Chappell Roan Is Our Most Revolutionary Pop Star in Years

A frontline report from Swifties for Kamala, but first: How Roan's unique combination of bombastic music, sexy lyrics, cheerleader energy, and queer positivity have taken over 2024.

The NPR Tiny Desk Concert that helped make Roan a star.

If you listen to Chappell Roan, you will come to one conclusion, even, I posit, if her brand of bombastic pop is not quite your thing: She is a generational musical talent. At Coachella this year, she confidently introduced herself as “your favorite artist’s favorite artist,” a paraphrasing of drag performer Sasha Colby and also the least-humble brag one could possibly imagine. And she wasn’t wrong. Since then she’s snagged the attention of no less than Elton John, Adele, and presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s campaign.

Roan seemed to have come out of nowhere this summer, but the truth was anything but. Just “a few years ago,” as Vox says, “Roan was making broody Lorde-meets-Florence Welch power ballads about suffering deliciously for the love of a boy.” And then came her own trip from her Midwestern home in Missouri to the Abbey, a storied Los Angeles gay club that helped her to embrace her own sexuality. This resulted in the breakthrough song “Pink Pony Club.” In it, she mimics a mother figure, having discovered her child’s dabbling, thusly: “God, what have you done? You’re a Pink Pony girl, and you dance at the club.” Oh, the humanity! Anyone who has grown up in the Midwest (myself included) understands the sentiment. Her other major songs continue the themes, from “Naked in Manhattan,” a tale of seducing a secret high school crush of the same sex, to “Red Wine Supernova,” an ode to a hot girl who was “a Playboy, Brigitte Bardot …” who “put her canine teeth in the side of my neck.”

Roan has gone suddenly, improbably, ultra-mainstream over this past summer. She currently has a startling seven songs on Billboard’s Hot 100. The long history of closeted pop stars suggests that Roan’s act shouldn’t have worked to this level, or at least that the industry has worked hard to keep people like her out of the business or in the closet. One can imagine the record company executives in suits, guys who can remember when George Michael felt he had to act aggressively straight (even while singing “Father Figure,” somehow), explaining to her why kiss-offs and sexually explicit come-ons expressly directed at girls aren’t marketable. What is this about being “knee deep in the passenger seat, and you're eating me out”? Must she complain in this breakup song that her former lover “stole my cute aesthetic,” clearly marking that lover as female? Must she describe a crush so specifically as looking like Brigitte Bardot?

The fact is, though, that I’m a straight woman, and that doesn’t stop me from relating to Roan’s music, whether it’s about girls or not. Here’s one of my favorite verses that’s just plain good: “I could be the one, or your new addiction/It's all in my head but I want non-fiction/I don't want the world, but I'll take this city/Who can blame a girl? Call me hot, not pretty.”

I may have screamed aloud the first time I heard this. Non-fiction! Call me hot, not pretty! Have you ever felt as if someone had taken pages from your diary, made them better, and then written them into a fucking banger of a song? Picture me listening to Chappell Roan for the first time on the recommendation of a friend, as I happened to be taking a hike along a local trail in Upstate New York, which means I was literally screaming to no one amid weeds and trees and a beautiful goddamn landscape ahead full of rocky crags, the sun setting on the horizon, as I wished to god that anyone nearby could hear what I was hearing. By my second listen through her major songs, I was singing along, chanting along.

Call me hot, not pretty! I exclaimed to the grasshoppers nearby.

In some ways, we have been working our way toward Chappell Roan for a while. Her outrageous style recalls Cher and Lady Gaga; her vocal acrobatics and command of dynamics remind me of Kate Bush and Cyndi Lauper; her precise songwriting echoes Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo (with whom she shares a collaborating producer, Dan Nigro); her explicit lyrics recall Prince; and women like Melissa Etheridge, Tegan and Sara, and Janelle Monae have sung about their love for other women. But no one has put it all together quite like Roan. In an America where a major-party vice presidential candidate insists that women are exclusively for baby-making, and rights are being systematically taken from women and queer people, Roan’s rise feels bigger than just the “HOT TO GO” dance.

Celebrating “girl power” has been all but mandatory for female pop stars since the Spice Girls did it in the ‘90s. There was even a Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Ariana Grande about the importance (and impossibility) of writing a feminist anthem. But Roan represents a genuine, radical version of girl power that calls the bluff of nearly every effort that came before her. Here, the elements of her uniquely 2020s pop star feminism:

There’s Queer Pride, and then there’s Chappell Roan. She brings a Gen Z nonchalance to her outness. Sure, she’s excited about dating girls, and she’s quite dramatic about it all, but there’s no self-consciousness to the way she brings it up. She’s not writing gay anthems; she’s writing about her own experience. But it goes beyond that, even; she’s having such a good time, even with all the drama, that she makes being a queer woman seem fun, and even superior to straightness. This reminds me of the way that Sex and the City turned single womanhood from a curse to the most desired lifestyle in the land. Roan’s rise has also coincided with the coming-out of established pop genius Billie Eilish, whose single “Lunch” is also pretty into girls: “I could eat that girl for lunch/Yeah, she dances on my tongue.” All of a sudden, same-sex sex isn’t a dealbreaker in the Top 40, a huge and welcome change.

