My first encounter with Chappell Roan felt like a memory even before it was one. It was in May, when my niece played the breakout star’s “My Kink is Karma” in the car with our whole family on the way to her college graduation. My niece, in turn, had first really paid attention to Chappell Roan when a friend played it for her on a road trip. This kind of word-of-mouth, listening-together-in-the-car introduction to a song resonated with freshness and excitement even as it was also a nostalgic throwback. That strong sensation of deeply familiar yet new and exciting is also an apt description of Chappell Roan’s music. Add to this the feeling that something is finally being delivered that you didn’t quite realize you were waiting for, and you have begun to describe the uncanny magic of Chappell Roan.
Feeling behind the curve seems to be a definitional part of first encounters with Chappell Roan for everyone who isn’t a 19-year old lesbian college student. Chappell Roan’s been building an audience for years, but it’s only recently, as that same college student noted, that “Straight people found her,” and, apparently, many middle-aged queers like me as well.
In the last months, the mode of her success has switched from climbing charts and building audiences to “going viral.” Normally, virality seems like a definitively digital phenomenon. But something else feels like it’s happening in the phenomenon that is Chappell Roan: an earnest and passionate longing for the analog. I mean analog here in numerous ways: aesthetics, language, temporalities—analog almost as a metaphor of itself. Analog, in this instance, signals a certain type of materiality and presence. But the self-evidence of the analog includes constant reference to itself within history, within culture, within what phenomenology—a field of philosophy most simply defined by the notion that existence is always situated and relational— would call a “lifeworld.” Analog is one word for what I felt, for instance, listening to new music in that crowded car.
Chappell Roan, in numerous ways, embodies the analog. What she ends up offering us is a pop performer that’s able to acknowledge, not just in words but with actual logistics, that life is hard and confusing because of the material conditions of being a young, queer person in this country, but to do so with the capacity for love and joy and fun. And it turns out this is something that we really wanted, maybe needed, to see, hear, and feel.
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What I specifically don’t mean by “analog” is acoustic instrumentation. Even a quick listen to The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess demonstrates how central 80s synth pop is to her sound. But that electronic sound comes with a counterintuitively analog sensibility. The technology behind the sound might be digital but it evokes a gestalt of now romanticized analog media: audio cassettes and VHS tapes, cameras with celluloid film, vinyl records, and so on. It’s true that the wealth of texture, feeling, and range in Chappell Roan’s actual voice captures and then keeps the listener enthralled. But it’s how she situates her voice within layers of cultural pastiche that positions her in relation to memories, both (inter)personal and cultural.
Chappell Roan’s songs, musically and lyrically, feel both playfully catchy and significantly inhabitable. Songs like “Feminomenon,” “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl,” “HOT TO GO!” and “Naked in Manhattan” are self-conscious but not posturing, substantive but light, clever, fun, at times hilarious. Each one of them in its own way offers a nod to the simplicity of the analog. There’s the cheer squad spelling out of “H-O-T-T-O-G-O.” There’s the “Hi it’s Chappell” voicemail that begins “Naked in Manhattan,”: “I would love to see you, so call me when you can.” The song describes the feeling of a “new crush, high school love again” in such an evocative way that the seemingly casual voicemail encompasses a tribute to the lost art of reaching out to someone by phone. The video for the song—a DIY low-budget escapade on the streets of New York City—doubles down on the analog by featuring a vintage high-heel telephone.
Chappell Roan’s deployment of bygone sounds and images offers more than nostalgia. The idea of the analog indicates a mode of being that is always referring to and standing in for something else, even as it also often provides simple and direct relationships between people, things, the world. In a very different context, theorist of film and photography Kaja Silverman has called it “the miracle of analogy.” The analog “is what it is” and is more than what it is, simultaneously: its points of reference and interaction open up a world of meaning. It’s full of complexity and incredibly straightforward at the same time.
For instance, her hit single “Red Wine Supernova” explicitly expresses lesbian desire while also having an uncertain address and subject position:
“You just told me, want me to fuck you
Baby, I will ’cause I really want to”
As with Freud’s analysis of the dream in “A Child is Being Beaten”, we cannot locate a clear position of identification. We must accept that the dreamer is everywhere and nowhere here, while the situation being dreamt of is everything. (Even in the magic-themed video for the song, Chappell Roan and her object of desire look like mirror versions of each other.) The sense of desire exceeds both its subject and object and becomes a space of total possibility. Roan’s videos and performances frequently employ a combination of drag and BDSM aesthetics, emphasizing just how much she is invoking a scenario out of which she can grow and become. The call-and-response formation of the songs—she is frequently either echoed by or in conversation with the voices of the backup band and/or herself—only add to this sense of an interactive scene playing out. Her recordings anticipate and reflect her interactions with concert audiences. (Innumerable comments on her videos mention how much her aesthetic reminds them of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), which by the early 80s had a devoted fandom co-creating a multi-modal interactive performance experience.)
