ITS A FEMININOMENON
Let me explain Chappell Roan to you
As of this writing, Chappell Roan has #2 album in the US. By the time you read this, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess may have hit the top spot. If you’re already caught up on your Roan Lore, feel free to skip this newsletter. But if you’re at all intrigued, confused, or utterly baffled as to how this girl no one had heard of dropped an album a year ago and it’s now it’s the biggest thing happening…I’m going to explain.
Kind of.
A lot of ink has been spilled over Chappell’s ride, and I’m sure the hot takes won’t stop until at least a week after the Grammys, so, not any time soon. The label politics, festival virality and fandom are too complicated to get into, and maybe miss the bigger point, which is this:
The album is just that fucking good.
Why did it take so long to catch on? Because it did. Why is it now so huge? Because it’s that good. It is top to bottom bangers with nary a skip in sight. Her voice is gorgeous, the production (by Dan Nigro, AKA the guy who also does Olivia Rodrigo’s stuff, and Chappell opening for Olivia is basically the basis of her fame) is phenomenal, the lyrics are witty and the songs are danceable fun without being braindead escapism. A deep and passionate joy, the album is.
And uh, yeah, that’s it!
See, I think this is a thing a lot of analysts might be downplaying. Not that people are underrating her music, but everyone wants to find some brilliant explanation for how she came to have so many singles charting all at once, when really I think it’s just a case of she finally got a platform and all the charting singles are just really really good, so it snowballed so much that it’s ruining her life.
(Some are saying that her leave-me-alone attitude smacks of a lack of media training, when there is a polite way to put up boundaries, but I actually think her approach is smart. By being kind of unpleasant in the TikToks she made about fan interactions, she comes off as the kind of person you do not want to bother, which is precisely her goal.)
I wrote a whole thing about songs that blew up after their initial drop, and you know what they have in common? They rock! If there’s a medium that doesn’t age, it’s music. Books and movies and shows eventually become dated, but a great song is a great song is a great song. Just ask any Christmas playlist. There’s a whole genre of TikTok/YouTube videos that are just young people hearing great songs for the first time, and they usually love them.
There’s no way to know precisely how Chappell’s career might have gone in the pre-digital age, but if you look at the success of Cyndi Lauper, Freddie Mercury or Kate Bush, it seems that she’d likely have made it to pop stardom any time pop stars existed (yes, even as an out queer woman. You think she couldn’t open for Elton John?) So if it took a year for the album to take off (in fact, she released “Pink Pony Club” back in 2020), it wasn’t because audience taste had caught up to her, but simply…one of those things.
In the movie Yesterday, a struggling young musician finds that suddenly he is the only person on Earth who knows any Beatles songs, so of course he takes credit for them and creates a giant double album and it goes mega platinum and he’s the biggest star in the world. People often criticize that movie for not saying anything about the music industry or our musical tastes, which is so not the point it drives me crazy. Yesterday is ironic wish fulfillment, so to play out he has to be successful, but whatever, I also disagree with the critique on a logical level. Would “Yellow Submarine” be popular if released in the 2020s? Honestly, maybe! “Red Solo Cup” and “Baby Shark” were hits. “Help” or “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” probably don’t take off without the context of the British Invasion, but “Let It Be?” If Coldplay, U2, Keane or Maroon 5 dropped that tomorrow…it’s getting noticed. Maybe not charting, but getting noticed. If you’d never heard “Yesterday” before and you came across a soulful young TikToker plucking it out on an acoustic guitar, you’d give that video a like.
To paraphrase our, I hope, next president, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you, but Chappell Roan’s album is so good it doesn’t matter.”
Anyway, here’s her recent interview with Bowen Yang, and her not-recent interview with ME.
Lizzie
(Oh you wanted the deep dive? OK FINE)