I’ve been trying and failing to write about Chappell Roan ever since I saw her perform in Berlin at the end of September. Chappell needs to be written about: there have been millions of words about her since her career blew up on a wholly unprecedented scale in April. But so much more that remains and needs to be said. I had so much to say that I didn’t know where to start. I also struggled with the constantly evolving narrative surrounding her. Every time I thought I’d pinned down what I wanted to say, something else would happen. Events were spinning out of control even at the time of the Berlin Velodrom show, which by rights should have been a victory lap for Roan, her biggest ever headline show. Instead, there was a distinct feeling of uncertainty around it.
The 12,000-capacity show followed weeks of headlines, controversy and cancelled dates. The month before, Roan had taken to her social media to make her now infamous statement, directly addressing “superfan” behaviour, telling people to “please stop touching me… stop being weird to my family and friends”. It was honest, heartfelt and brave. But nonetheless it earned her a lot of criticism, some of it from her own fanbase. In the days before the Berlin concert, Roan gave several big interviews to the UK press, saying she had been diagnosed with severe depression and was in therapy. Up to the moment Roan took the stage, doubt remained about whether the concert would go ahead.
Even after she appeared, It was difficult not to perceive the tension: the rise but also the fall that comes, sooner or later, to many huge stars, but especially to women. On one hand, there was the mass crowd adoration. The camera zoomed in on a teenager holding up a sign reading “Chappell Roan Turned Me Gay”. It was both a witty and poignant reminder of the cultural influence and emotional hold she has with her mostly young, queer fanbase. Roan laughed and nodded when she saw the sign. “Good!” she said. She spoke later about how she wanted her shows to be the “safe space” she wished she’d had in her youth, where “you can be you”. To all of us older queer people in the audience who never had a Chappell, her words were impossibly moving.
The boldness of Roan’s project should not be underestimated. Even in 2024, to establish yourself as an openly lesbian artist, to write and sing loud songs about lesbian sex but refuse to be sexualised by the patriarchy, is a brave move. To simultaneously elevate queer artists less palatable to the mainstream (each Roan show is opened by local drag queens) is braver still. Chappell is bold and loud and groundbreaking, and for many, many young people, every day she exists in the world is a day where they feel a little less lonely and a little more proud.
What went unspoken in Berlin was that in creating that space for others, Roan appeared to have lost her own sense of safety that her art had always given her. I found it difficult to fully relax and not watch her closely for any signs of fragility. She was late taking the stage and departed it only two songs in for an uncomfortable pause, her all-female band stranded and silent, leaving the audience to wonder whether something was seriously wrong. She said afterwards that she just had to change her shoes, as she was slipping on the stage floor. The simplistic stage seemed at odds with the packed, surging crowd, another reminder of Roan’s rapid ascent, leaving the production surrounding her art scrambling to keep up. The music itself was stellar, Roan’s immaculate pop songs bookended by beautiful ballads, that soared under the Velodrom roof. The concert ended on a high. As the crowd drifted out of the venue, bubbling over with suspended excitement, still singing the songs, it seemed like all might be ok.
But by the end that week, Roan had been cancelled online, by her own fans as well as the general public, for comments she made refusing to endorse Kamala Harris for US president, in the same interview in which she had discussed her mental health. Then she was cancelled again in response to a TikTok she made attempting to clarify her political position, this time for her mispronunciation of “Kamala”. According to some, Roan was ignorant, entitled, guilty of white privilege. She cancelled two planned festival appearances for the coming weekend, saying in a statement that things had “gotten overwhelming” and she needed to prioritise her health. By that Saturday evening, the discourse around Roan was loud enough to have inspired a controversial Saturday Night Live sketch comparing her to Moo Deng, the Thai baby pygmy hippo who had blown up on social media in a similar manner to Roan. For a few days, it seemed possible that the Berlin show might be the last Roan show for several years, even at all.
But Roan is a survivor. She rose again, to complete her final few shows of the Midwest Princess Tour. But her social media stayed largely silent, certainly free of any direct statements from Roan herself. When the shows were over, all went quiet.
I thought of Roan again when Liam Payne from One Direction died. I thought of the bitter irony in the media’s eagerness to attribute the tragic death of a complex and very troubled man solely to his early stardom and the perils of fame, while Roan’s own statement “I am scared and tired…I feel the most unsafe I have ever felt in my life,” received a far more muted response. It was reported on, but as a specific event seemingly not worthy of any wider resonance. This is what happens to women: men’s suffering is universalised and causes people to insist “something must be done”. Women’s suffering is individualised, blamed on their own psychological issues rather than systemic oppression. It seldom inspires societal change.
When Oscar-winning actress Saorise Ronan silenced three powerful male actors on a UK chat show last week, by pointing out the constant threat to personal safety that women live with, I thought of Roan again. I thought of the conversation I’d had with a male colleague who has worked in the music industry for two decades and yet could not empathise with Roan’s perspective. „You can’t complain like that when you start out in the entertainment industry, he said. People don’t like it. Fans don’t like it.“ Not for the first time, I thought: „the men just cannot understand, and somehow we have to make them.“
So I punched the air, when I watched Chappell Roan’s triumphant return on Saturday Night Live last weekend. This finally felt like the victory lap that the Berlin show should have been for her. Her performance was loud, proud, daring, assured – everything that Roan is, and everything that makes her so disliked by some. The two tracks she performed felt like no accident either: her most beloved queer anthem “Pink Pony Club”, which saw her rejected by her former record label, and brand new song, the country-pop “The Giver”. Pop is not exactly lacking in coyly flirtatious songs about girls kissing girls, but an out lesbian singer frankly and joyously owning her prowess as a “top” is something primetime US TV has never seen. As Roan dropped to her knees and roared “only a woman knows how to treat a woman right”, the words came to me. Too often, women, especially queer women, are fetishised in print as beautiful tragedies. But Roan is not a tragedy. She is tough and she will not be kept down. I wanted to focus on her rise, not her fall.
