When Chappell Roan, a 26-year-old pop artist from the Midwest, stared dead straight into the live-stream camera during her performance at Coachella this year and introduced herself as “your favorite artist’s favorite artist” and “your dream girl’s dream girl” in a nod to drag artist Sasha Colby, the line landed like a prophecy.
This year, from TikTok feeds to television, Roan, with her mass of curly red hair, irreverent pop bangers and fantastic, cartoonish costumes, has felt increasingly inescapable. She has dominated festival stages this summer at Coachella and Governors Ball, so much so that festivals like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza had to move her to bigger stages, and her increasingly massive crowds have created safety concerns. She performed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, on the latter dressed as a creepy, ballerina-like creature ripped from Swan Lake. Her Tiny Desk performance, which she delivered in disheveled prom attire and a wig stuck with cigarette butts, has 4 million views and counting. Her ’80s-inspired power ballad single this year, “Good Luck, Babe!” has steadily climbed the Billboard Hot 100 all summer. And even though her debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, came out last September, songs from the release like “HOT TO GO!” and “Pink Pony Club,” have started working their way up the same chart in the last month. “I feel a little off today, because I think my career is going really fast, and it's hard to keep up,” Roan said on stage last month at her concert in Raleigh, N.C. “Thank you for understanding. This is all I've ever wanted. It's just heavy sometimes, I think."
In a year crowded with album releases from some of the industry’s biggest pop stars, from Taylor Swift to Beyoncé, Billie Eilish and Dua Lipa, it’s been refreshing to see the spotlight on a relative newcomer like Roan. Her music has an easy-to-root-for, mouthy, unpolished charm, trading in varying shades of disco, synth-pop and rock, unified by Roan’s cheerleader theatricality and queer, outcast streak. There are echoes of bratty, stupid-on-purpose, early 2000s electroclash in songs like the addictive “HOT TO GO!”, which has a "Y.M.C.A."-style dance routine to do along with the chorus, and the album opener, “Femininomenon,” which instructs listeners to “get it hot like Papa John.” The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is bold, funny and even a little dorky — “I’ve got a California king, okay maybe it’s a twin bed and some roommates,” she sings cheerfully as she tries to bring a “Brigitte Bardot” type back to her place one night on “Red Wine Supernova.”
In interviews and social media clips, Roan can be soft-spoken and dry, clear about the delineation between her real identity and “Chappell Roan,” a throwback to an escapist era of Lady Gaga and Sasha Fierce. But on record and on stage, immersed in her persona and underneath layers of glitter, she’s the gay party girl extrovert of her dreams, singing about running around Manhattan kissing girls before she had ever kissed a woman in real life. In its hyper-confidence, Roan’s big personality makes The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess entirely her own, but also like a door through which her listeners can walk through and experience her fantasies for themselves. And all of this — the live performances, the cultivated persona, her humor — has made Roan’s sparking star power distinctive and grounded in a moment where the music industry, and its ability to break dependable new artists, is chaotic.
In reality, Roan’s big moment is actually the result of a career built over the past several years. Roan, whose real name is Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, released her debut after a period that could actually be described in our “Nepo baby” watchdog era as actual music industry hustling. Born in Willard, Mo., and raised in a Christian household and conservative town, the artist began uploading music to YouTube as a teenager, eventually landing a record deal with Atlantic in 2015, when she was 17. An EP and a few singles followed, several of which were written with writer-producer and future Olivia Rodrigo collaborator Dan Nigro, but Atlantic ultimately dropped Roan in 2020. Dumped from her label and newly heartbroken in Los Angeles, Roan moved back to Missouri and juggled a number of odd jobs, as she watched her former co-writer, Nigro, help make Rodrigo a star with Grammy-winning hits like “driver’s license.”
It wasn’t until Nigro signed Roan to his Island Records imprint Amusement that it seemed like she had enough runway to escalate her career, putting out a number of songs that would feature on The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. One of those songs was the album cut “Casual,” a ballad about a relationship that has all the markings of a serious commitment without any real label. On TikTok, where Roan teased the track before its release in 2022, its R-rated chorus, rattling off the ways in which a “casual” fling was anything but, became a sort of meme prompt to participate in for a generation that’s popularized the term “situationship,” with thousands of fans using it to soundtrack videos in which they describe their own half-baked romances.
It’s tempting to look at Roan and pin her current success on the typical blueprint for viral fame in 2024, in which an artist can become immediately hyper-visible on the basis of a few, or even just one, memorable song boosted by TikTok. This summer, big, established names have dominated the charts, from Kendrick Lamar to Eminem and Swift. But a handful of artists have also wiggled their way into the conversation for the first time seemingly out of nowhere, from the Mormon-raised, American Idol dropout Benson Boone to “Million Dollar Baby”’s Tommy Richman. Sabrina Carpenter, a former Disney Channel star whose song “Espresso” has exploded this summer, broke a record formerly set by The Beatles when she recently landed two songs in the Top 3. The artist Shaboozey, who appeared on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter earlier this year, broke records when his song “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” made him the first Black male artist to have the No. 1 song on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the Hot Country Songs charts at the same time.