She’s boldly one step beyond Queer Pride: She sees how straightness can weigh on women in a patriarchal society. Pick a Roan song, and there’s a good chance you’ll get some sick anti-straight-guy burns. “I’m through/With all these hyper mega bummer boys like you/Oh yeah, I need/A super graphic ultra modern girl like me.” “Stuck in the suburbs, you’re folding his laundry.” ”When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night/With your head in your hands, you’re nothing more than his wife.” In Roan’s world, men are useless at best; in fact, they are often a hindrance. And, well, she makes some valid points.

Her biggest songs are roaring odes to female power—because she’s deliriously in love with women. “Red Wine Supernova” swoons over a girl with long hair and no bra (“that’s my type”) and offers a “wand and a rabbit” as an enticement to come over. According to “Femininomenon,” only women can “hit it like rom-pom-pom-pom” and “get it hot like Papa John.” More importantly, the choruses of these songs soar and thump with a power you feel in your body, and hearing appreciation for the female form through a female gaze just hits different. There’s no creepy objectification, only the thrill of realizing that women are glorious.

She’s casually sex positive. She’s not being aggressively graphic, but she’s not holding back, either. She follows that “knee deep in the passenger seat” line with this heartbreaker: “Two weeks and your mom invites me to her house in Long Beach/Is it casual now?” The juxtaposition of physical intimacy and emotional intimacy, while still being declared “casual,” is the killer here. Genders don’t matter; the anguish of the situation is palpable and relatable, and it doesn’t work as well without the specific image. Meanwhile, the joy of impending sex in “Red Wine Supernova” is contagious.

She’s inspired by drag queens. Though she’s a cis woman, she celebrates the highest in femininity by taking inspiration from folks who appreciate the divine feminine and know how to express it.

She’s also inspired by cheerleaders. Another classically feminine, American archetype. Yes, I know there are male cheerleaders, but in the modern-day United States, cheerleaders have long been held up as teenage feminine ideals, and Roan co-opts this to once again exalt female energy and get her crowds going, most notably in “HOT TO GO.” “I wrote this song so I could live out my cheerleader fantasy!” she said upon its release. “I just wanted to make something simple and silly that I could do with the audience because I’m a huge fan of audience participation. Also, selfishly (and shamelessly) wanted to bounce around on stage singing a song about being hot.” If this also happens to also make her one of the most exciting—and subversive—pop stars we’ve seen in some time, so be it. Her infectious spirit is revolutionary in itself.

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A Swifties for Kamala Update

Because Pop Stars in Politics is now apparently a beat, god knows I’m going to cover it, so I attended last night’s Swifties for Kamala kickoff call. It was a well-organized and quite legitimate get-out-the-vote effort on par with any of the activist Zooms I’ve attended in the past, and it attracted an estimated 34,000 fans, raising $142,000 as of this writing. The speaker lineup was stacked and included Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, singer-songwriter Carole King, and many others. Everyone shared their favorite Swift songs: Warren chose “Karma,” which I respect as both a Midnights pick and a fairly deep cut, as well as, when she has time, “All Too Well (10-Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version),” which is the sign of a true fan.

Everyone also did Swift puns. So many Swift puns. However many you’re imagining are the most puns there could be, double it, and that’s about how many they did. (See below.)

King gave quite salient advice for people nervous about volunteering, urging budding activists to “build a bridge” with the people they’re calling or canvassing, asking potential voters about what matters most to them, then connecting with them wherever they are. “I’ve been a political activist for years,” she said. “I’ve been a volunteer, I’ve been a door knocker, even as a famous person. I’m telling you all this because if any of you are thinking of volunteering to be door knockers or phone callers, but you’re a little nervous about what you might say, please believe me: there is nothing to lose and everything to gain.” Links were shared not only for fundraising but also the Neighbor2Neighbor canvassing program. More resources continue to be shared in the group’s Discord. They also have a Substack!

Senator Ed Markey was the surprise winner of the night, naming “Snow on the Beach” as his favorite Swift song, which is a daring choice on its own, but then he got extra points for tying it to climate change, musing that he hopes snow won’t just be a historic oddity for future generations. And then he delivered the greatest string of Taylor Swift references in the history of time, so smoothly it was like he’d written the songs himself: “There are just five fortnights until election day, but we’re not out of the woods yet. We know from the last solar eclipse that Donald Trump will stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror. We have our work ahead of us to beat this antihero wannabe, or as I like to call him, Mr. Casually Cruel, Mr. Everything Revolves Around You. In the words of Taylor Swift, I never trust a narcissist.”

In other news …

One final note: Our new pop culture author collective, Ministry of Pop Culture, is up and running! If you haven’t already done so, please check it out and consider subscribing to support our work. Recent posts include Saul Austerlitz’s excellent piece on “Good Man” Tim Walz and his connection to Ted Lasso and Friday Night Lights; my piece on Kamala Harris’s pop star-ization; and Thea Glassman’s “How to Write Like Taylor Swift.”