"BITE ME" by Renée Rapp: The Album America Needs, 99/100, and the sound of New York's Spirit
- John-Michael (Jean-Michel) Valat De Cordova
- Aug 5, 2025
- 3 min read
NEW YORK CITY, NY — Last year, my top artist for the year was the wonderful Renée Rapp. Her songs ranging from Boston to At Least I’m Hot have captured not just my fancy but rather imagination and nostalgia for something that has never quite happened, but almost always something I wished did.
In this article I will continue to examine my feelings about things as varied as New England, white queer people in New York City and Greenwich CT, and the subtly slow decline of the Pop music industry since the 1980s. But, perhaps most importantly, it will all be a hamfisted metaphor for Renee Rapp as a cultural symbol. To get this out of the way: Renee Rapp’s BITE ME gets a 99/100. Why not 100? Well, let me explain.
Noah Kahan may have been able to “make people who’ve never been to New England feel like they’ve lived there their whole lives”, but Renee Rapp allows me to return to my upbringing in the simultaneously leafy, cultured, and italian-american neighbourhood of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. An area once described a friend from college, Cato, as “somewhere where no one good lives, except my old roommate who has a framed Kennedy photo & also a Nixon photo in his room”.
Renee Rapp’s new album BITE ME describes the pure queer rage, anger, and envy that I know many of my friends and I have been trying to capture in songs, articles, and tweets since at least the coronavirus breached the pristine shores of the upper-east side and Greenwich CT (shoutout to Todd’s Point, btw). It is an absolutely unabashedly good, queer, and camp response to the despair that we have often seen in other songs and pop music of the past 5 years. However, I think there is something more to it, to me, under the surface of the biting lyrics, danceable beats, and talented frontwoman
Last year, my writer Diana Allar published the article What Happened To Music? The Steady Reduction in Music Quality Over The Past Forty Years — An Opinion on Industry Decline (in retrospect, a headline I should’ve killed before it got off the floor). While I believe Ms. Allar to be an exceptionally talented young writer, I think the premise that she took on was wrong, and something that she struggled to fully develop. Yes, something is going on in music (and often something bad), but as someone who has been through the ringer for music, from broadway lessons in Cos Cob, CT when I was but a meager eight years old, to memorizing the entire script of Hamilton when I was in the 5th grade unintentionally (and still to some extent knowing most of it), to writing shitty songs for the acoustic guitar for my garage band in my Senior year of High School. Music is very well alive, but as has always been the case, and I suspect will continue to be the case for quite some time, Pop music will always feel artificial when coming form a non-subversive place, as it almost always feels a bit forced and (for lack of a better term) sanitized. However, this is not the perspective I would want to take with Renee Rapp’s New Album, and would be an unfair critique in my mind (as it probably was the first time The Radical Times published it).
What was the purpose of that? Well I’ll tell you if you stop critiquing my critique:
Renee Rapp’s Album, to me, is an exceptionally good album from an exceptionally good queer artist that I hope to see succeed immensely. In my mind, it captures the romanticized New York City that only tourists and transplants can ever see, and as someone who was born (and raised for a short time) in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn it is something that I only ever got to see as a kid. Commercialization has killed it. Rennee Rapp, however, has breathed another breath of fresh air to it, to the boon of the queer community, that I myself happen to be a member of. As I tweeted while deliriously sleep deprived “Renee Rapp is god’s favorite lesbian”, although from a more critical perspective you could probably say Chappel Roan has been more commercially successful. And, it's not 100, because as a French person I must assert that "vignt c'est pour dieux" (20/20 is for God).