While all of these artists, including Roan, have had boosts in visibility from bigger stars (Roan opened on tour for Olivia Rodrigo, Carpenter and Boone on Eras tour stops for Taylor Swift, Shaboozey got Bey’s approval while Richman is signed to R&B singer Brent Faiyaz’s label), they’ve also benefited heavily from TikTok, which has turned their hooky songs into trending “sounds” users then add to videos or fodder for dance choreography “challenges” that people repeat. TikTok is a certified hit-maker, as evidenced by Roan's viral, meme-ified hits like "Casual" and "Good Luck, Babe!"; it can push a song — or at least a snippet of it — to ubiquity within the app, and then to popularity on streaming services and then into the upper echelons of a Billboard chart and keep it there just long enough for its maker to juggle a few label offers. But it’s not a star maker. Whether for unsigned acts who go viral on the app and land deals (PinkPantheress, 4batz) or for signed artists who get a boost on it like Chappell (Steve Lacy, Tate McRae) rarely has breaking out on TikTok translated into the level of visibility Roan is experiencing. Even Olivia Rodrigo’s extremely popular “driver’s license,” which launched her Grammy-winning musical career and went viral on the app, still benefited from the fact that she had a built-in fanbase from her appearances on Disney Channel shows.
TikTok’s intense influence has ultimately created a landscape in which, for the last few years, songs have become bigger than artists, and the shelf life for those songs is dismal. All of this unpredictability, and the app’s one-hit-wonder churn, can make any music fan exhausted, but it’s also made the music industry anxious about artist longevity and sustainability. “Each person I talk to in the industry is more depressed [about this] than the person I talked to before them,” an anonymous music manager told Billboard in a 2023 piece titled, “Pop Stars Aren’t Popping Like They Used To — Do Labels Have a Plan?”, which detailed the frustrations of music executives attempting to break artists in a fractured industry. Taylor Swift’s grip on touring, streaming and the charts has cast the entire industry in her long shadow, where big artists struggle to book stadiums or money-making tours and artists at all levels suffer to make a livelihood from their work in a streaming economy. You can make an artist go viral, but whether or not they can sustain that success and funnel that attention into a sturdy, longer-term career is elusive. The buzzy regional Mexican star Peso Pluma may have placed over 20 songs last year on the Billboard Hot 100 preceding and following his release of GÉNESIS, but he hasn’t landed a song yet there following his sophomore album, EXODUS.
But Roan already is bigger than her songs, and bigger than TikTok. In Roan, there’s the rare promise of an artist who seems equipped to meet those industry anxieties and extinguish them. On paper, she has an alchemy of traits that seem to fulfill both old-school and new-school fantasies of music stardom in 2024 that few artists in her current cohort possess. She has the kind of scrappy backstory — a self-described “Goodwill pop star” — that’s irresistible in a moment where listeners are quick to call “industry plant” on any act who signs a deal too early in their career or who appears too manicured by corporate forces. Her all-in on theatricality with a heavy credit to drag queens, from her ridiculous, funny costumes like emerging from a giant apple bong dressed as the Statue of Liberty during her Governors Ball set, have made her festival appearances distinct and have drawn comparisons to artists like Gaga. She’s good at but not too reliant on social media to showcase her personality, she can make viral TikTok dances for her songs before her fans do, and she draws political boundaries most artists shy away from. Her music vibrates with personality and humor that doesn’t get cultivated easily in an industry that still cobbles together many a pop album across removed writer’s rooms.
But more importantly, she can perform — in the flesh, to massive audiences, and to any camera (not just the one that’s built-in her smartphone), with a voice that literally belts all the notes on her album and more. It wasn’t her debut album, or her TikTok viral singles, that’s commanded attention to Roan this summer so much as it’s been her ability to translate her sheer, raw talents as an artist to the masses. Live, she turns her shows into an interactive experience from rallying everyone in a “HOT TO GO!” dance and posting themed mood boards for different stops so fans can show up in matching outfits. Even the guttural “Good Luck, Babe!”, released as a standalone single just before Coachella, sounds engineered with its wailing “I told you soooo!” bridge to meet the increasing intensity of Roan’s live performances, which far rival her recorded material.
Where most artists who break out on TikTok stay hemmed within the boundaries of the app or their fleeting online virality like a petting zoo animal longing for greater pastures, and others struggle to adapt their IRL magnetism to the internet’s chaos, Roan has successfully created a community and a growing body of work that thrives on- and offline. She’s managed to exist successfully in all of these disparate spheres, and with each step of her career, she’s not only elevated her platform, but her artistry in step with bigger, stronger performances and her best song yet in “Good Luck, Babe!” There’s a 360-degree quality to Roan’s career that, while nascent, makes her singular in this moment compared to her peers, better positioned for a career that may last beyond a single song or a single season. In an industry where new names arrive and die on the charts so swiftly it could induce whiplash, Roan has been carefully, slowly building to becoming a dream industry’s dream girl.
Copyright 2024 NPR
