I get it now
Review of Chappell Roan's "The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess"
Chappell Roan—The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess
Released September 22, 2023
I am not and have never claimed to be an early adopter of the new and trendy, especially when it comes to music. It takes me a while to get into albums, hence why I started this series to tackle all the albums that have been released and I just haven’t gotten to yet. But it can also take me a bit of time to really get into a new artist, especially one that has so much hype around them. And that’s not a negative against any artist, but more a need for me to shut out what everyone else is saying about them in order to find out what I actually think about them. Which leads me to now, almost a year after the release of her debut album, I finally get the Chappell Roan hype.
I have to admit, it didn’t start with this album for me. For me, I first really loved her single “Good Luck, Babe!” and even that didn’t hit me until it had been out for quite a few weeks. But then one day I found it stuck in my head, probably from hearing bits of it on TikTok, and you know when a new song just scratches an itch in your brain and you need to hear immediately and at least 12 times on repeat? Yeah, that’s what happened to me and this song.
Since then, it’s been just that one song on repeat but then slowly and surely, I got the urge to listen to the full album. I had heard quite a bit of already on TikTok and “Casual” had already made its way into my monthly playlist a few months prior. But on this listen, I’m starting to understand why she’s just taken off in this moment.
I’m actually surprised it’s taken this long for an artist like Chappell Roan to become big. She’s musically like Cyndi Lauper and culturally like Madonna with a sprinkle of the performance art of Lady Gaga. And I never bring up comparisons to bring down current artists, but more so to make a point to anyone shocked or clutching their pearls about her music or lyrics or stage presence that none of this is new. It’s true that nothing is truly original but instead of that being a negative, I think it’s actually incredibly important that subsequent generations have their own versions of Madonna or whatever classic “real music” you can think of because the impact is the same regardless of the artist. The empowerment for young women that Madonna brought us in the 1980s is the same empowerment Chappell Roan brings for young queer people now.
This album is produced and mostly co-written by Dan Nigro, who is mostly known for his work with Olivia Rodrigo. Even though Jack Antonoff is still the pop girl producer of choice, between his work with Olivia and Chappell, I could easily see Nigro taking that place. Especially now that we’re seeing a rising anti-Antonoff camp following mixed reviews of his production on Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department.
Fourteen songs is a quite collection for a debut album. I know she’s been making music as Chappell Roan for a long time, but you can really hear how those years were instrumental in honing a sound and a style for her that’s invoking classic ‘80s pop stars, but still fresh. But honestly, even if she didn’t have such a strong artistic sense, I think she’d still have a good chance at being a star just on her vocals alone. I do have to wonder if JoJo Siwa is somewhere seething that Chappell Roan “invented” gay pop before she could.
My favorites on the album are “Pink Pony Club,” “Naked in Manhattan,” “After Midnight,” “Kaleidoscope,” and “Red Wine Supernova.“
What I also find interesting in Chappell Roan’s rise to superstardom is her use of persona and the sharp line she is drawing between Chappell the persona and Kayleigh the artist.
Within the concept of persona, particularly when it comes to popular music, there’s assumably always at least two layers to every artist—the —the real, private person and the curated public person they project. Phillip Auslander, who wrote an article about musical personas, has written that “unlike actors, opera singers, or even ballet dancers, musicians normally do not portray overtly fictional characters in their performances,”1 but as always, we know there are exceptions to the rule. Artists like David Bowie, Lady Gaga, Ethel Cain, and now Chappell Roan do add a third layer to their persona, and that’s an overtly fictional character layer.
In my experience, artists who are putting forth a character persona aim to truncate the curated public person and the character, so that the audience sees the character as the public person. What I find that Chappell Roan is doing differently than someone like an Ethel Cain is she’s not obscuring the fact that there are three layers to her persona. There is Kayleigh the private person, Kayleigh the artist, and Chappell Roan the persona. Unlike other artists with personas, Roan makes it easy to tell when she is “in character” by being done up in big costumes and big hair and makeup whereas when she’s speaking as herself as the artist and the creator, he is dressed down and wearing minimal if any makeup. Also in interviews where she’s talking about the making of the music or the album cover or the genesis of the persona, she directly speaks of Chappell as a separate entity from herself and refers to Chappell as a character distinguishable from herself. This stark distinction disrupts a certain authenticity that we’ve been taught to expect from artists. Unlike other artists with character personas, she wants us to know that Chappell is not the real her, and thus is creating a boundary between the public and the private.
Auslander also writes about persona that it’s not just derived by the artist themselves, but that the audience has a role “as the cocreators of the musicians' personae,”2 and that “audiences try to make performers into who they need them to be, to fulfill a social function..”3 Part of Chappell Roan’s success is the function audiences have given her as a symbol of queer representation. Even before she explicitly spoke about her sexuality, both in the music and in the appearance, Chappell was “queer coded” which then became part of her public persona. As a cishet woman, not all of the lyrics resonant with me, but I don’t need them to. Chappell Roan is connecting specifically in this moment in time with audiences who have previously not been able to see themselves in mainstream pop before, and for those audiences, this is really solid pop music that also fulfills the social function they need which is to be able to feel seen by performers like them.
Overall, this is such a fun album and I’m so happy for her to have all the success she’s having after working at this for so long. She recently confided in a crowd in Raleigh that it’s all been a bit overwhelming for her, so I hope she is able to balance the demands of the moment and is able to step back and enjoy what she’s accomplished as well.
Auslander, Musical Personae, 2006. p. 117
Auslander, p. 115
Auslander, p. 115