It’s the new one popstar. The unprecedented face of the industry, the stellar performance. He has just won the MTV VMA Award for best new artist, is causing a sensation among the young and mostly English-speaking audience, and his songs have burst onto the charts like a typhoon. This Thursday, Primavera Sound announced that it will be headlining the next edition of the festival.
At 26 years old, Chappell Roan has become an emerging pop phenomenon in a matter of months. She has established herself as a cheeky, fresh diva, outside – for now – the Hollywood conventions that constrain the rest of the superstars. His music proliferates on TikTok and his choreographies are the most danced at festivals.
Born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz in Missouri, she began her career quietly. He released his first epé, School Nightsin 2017, a dark work that was part of alternative pop and that already showed some of the concerns that define his style today: clichés about adolescence, reminiscences of the “American” imagination, sexuality.
His success has come this year, after publishing his debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (2023). The album immediately crept into the algorithms of social networks, driven in large part by Roan’s participation as the opening act on Olivia Rodrigo’s world tour, with whom she shares a friendship and target audience. “Chappell Roan is, without a doubt, one of the greatest beneficiaries of the opening act in the recent history of the phonographic industry,” explains SergioOpina, analyst and pop culture expert.
With the album came his rebranding. Roan loves to perform in an exaggerated aesthetic atmosphere and campabsolutely intense and emotional, dressed in drag on the stages of some of the main festivals in the world, where more people have come to see it than the headliner. She is a visual artist, a performer. His music is energetic and liberating, and his songs Good Luck Babe! and Hot To Go They have been almost crowning the ranking for weeks Billboard. Some of his songs like Pink Pony Club They celebrate femininity in all its complexity and offer a vindication of culture queer.
“Its aesthetic identity makes it unique to a greater extent than its musical proposal,” says Sergio. “In the face of the vulnerability of progressive pop that reverberates among Billie Eilish’s generation Z, the vindication of the literary female hysteria led by Taylor Swift and the exaltation of rave of post-ironic idiosyncrasy of Charli
The young artist enjoys the title of new LGTBIQ icon and unconditional fans. At this time when the industry has become a factory of new artists, among nepo babies and musicians like Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo — who have used their success on television to move into music — Roan stands out because he has none of those, argues Coleman Spilde, an American film and music critic.
In fact, years before she rose to international fame, she was forced to leave Los Angeles and return to her town of 6,000 inhabitants, convinced that her dream was over and overwhelmed by returning to a place that constrained her. In August 2020, her record company terminated her contract because her songs were not taking off, and she worked as a waitress, babysitter or cashier to return to the mecca of entertainment. “She’s an underdog who had been making music for years before she rose to fame, and that’s partly why her fans love to defend her. It’s fun to cheer her on,” says Spilde.
“His followers are people who identify with the desires and experiences he writes about, people who want to turn this bleak world into something a little more colorful. It is not surprising that it has attracted a large number of fans of the LGTBIQ collective. Of course, it helps that Chappell herself is gay, because queer We love to praise one of our own,” he continues.
Your album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest PrincessSergio analyzes, is orchestrated around the synthesizer and a post-pandemic predilection of many artists – such as, for example, Dua Lipa – towards electronic dance music of the 20th century, “with special emphasis on the synthesized pop of the eighties ”. Their songs range from pure pop, folk or alternative signature pop, and although some may sound like anthems of cheerleaders At the first listen, schoolchildren usually contain messages that have nothing to do with what mainstream.
Of course, comparisons are inevitable, and listeners constantly try to categorize her as the new ‘pupil of’ or whatever other category previous artists have invented. The most popular: those of Lady Gaga, Cher, David Bowie or Madonna.
“The confidence she shows in her live performances—in the costumes, the set design, and her theatrical singing—is very reminiscent of the first Lady Gaga,” says Spilde. “Personally speaking, she’s very much Madonna: determined to be famous on her own terms, even if some of her fans don’t like it. He makes art exactly the way he wants. “I also see Cher, David Bowie and even some Fiona Apple in the way she writes her songs,” he adds.
“The analogies between Chappell Roan and Lady Gaga are, de facto, reasonable,” agrees Sergio, who explains that, with the end of Lady Gaga’s period of hegemony, back in 2013, the exaltation of theater in popular culture also ended: “Roan settles, precisely, in the hollow of the performance of pop of the present decade.” Also noteworthy, both for Sergio and for other critics, are the reminiscences of Kate Bush: “A deliberately histrionic identity, authenticity in abundance and the reappropriation in a scenic key of the rhetoric of the ‘unhinged’ woman.”
With these artists she shares the closeness of the LGTBI public, although the general public has also welcomed her very well. “It has been a long time since an artist queer he made his way without having to apologize, without skirting around or dancing around the fact that they are queeror without having to come out of the closet later,” notes the American critic.
The young singer is not, however, exempt from criticism. In recent years, a large number of international pop stars have simultaneously claimed “femininity” and “feminism,” and among young audiences the doubt arises about a possible “commodification” of both terms. It is a common denunciation by the most progressive groups of artists like Sabrina Carpenter or Taylor Swift herself, at the same time that the listener glorifies them.
Sergio clarifies that the phenomenon, however, is neither new nor has it been invented by the singer from Missouri: “Electronic dance music, pop and currents dance “They have based their proliferation on the commodification of femininity, magnified by manifestations that are conceived strictly from the —fetishizing— male perspective and supported, of course, by the segmentation of the LGBTI+ public, an absolutely infallible market niche.”
Others find Roan’s twisting and exaggeration of femininity far removed from what is sold on the market, and her presentation of feminism well-founded. “It exaggerates femininity and turns it into something almost comical, which is in line with the inspiration it takes from the community drag”says Spilde.
During this short period of success, he has also managed to discuss on several occasions with his fans via direct and social networks. One of the first was for not agreeing to be photographed with all his followers on the street. “I continue to be a person with a private life. When we are not acting we do not owe you anything. I know that many colleagues think that way,” he said a few months ago, starting a controversial war on the matter.
The second has been recent: he has refused to support Kamala Harris on her way to the White House in protest of the support that the Democratic Government has shown to Israel in its offensive against Gaza. The younger public did not fully understand the claim and thought that the singer would vote Republican. “But have you seen me? How am I going to vote for Trump. “I will vote for Harris, but I don’t want to support her because I think many things have been done wrong,” he later expressed.
“Chappell Roan offers the possibility of denaturalizing the conception of the pop diva,” Sergio argues. “His proclamations regarding the preservation of privacy and the relativization of the deification of celebrities harbor a not inconsiderable potential.” “He’s not a typical star,” Spilde agrees. “She is very clear and direct with her fans, an assertive woman who knows what she wants. That is still something that scares a lot of people,” he says.
In the background, there is a palpable hope that its success will not fade away prematurely. “I think we are going to see great, exciting and theatrical performances again,” says Spilde convinced. “Nowadays, everyone thinks they are very different, everyone has their own ‘brand’. But ultimately, that’s what makes everyone the same, and that’s why a lot of artists don’t take off like Chappell Roan has. She is herself, like when she wears a pig’s snout on the cover of her single Good Luck, Babe”.
The impact of his music remains to be seen, but Roan has some advantages to maintain his stardom. “In the absence of confirming his longevity and, knowing the inherent volatility of pop phenomena, Chappell Roan’s demonstrations against the intrinsic claims to stardom could confer on him a spectrum of rhetorical-discursive influence,” says Sergio. At the same time, he explains, his emergence as the first pop reference codified from the margins of lesbianism and queer They can predict greater success for you. If she wants, of course.
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