In defence of Chappell Roan

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 Bon 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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