In defence of Chappell Roan

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Chap­pell Roan wasn’t meant for all this. Chap­pell Roan is meant to be a queer icon and alt pop girlie. She should be occu­py­ing the same cul­tur­al space that Car­ly Rae Jepsen did with Emo­tion in the mid-2010s; a left-field song­writer with a zeit­geist-cap­tur­ing body of work that wasn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly com­mer­cial­ly suc­cess­ful, but amassed a cult fol­low­ing that would become the foun­da­tion of her fame going forward.

That’s almost what The Rise and Fall of a Mid­west Princess did for Chap­pell Roan. Her 2023 debut was met with a mod­est amount of crit­i­cal acclaim and a hearty dose of petrol on the flames of an already thriv­ing – but firm­ly under­ground – grass­roots fan­dom. It didn’t have much of an impact on the charts at first, but that was hard­ly sur­pris­ing for a first album from a drag queen who writes 2000s scan­dal­ism-inspired songs about eat­ing pussy. In the last few months, though, that’s all changed.

It start­ed typ­i­cal­ly enough. A slot open­ing for Olivia Rodri­go on tour; a viral appear­ance on NPR’s Tiny Desk that rock­et­ed her Spo­ti­fy month­ly lis­ten­ers count and turned The Rise and Fall of a Mid­west Princess into a sleep­er hit; per­for­mances at Coachel­la, the Governor’s Ball, and a slew of late night talk shows that became a series of coro­na­tions for her reign over the con­tem­po­rary pop land­scape. This has been the stan­dard mode of the ​‘hype’ machine post-social media, expe­ri­enced by every­one from Bön Iver to Ethel Cain. More recent­ly, though, it’s been mal­func­tion­ing. The pace of hype is mas­sive­ly accel­er­at­ed while also being trans­mit­ted across a dan­ger­ous­ly broad scale, turn­ing bur­geon­ing fame into a Faus­t­ian bargain.

Chap­pell Roan is cur­rent­ly receiv­ing news cov­er­age that out-strips most inter­na­tion­al con­flicts. The last few weeks she’s been stuck on a rolling cycle of inter­views, sound­bites, back­lash­es and clar­i­fi­ca­tions, prompt­ing fur­ther back­lash­es and clar­i­fi­ca­tions. Her name has been hoovered up into every dom­i­nant con­ver­sa­tion of the moment, from the U.S. Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion to Israel’s war on Pales­tine, and the increas­ing­ly obses­sive nature of music fan­doms. For an emerg­ing artist, this is not nor­mal. Chap­pell Roan isn’t hav­ing her Car­ly Rae Jepsen cir­ca Emo­tion arc now, she’s hav­ing her Car­ly Rae Jepsen cir­ca ​‘Call Me Maybe’ arc – a moment of sud­den, over­whelm­ing atten­tion that came crash­ing down while she was still wait­ing tables. Jepsen has been vocal about her strug­gles with fame over the years, find­ing the paparazzi intru­sive and the expo­sure jar­ring. But even the height of Jepsen-mania didn’t see the artist grilled on her vot­ing inten­tions and then strung up for weeks over her answer.

What makes things worse, per­haps, is the kind of artist Chap­pell Roan is. She is a mod­ern pop star oper­at­ing in a mod­ern ecosys­tem that was shaped, in part, by the suc­cess of Car­ly Rae Jepsen; one that sees artists signed to major labels with iden­ti­ties, aes­thet­ics, and grass­roots fan­doms already in place. They’re cre­at­ed by the cul­ture and scout­ed by the indus­try, rather than the oth­er way around. They aren’t pre-pack­aged the way pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions of pop stars would have been, which makes for more inter­est­ing and diverse music but has its draw­backs for the artists per­son­al­ly. They’re being thrust into the same ech­e­lons of star­dom as Brit­ney Spears or Christi­na Aguil­era, but with­out the mega-sales or rel­a­tive insu­la­tion from the out­side world that came with old school Dis­ney kid fame. Rather, Roan, along with the rest of her gen­er­a­tion, appeals pre­cise­ly because she’s so acces­si­ble. They have com­mu­ni­ty-based rela­tion­ships with their fans, and speak out about caus­es close to their hearts. ​“They seem like ordi­nary women, at home in front of small­er audi­ences,” Kate Moss­man wrote in the New States­man last week. ​“The obses­sive behav­iour they inspire – tick­ets to Roan’s Brix­ton gig were fetch­ing £400 – says far more about the audi­ence than the music itself.”

