For Chappell Roan, who has been toiling in the pop music trenches for several years now, the recent burst of acclaim she’s received has been overdue, affirming and more than a little disorienting. Perhaps the most energizing breakout star of this year, she has songs that center queer romance, a robust aesthetic gift and, most striking of all, an unusually moral sense of how a famous person should be treated.
As she’s being embraced, she’s also being tested. The last couple of weeks especially have provided Roan a case study in the difference between IRL and URL fandom — the people who show up to commune with you, and the people who make you the object of their study and chatter online — and which to stake her future on.
Last Tuesday in Franklin, Tenn., she took a mid-show breather to survey the 7,500 people who’d come to see her perform at the FirstBank Amphitheater.
“I know how hard it is to be queer in the Midwest and the South,” she said. She grew up around seven hours west, in Willard, Mo., chafing against her conservative surroundings. As a young person, she continued, “I really needed a place where people weren’t going to make fun of me for how I dressed or who I liked.”
For the night, the amphitheater just outside of Nashville had become such a place. Carved into a rock quarry, the open-to-the-sky venue felt cloistered, protected. A place for intimate but very loud conversation out of view of prying ears and eyes.
This was one of Roan’s final live performances of this year, a headlining show coming just a few months after her midday sets at Coachella and Lollapalooza turned into viral phenomena, but also a few days after she’d pulled out of a pair of appearances at All Things Go, a largely queer, woman-focused festival in New York and Maryland, citing exhaustion. The cancellation followed dust-ups with fans, a brief dispute with a photographer on a red carpet and questions about how she expressed political views.
Fame will kidnap you if you let it, and Roan, 26, has been transparently navigating its demands — onstage and online — over these past few months that have seen her morph from cult queer-pop hero to zeitgeist-shaping star.
Her popularity is growing almost daily. “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” her debut album that arrived just over a year ago, now sits at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, a startling surge after not charting for the first six months of its release. Her songs pepper the Hot 100. They are part of the backbone of TikTok.
But being a new star — a young, queer, female one at that — has put Roan in the position of assessing what success has brought her with a cutting clarity not shared, at least publicly, by most of her peers. She is at something of a pivot point: amplifying and embracing what she sees out in the ecstatic crowds of paying devotees, while casting a skeptical eye on what she encounters on the internet, in fan comments and videos that dissect her down into unrecognizable pieces.
At her concert, almost everyone came in costume: Realtree camouflage, pink cowboy hats, Western boots, frilly dresses, hand-drawn shirts with Roan references. Dressing like Roan — who started the show in a Realtree camouflage dress before switching to a corset in the same pattern — was an act of devotion and a demonstration of trust.
Roan’s set was casually virtuosic, full of frisky songs about queer love and lust, sung with verve and, in more than a few moments, tactically sharp power. She turned the end of “The Subway,” a pensive number about seeing shadows of an old love everywhere, into a festival of desperation. “My Kink Is Karma” vividly blended disgust and dismissal. During “Picture You,” a torch song about unrequited obsession, Roan — with almost David Lynch-ian energy — serenaded a wig set atop a microphone stand.
She unleashed the most at the end of “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl,” a jubilant treatise on sexual awakening that came early in the night. “Not overdramatic,” Roan yelped. “I just know what I wantttttt.”
It was an extended syllable that felt like it contained a world of implications: a rejection of social expectations of sexual and gender identity, the relief of leaning in to one’s own personal truth, and also, in the specific context of the past few weeks, an artist’s right to set boundaries with the people who consume her art.
We tend to think of standom as uncomplicated idol worship — not a fickle embrace, but a fixed one. But the phase of stan culture that’s been emerging in the past year or so is far messier and contingent. Online fandom can swarm rapidly, and provide an unrepeatable boost. But it’s also impossible to fully tend to, and loyalty can collapse along myriad fault lines.
That’s happened repeatedly with Roan recently, most prominently around her declarations of political sentiment. In a Rolling Stone cover story, she said she turned down an invitation to perform at the White House’s Pride celebration, but had considered attending and protesting the Biden administration’s stance on the war in Gaza. She told The Guardian she wasn’t going to endorse any candidate in the upcoming presidential election. That led to a series of bad-faith misreads, including the suggestion that she supported Donald J. Trump, which Roan dutifully swatted down, finally saying that she was voting for Kamala Harris while not endorsing policies of “the Democratic Party that has failed people like me and you — and more so Palestine and more so every marginalized community in the world.”
She posted two TikTok videos on the matter, the second more flustered than the first. Appearing without makeup, she spoke into the camera as if lightly scolding the Roan enthusiast on the other side. Fandom is supposed to be a form of obsession, a dedicated cataloging of adoration, but in these videos, Roan was asking, in essence, how can you be a Chappell Roan fan and understand so little about Chappell Roan?
Superstars rarely do anything that might alienate their most intense devotees, accepting some small amount of fan misbehavior as collateral damage. But Roan is different here, too. Six weeks ago, she posted some messages on social media in response to what she described as “predatory” fan behavior: “If you see me as a bitch or ungrateful or my entire statement upsets you, baby that’s you,” she wrote, “you gotta look inward and ask yourself ‘wait why am I so upset by this?’”
Those statements make her the only pop star at her level of fame — medium, but surely growing — who has spoken this openly about the pressures and intrusions that wild success introduces. The idea that a fan might abandon a star is accepted; the notion that a star might reject a fan is still somewhat untested territory (apart from perhaps Doja Cat, who has always appeared to view fans as a nuisance).
It is also a test of the stability of the online juggernaut of Roan support. Star narratives aren’t purely top-down like they were a few decades ago; they are the sum of untold incomplete bits of information that are also misread at a frightening clip. For a young star looking to build a stable foundation for a rocketing career, one brick can be yanked at any moment, putting the whole house in peril.
The only solution, Roan appears to understand, is to hold close those who want to be closest to her. After urging attendees to tip the drag queens who had opened the show, and reminding everyone she grew up somewhere very much like this place, she assured the Tennessee crowd, “You are welcome here. You are loved and you are cherished.”
Throughout the night, the audience was tethered to her performance in ways both mundane and sly. Roan’s music often recalls the energetic centrist pop of the early 1980s — it is a package not designed for alienation. When she sings, she lingers on phrases for effect, with vocal flourishes redolent of Kate Bush, Stevie Nicks, Cyndi Lauper.
Though she’s technically impressive, she’s not unapproachable, turning songs like the husky “Casual” and the earthy “Red Wine Supernova” into cheeky anthems. Throughout her show, the video screen behind her not only pulsed with colorful illustrations, but also displayed the key phrases for the crowd to shout along.
That gesture reflected an implicit understanding that the songs won’t reach full potential without the singalongs (and in the case of “Hot to Go!,” the accompanying dance). It was also a roundabout acknowledgment of the manner in which TikTok has reshaped pop music listening — no longer from the beginning of a song forward, but from the catchy section outward. Flashing the words on the screen is a signpost to locate fans in the meme if they got lost in the song on the way there.
In truth, though, almost no one at the show was lost, ever — not musically and not spiritually. If online, quarrel had become a primary vehicle for conversation about Roan, here under the Tennessee stars, Roan was at work forging something sturdier. The crowd mirrored her appearance, her gestures, the words of each song. By the end of the night, you had a real glimpse into how modern standards — and stars — will be made.
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