about their partners’ current education levels and care relatively more about youth and physical attractiveness. This also likely has biological underpinning.
Thus, for educated women, there is a relative lack of “eligible” men—and they’re competing both with other educated women and with less-educated women.
For most people, this works out fine. Most late-twenties Americans are in committed relationships. But in this situation, there remain more single women than men they want. If you’re one of these women, you have a choice of bad options:
Fight harder for male attention—do things you’d rather not to convert a hookup into a relationship.
Hold out for an ever-shrinking pool of men who are educated, emotionally mature, sufficiently masculine, and still single.
Fight both evolved psychology and common sense to date a man who’s lesser than you in most ways that matter.
Stop looking for a man in your life.
Lonely men are too steeped in their own resentment to realize that they have the easier problem. Yes, elevating a rock-bottom, lonesome life into something that invites women’s attention is a Herculean task. But sifting through a deluge of male attention in search of someone who won’t hit-and-run is Sisyphean by contrast.
The self-insert protagonist of Snow Angel never gets a happy ending. The men in these stories are often commitment-averse losers, from the broke-but-still-smoking ex of “Tummy Hurts” to the happy-birthday-are-you-alone texts of “23”. And even at their best, the relationships remain painful. “Swim” talks of waterboarding and lambs led to slaughter, and “The Wedding Song” talks of a longed-for marriage that he wasn’t interested in.
And yet, the men still get picked—if not by the narrator, then by some other woman. Resentful redpillers love wishing a lonesome middle age on the women who reject them, but rejected women have to grasp for weaker, sadder revenges. The only hope for the man in "Tummy Hurts” is that “Eventually, 2043 / Someone’s gonna hurt their little girl like their daddy hurt me.”
The sadness in Snow Angel is notable in its persistence. Note that Taylor Swift—artistic standard-bearer for all young women, not just the urban and educated—still has joy on her album Midnights. Swift depicts a liberated singlehood in “Bejeweled” and a genuinely good man (at the time) in “Lavender Haze.” Even the panic works out better—Swift’s “Mastermind” suggests the same depth of neurotic rumination as Rapp’s “Talk Too Much,” but in Swift’s case it works to secure the boy.
But Reneé Rapp isn’t writing for all women—she’s writing for the educated, the urban, the still-feminist, the maybe-bisexual. And those women don’t get happy endings on Snow Angel, even on the deluxe edition.
The Charli XCX album brat consumed the consciousness of chronically online girlies all over the internet. Musically, it’s a tour de force of offbeat girl pop, from the swaggering “360” to the self-explanatory anthem “Mean girls.” To the fandom, it shares celebrity gossip-as-lore in songs like “Sympathy is a knife” (not confirmed to be about Taylor Swift) and “Girl, so confusing” (confirmed in a remix to be about Lorde). But to me, I’m most enthralled by the penultimate track “I think about it all the time,” the track where Charli asks whether she’d want to disrupt her career to have a child.
Somewhere between 2022 and 2023, the dam started to break on what Katherine Dee called sex negativity —a slow trickle of thirtysomething women lamenting “missing their window” for children, “cottagecore” content glorifying a pastoral motherhood, and the rise of a “soft girl” or “divine feminine” genre of longing.
The sequential shocks of Trump’s election, COVID-19, and the aging of millennials into their thirties drove nails into the coffin of the Tina Fey, Michelle Obama, Bustle and Refinery29 era of post-Recession “girlboss” feminism. As the women who leveraged girlbossing into a fulfilling life stopped posting, younger Gen Z women witnessed the leftovers—the most neurotic, the most radfem, the ones least joking about the box wine—as they lamented how all their feminism got them nothing. The contemporary discourse still resembles the GamerGate wars of social justice warriors versus incel gamers, but an exhaustion has set in. Online politics has hit a sugar crash, scored by folklore-era Taylor Swift and to a lesser extent Snow Angel, in part because drawing political lines based on gender contravenes the human desire to fall in love.
The men who won’t date liberals and the women who won’t date conservatives will find each other eventually. Their respective politics are smoldering into a weary suspicion of institutions and a resignation that the world will end anyway. That’s enough common ground for opposites to attract.
Renee Rapp does not continue misery-posting with her next project: playing Regina George in Mean Girls (2024), the movie musical based on the stage musical based on the movie based on the…guide for parents on intrasexual competition between teenage girls. Between her performance in the movie, her interviews during the promotion tour, and her tie-in song with Megan Thee Stallion, Rapp plays up the archetype of the horny and unhinged It Girl, to the delight of her fans.
The self-insert of Snow Angel, much like Regina George, is ultimately a character—relatable, but by no means a whole person. There’s value in asking why people find a piece of artwork not just compelling but relatable, but no one is a monolith, and no one stays the same. In the year it took me to write this review, Rapp came out as lesbian, exempting herself from much of the anguish of her own album. Maybe her next project will follow Zolita’s Evil Angel into a heart-of-darkness account of dysfunctional lesbian romances. Or maybe she’ll fizzle, settle down, and make a career writing Broadway songs.
I didn’t like the album—it was well-done, but it felt forgettable. Oliver Tree also did anguish scored to mid-aughts nostalgia with Ugly is Beautiful, but his rendition felt more impactful, in part because it was paired with truly bizarre music videos and interviews. Maybe if I shared in the mimetic thirst of Renee Rapp interview compilation videos, I’d have a different opinion of her music.
As it stands, I’m more interested in the listeners of Snow Angel than the album itself.