Last month, Roan rebuked ​‘enti­tled’ fans for demand­ing pho­tos with her in pub­lic or track­ing down per­son­al infor­ma­tion, like where her par­ents live or her sis­ter works. It’s a com­mon com­plaint of fame in the 2020s – Phoebe Bridgers, Pete David­son and Doja Cat, have expressed sim­i­lar frus­tra­tions in recent years. How­ev­er, Roan’s barbed reac­tion to the spot­light has led to crit­i­cisms of its own. One viral tweet alleged that Roan is ​“not built for fame” after she told the paparazzi to ​“shut the fuck up” at the VMAs. It actu­al­ly wasn’t a paparazzi who was yelling at her, it was some­one else yelling at the paparazzi, but had it been a paparazzi she would have been well with­in her right to say some­thing. We have an infi­nite sup­ply of retroac­tive appre­ci­a­tion for fig­ures like Court­ney Love, Fiona Apple and Amy Wine­house, who held their own against the more intru­sive aspects of the media in the 90s and 2000s to their own detri­ment in moments that are now con­sid­ered ​“leg­endary,” but when it hap­pens in front of us in real time it’s seen as ungrate­ful. With the scars of Y2K’s tox­ic celebri­ty cul­ture vis­i­ble on every­one who endured it, from Janet Jack­son to Paris Hilton, we still expect pop stars to be compliant.

A part of the prob­lem is that there’s no such thing as ​“a bit famous” any­more. Chap­pell Roan is a rel­a­tive­ly new under­ground artist with a lot of anti-estab­lish­ment views. At any oth­er point in his­to­ry, she would not be front and cen­tre of the news cycle in broad­sheet news­pa­pers. She wouldn’t even be on their radar. She shouldn’t be any­where near the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment except to crit­i­cise it, but this sum­mer she was invit­ed to per­form at the White House’s Pride Cel­e­bra­tion. She turned it down, cit­ing the Biden-Har­ris administration’s fail­ure to defend queer rights against the hun­dreds of anti-LGBTQ+ bills tabled by Repub­li­cans, and their ongo­ing sup­port for Israel dur­ing the assault on Gaza. At the moment, though, she’s being raked over the coals for not endors­ing Kamala Har­ris in the upcom­ing elec­tion – a response that would be con­sid­ered stan­dard com­ing from an all-male band broad­ly iden­ti­fied as ​“punk” but far less out­spo­ken than Roan has been.

“The whole cir­cuit­ry of fan­dom has been dis­rupt­ed since the pan­dem­ic,” says jour­nal­ist Han­nah Ewens, writ­ing on the chang­ing nature of fan­dom in The Guardian. ​“It used to be artist, fan and fan­dom in a Venn dia­gram, which held the shared world the artist and fan cre­at­ed togeth­er in the over­lap­ping cen­tre. Now it’s artist, fan, fan­dom and online audi­ence – and in the mid­dle, a neb­u­lous space that no longer feels like a shared secret, but a bat­tle­ground over the nar­ra­tive of that artist.”

Effec­tive­ly, the nature of fame in the 2020s is forc­ing Roan to address an audi­ence far beyond her nat­ur­al orbit. She’s an unortho­dox fig­ure embraced by a main­stream that is increas­ing­ly will­ing to cham­pi­on artists from LGBTQ+ spaces, but large­ly unwill­ing to accept the defi­ant views they might hold against the pow­er struc­tures sur­round­ing them – be it pol­i­tics, celebri­ty, or indeed their own fans.

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