Roan is a giver, who has given young women and queer people so much, and will give more if she is supported, nurtured and championed. There can hardly be a more prescient day to write this than the day of the US Presidential election, with the looming possibility that a misogynist accused of multiple abuses against women may once more become leader of the most powerful nation in the world. 2024 has been the year of women in pop, but we need Chappell Roan more than we need Sabrina Carpenter, more than Billie Eilish, more than even Charli xcx. We need a female pop star, whose rise is concomitant with openness about her sexuality, rather than being conditional on her keeping quiet about it until massive fame is assured. We need a female pop star, who will say the things that others are too afraid to. Who will set boundaries and who is prepared to redefine what it is to be a woman at the top of her game in the music industry. Because there is nothing more that the patriarchy hates than a woman who won’t be silenced.
Roan’s queerness lends her a great deal of freedom to do this. In the 1970s, French feminists argued that to be a lesbian was to break free of gender categories as we knew them. Lesbians were not women because “woman” was a social category that made sense only in opposition to men, and lesbians were, by their very nature, freed from this. When Roan says “Only a woman knows how to treat a woman right”, she’s not just talking about sex. Women get this, in a way that men just don’t, but Roan feels freer to say it, to break the fourth wall of fame. Because she doesn’t want to fuck them. It won’t be an easy path for her to walk, but she seems determined to.
The most important lesson Roan is teaching young women is what she said in her social media rallying cry: “Women don’t owe you shit”. Nearly a century of feminism hasn’t exorcised this idea: as women we’re still raised to absorb the opposite of that. Firstly, we owe other people, namely the patriarchy, our bodies. Misogyny tells us women’s bodies are public property, freely available for all to comment on, criticise, sexualise and even touch. In her social media statement, Roan calls this out, comparing fans’ entitled behaviour to the age-old attitude that a woman wearing a short skirt is somehow to blame if men sexually harass her in the street.
It feels different for female stars than it does for male ones: even the few, all female journalists who did make a broader link between Roan’s plea for boundaries and obsessive fan culture, did not consider that at least a male star on the level of Roan, or Liam Payne, can walk about everyday life, knowing his worth offstage does not boil down to how “fuckable” he is. All famous women know that it is always, everywhere about that for them and all women, and this level of oppression by objectification is something men still do not understand. Roan also acutely understands the double bind of being a lesbian in the entertainment industry: the dual objectification that comes from the men unwilling to invest in your art, unless you contort yourself into a version that they want to fuck and the queer women raised within misogyny to believe women’s bodies are there primarily to be objectified.
The other important message that Roan is giving women is they do not owe others servitude. Women are still raised to believe their duty is to please others and put others before themselves. This means not speaking up when they are unhappy or angry or feeling any other emotion unpalatable to the patriarchy. It is no accident that Taylor Swift symbolises the ultimate successful woman today: beautiful, smiling through heartbreak, silent on any remotely controversial issue, relentlessly hard-working. When male stars cancel shows at short notice due to their mental wellbeing – as Sam Fender and Lewis Capaldi have – the public gets behind them and applauds them for their bravery and honesty. On the rare occasions women do it, they are selfish, weak, overdramatic, unreasonable, inconsiderate. Even Dave Grohl, cancelling shows purportedly to be with his family in the wake of his exposure for fathering a child outside of his marriage, got more sympathy than Roan did.
Women are supposed to comply with the rules set for them by society. It was notable that though a number of female stars apparently contacted Roan privately, to express their support following her social media statement, none did so publicly. Female stars quickly learn to keep quiet to maintain their profile: trolls gradually drive them from expressing themselves directly on social media. Roan is saying – loudly – that this is not ok. She is claiming her right to her own voice on the most powerful communication platforms that exist. Privately, Roan’s fellow stars agree with her. For the briefest of moments last month, the UK pop star Beabadoobee posted a similar message on her TikTok about the pressure from fans, ending it “You cannot expect so much from one person… I will never be good enough for you.” Shortly afterwards, it was taken down. Despite all the controversy, Roan’s statements remain on her accounts for all to see. The worst thing we can do to women is silence them, and Roan will not be silenced.
The chorus of “The Giver” has Roan assuring us “I get the job done”. It recalls Taylor Swift’s now famous lyric “I cry a lot but I am so productive” from her recent song “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”. But Roan’s position is a world away from Swift’s, which is about the age-old feminine traits of suffering and martyrdom prized by the patriarchy. On one level, Roan’s words are about the giving of sexual pleasure to women (and we need much more of that too) but it’s also about giving in a much wider sense. A more just and evolved world wouldn’t need Roan to carry the weight she does. It’s exhausting to be out there on her own, a symbol of hope for so many, but she’s doing it, getting the job done for young, queer women especially. Lots of people would like to shut Roan up, but we can’t let them. She needs to be heard, loudly, and men – not only in the music industry but everywhere – need to start listening.