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On September 28, the summer of Chappell Roan began its inevitable turn to fall. In a “Weekend Update” segment on Saturday Night Live, Bowen Yang appeared as Moo Deng in a bit comparing the viral hippo’s plight to Roan’s own complaints about inappropriate fan behavior, cementing it as A Definite Thing. (In response to fan outcry about “a gay cishet man [sic] making fun of a queer woman,” Yang declared that the sketch was made with love.) The segment capped off a turbulent week for Roan, in which the singer’s comments about the presidential election set off yet another round of social-media backlash, prompting her to pull out of two planned performances at the All Things Go Festival. “Things have gotten overwhelming over the past few weeks and I am really feeling it,” she wrote on Instagram.
This mishegoss is the latest in an exhausting, monthslong conversation involving Roan, fame, and stan culture. In August, she issued a series of social-media statements calling out “predatory” fans and disagreeing “with the notion that I owe a mutual exchange of energy, time, or attention to people I do not know, do not trust, or who creep me out, just because they’re expressing admiration.” A week later, she canceled two European tour dates over scheduling conflicts, seemingly with the MTV VMAs, where she once again made headlines for getting in a shouting match with a photographer on the red carpet. All of this drama centers on one incontrovertible point: No pop star in recent memory has ever become as famous as fast as Chappell Roan. For an artist who has been open about her own bipolar disorder and depression, it’s all happening too quickly to handle.
Though real diehards have known about her since 2020, for the general public, Roan has rocketed from anonymous to ubiquitous in less than a year. Her debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, was released in September 2023 but didn’t crack the Billboard 200 chart until April. By July, Roan had a half-dozen songs on the Hot 100. This summer, the Times ran a story on the rapid upscaling of her live tour: She went from playing a 600-person venue outside Sacramento to drawing an estimated 80,000 at San Francisco’s Outside Lands festival. Up until the European cancellations, Roan was an endearing story of overnight success, the quirky theater kid who’d made good while remaining honest and unfiltered, and most supporters agreed with her decision to draw a firm boundary against pushy fans. But the canceled shows set off the first rumblings of a backlash — one so predictable Roan even put it in her album title. The downside to her rapid ascent is also becoming increasingly clear: Chappell Roan got famous before her brain did.
I don’t mean that in the “Your brain freezes in time at the age you became famous” sense, though 26 may, in fact, be the worst age at which to become mentally stuck. I mean that it would be impossible for anyone’s sense of themselves to expand at the exponential rate Roan’s public profile has. Compare her to the summer’s other pop girlies. Before Brat Summer, Charli XCX operated in the pop trenches for over a decade, long enough to gain a savvy sense of how to control her media narrative. Likewise, Sabrina Carpenter was a former child star who spent years on pop’s C-list before breaking out on her sixth studio album. Roan, by contrast, hasn’t had the time to learn how to protect herself against the glare of the spotlight, nor to gain the financial resources other celebrities use to cosset themselves from the world. She’s fallen into an unmanageable level of notoriety: famous enough to have stalkers, not rich enough to hole up on Lake Como.
Adding to Roan’s difficulties is that she carries a burden of representation that the others don’t. As an outspoken advocate for the queer community, she now finds herself in the Dylanesque position of being treated by her fans as not just a singer but a truth-teller. (Funnily enough, Yang’s audience has a similar habit of seeing him as an avatar of political righteousness.) This, in turn, raises the stakes of her every public utterance. Take the blowup over comments Roan made to The Guardian in a September 20 interview about not feeling “pressured to endorse someone” in the U.S. presidential election. The interview was picked up by @PopFlop, a social-media account dedicated to aggregating female musicians’ quotes in as inflammatory a manner as possible, which pulled out Roan’s remark that there were “problems on both sides.” (PopFlop later apologized, saying it “didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.”) Anyone who has spent any time around woke 20-somethings knew Roan was making a leftist “both sides” argument, not a centrist one. Nevertheless, the quote led the internet’s greatest detectives to surmise that an artist who spotlights drag and trans performers, sings vividly about lesbian sex, and depicts heterosexual relationships as inherently unfulfilling might be a closet conservative. Under the guilt-by-association ethos of social media, these people found the news that the singer was related to a Republican state politician a damning gotcha, as if 26-year-old women always have the same politics as their uncles.
In this position, other celebrities might go dark. Roan’s response was more like that of the normal person she so recently was: She felt misunderstood, tried to clarify her remarks, and only wound up digging herself in deeper. She posted a pair of TikToks explaining that while she would be voting for Kamala Harris, she would not be officially endorsing her, in protest of the Democratic Party failing “every marginalized community in the world.” Roan’s comments threw her smack in the middle in the internet’s most intractable political debate, which has been tearing leftists and liberals apart since the spring of 2016, thus ensuring that the endless saga of Chappell Roan continued for a sixth straight week.
In a sense, Roan was a victim of context collapse. In the online spaces where her fans congregate, such views are uncontroversial; only when they come in contact with normie Democrats panicked by memories of 2016 do they become triggering. But her decision to back out of this weekend’s concerts in the wake of the controversy points to misplaced priorities, an artist who seems more concerned with anonymous commenters than her own fan base. She’s locked in a losing battle: The more time she spends responding to every possible criticism, the harder her job will be.
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