Chappell Roan can’t be stopped
SAN FRANCISCO — What a difference a year makes.
On Aug. 11, 2023, Chappell Roan released “Hot to Go!,” a cheerleader’s chant of a synth-pop bop — “like ‘Y.M.C.A.’ but gayer,” she said at the time — that heralded a soon-to-drop debut album by a young artist eager to break out after the disappointing collapse of an earlier record deal.
For the record:
3:01 p.m. Aug. 15, 2024An earlier version of this article said that Chappell Roan was dropped by Atlantic Records in 2000. She was dropped in 2020.
Exactly 12 months later, Roan stood onstage Sunday afternoon at the Outside Lands festival as pop’s biggest new star: a redheaded dynamo in a blue-sequined majorette’s uniform teaching an audience in the tens of thousands how to do a dance that everyone already seemed to know.
“This is the actual outfit I wore in the video,” she said of her “Hot to Go!” garb, panting a little under the hazy San Francisco sky. “It’s hot as f—, b—.”
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The massive crowd inside Golden Gate Park was just the latest that Roan has gathered over the course of a festival season that kicked off with her viral appearance at April’s Coachella; since then, the 26-year-old has gone on to dominate New York’s Governors Ball, where she memorably dressed as the Statue of Liberty, and Chicago’s Lollapalooza, which said she played the largest daytime set in the show’s three-decade history. (In a summer of bickering over crowd size between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the endless aerial shots of Roan’s festival hordes have put them both to shame.)
Roan has been putting up wild numbers on pop charts too: This week, her sly and glittery 2023 LP, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” hit a new peak of No. 3 on the Billboard 200, while no fewer than seven of her songs are on the Hot 100, including “Good Luck, Babe!” at No. 6, which is as high as the single has gone since it came out a week before Coachella.
You can attribute at least part of Roan’s success to a hunger among listeners for music from fresh (or perhaps refreshed) faces; ditto recent streaming smashes by the likes of Shaboozey, Tommy Richman, Benson Boone, Teddy Swims and Sabrina Carpenter, the last two of whom also performed in prominent slots at Outside Lands.
But only Roan was preceded to the stage by a miniature marching band that snaked across the festival grounds, trailing fans wearing pink cowboy hats as it pumped out a brassy rendition of “Hot to Go!”
Indeed, for all the singer’s omnipresence on social media of late, Chappellmania — which actually got going just prior to Coachella when she toured as an opening act for Olivia Rodrigo — has played out as a distinctly live phenomenon in which people are longing to participate in person.
Well, most of them: “It’s so weird that VIP thinks they’re so way too cool to do this,” she said Sunday, having noticed that a sorry few near the stage weren’t joining her in the “Hot to Go!” dance. “Do it or I’m calling you onstage!”
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The sense of community Roan has quickly established has something to do with a post-pandemic desire for real-world connection; it has even more to do with the fact that she’s the first major pop act to attain high-level stardom as an openly queer person rather than someone for whom coming out was a crucial part of their celebrity narrative.
In San Francisco, fans held handmade signs that read “BUTCHES FOR CHAPPELL” and “TWINKS 4 CHAPPELL” — one indication of the powerful identity politics at work in her following (and another thing that made this concert a lot more fun than a campaign rally).
Yet those factors both feel secondary to the old-fashioned razzle-dazzle Roan dispenses onstage: the eye rolls, the kiss-blowing, the finger guns, the hair-whipping. On Sunday, she dropped into a full splits during “After Midnight,” which she knew well enough not to scold anyone (VIP or otherwise) into replicating. As vigorously as she was moving, her vocals were gutsy and precise in “Femininomenon” and “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl,” to name two of the insanely hooky, ’80s-coded jams from “Midwest Princess,” which the singer made with Rodrigo’s most trusted collaborator, producer Dan Nigro, in the wake of being dropped by Atlantic Records in 2020 and moving home to small-town Missouri from Los Angeles.
Pop music operates in cycles, and what Roan seems to have understood earlier than most is that — following a decade defined by Lorde and Billie Eilish and their many mumbly admirers — the culture was circling back to the color and spectacle of 2010s-era superstars such as Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. For probably half the songs in Roan’s set at Outside Lands, the screen behind the performer and her three-piece band flashed key lyrics in order to get audience members chanting along with her; it was pop show as shared public ritual, not pop show as private bedroom confession.
Even so, Roan’s special sauce — and the quality likely to bring a boatload of Grammy nominations her way this fall — is the startling emotional candor she builds into her sparkly neo-New Wave anthems. You can feel it in the gorgeous “Casual,” which is about a woman struggling to reconcile the intimacy of a relationship with her lover’s insistence that they’re not attached, and the astounding “Good Luck, Babe!,” in which she warns a girlfriend who’s decided to marry a guy that one night she’ll wake up and realize “you’re nothing more than his wife.”
Is “Good Luck, Babe!” a sad song? A happy song? A song of regret or revenge? The way Roan performed it Sunday — breathy and yearning yet with a faint snarl — it was all of those. “You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling,” she sang, and you knew just what she meant.
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