The Pink Pony Club video represents most directly Chappell Roan’s interactive hopes for performance. She’s not trying to separate herself from the crowd; she wants to join others in sharing a (queer) world. The song narrates a young woman finding freedom as a stripper, but is actually/also about Chappell Roan’s experience at a gay bar in West Hollywood. The video makes the analogy clear. It moves from her lonely performance in a dusty saloon filled with inattentive, gray-bearded bikers to a joyous queer dance party. Vocally, she moves through an array of registers: from shy yearning to nearly operatic rebuke to gleeful release. Visually, the first hint of a queer rupture appears when the video cuts to an ambiguously gendered bartender. It comes to fruition just as a spotlighted Chappell Roan has fully commanded the focus of the room—at which point the camera leaves her behind and pans instead to a drag queen air guitaring an unapologetically 80s guitar solo, but on an actual guitar.
These escalating layers of performativity shift the focus away from Chappell Roan and onto the world around her. The dusty biker bar gives way to a crowded space filled by men in leather harnesses, leather caps, aviator sunglasses, chaps, mustaches. The timeless aesthetic of gay leather bars, seemingly immune to changes in fashion, emerges here as the mise-en-scène that carries her (literally) into the end of her performance. Everyone is now dancing together, while Chappell Roan, still on stage in some shots, appears joyfully in others as just one of the crowd.
The attention paid to the iconic gay leather bar aesthetic shows how the analog works as both transcendent and grounded. It’s moving, especially for someone like me who went looking for a home— usually unsuccessfully— in the Castro District in the early 1990s, to see a young woman publicly yearning for her queer sexuality find support within that scenario. But also the instant recognizability of this imagery gives it a type of material constancy that registers as comfort. It is not subject to changeable fads or generational disconnect, or to the sense of a world so transformed and threatening that it feels both unrecognizable and doomed. It is, no matter who you are, an analog version of queerness. And so is the drag aesthetic with which Chappell Roan so explicitly identifies: the joy of costuming and make-up and all the practical, material effects that are the lifeblood of performance.
In fact, she makes clear that “Chappell Roan” is a stage name that simultaneously is and is not herself, which in turn highlights what performance is and is not. In the writing credits for the songs she uses her given name Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, an identity she still acknowledges is a creative force behind Chappell Roan even if she doesn’t perform as such. Listening to the songs Amstutz (co-)wrote and Chappell Roan sings reminds us how we perform as ourselves but also outside of ourselves, and how much this is all wrapped up in gender and sex. (Apt that Judith Butler is having their own new pop surge this year.) And although Chappell Roan has quickly achieved “icon status,” it feels significant that interviews and articles so frequently highlight her creative partnerships, her influences, her opening acts, and her audiences. “Chappell Roan” exists as a shared phenomenon that exceeds the individual that is Kayleigh Rose.
Similarly, Chappell Roan moves the “relatable” toward the relational. Her authorship is that of an avid and unpretentious student of culture, as well as someone that simply lives in the world. Her lyrics often show a preference for direct cultural reference over poetic license. With the deceptively simple “Naked in Manhattan,” she jumps from Mulholland Drive to Lana del Rey to Mean Girls in what feels like a blink:
“Oh, I’ve never done it, let’s make it cinematic
Like that one sex scene that’s in Mulholland Drive”
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“When I sing that Lana song, it makes you cry
Mean Girls, we watch it every night
And we both have a crush on Regina George…”
She pushes back against that stereotype of the “Gen Z” student that wants to make their own films or write their own books with little interest in studying the work of others. She is listening, not just singing. She is watching, along with us. She’s explained that when she famously called herself “your favorite artist’s favorite artist,” she was both staking a claim on the stage and paying tribute. Chappell Roan is a star who makes it clear that she is at bottom a fan: a fan of the many things and people that so many of us also love. Her references here are traceable and clear, quotations rather than memes. A+ for you, Chappell Roan, for doing the homework, citing your sources, and truly participating in discussion.
Chappell Roan isn’t antithetical to outsized icons like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. But she does nevertheless reveal that for some time there has been something people didn’t even know they were missing, from Swift’s portrait of (white) feminine attachment especially. Unlike the nearly post-truth, conspiratorial digital fandom of something like Gaylor, driven in part by Swift’s well-known penchant for “easter eggs,” little sleuthing and data visualization are necessary to interpret Chappell Roan. Literally, you can just ask her what her songs are about and she will tell you.
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The straightforward joy and hope released by Chappell Roan’s music has a clear political analog in what at first seemed like the surprising enthusiasm for Kamala Harris’s presidential candidacy. Chappell Roan makes different things feel possible, much like the surge of attraction to Harris that so obviously reflects the deep malaise about another Biden/Trump contest that we didn’t fully recognize the weight of until it gave way to another possible reality. I mean, who isn’t just “through, with all these hyper mega bummer boys like you”? Despite the massive differences in who they are, that Harris going viral herself is manifested by gleeful supporters adding a Chappell Roan soundtrack makes the analogy explicit.
Phenomenology insists that we recognize existence as fundamentally material and relational. “Being” is always being-in, being-with, being-towards. Unlike much of the solipsistic fare of white pop music, Chappell Roan manages to communicate deeply emotional material at the same time that she shows an awareness of how feelings are also part of broader structural, often dysfunctional, realities. Her cry of, “I miss the seasons in Missouri, my dying town,” in a song called “California,” tells us that she thinks about not just her place, but that of others as well. She cares about relationships created between different spaces, times, and people as one moves through the world. Her concern transmits in her attention to the audiences that come to her shows, even—or especially—now that she has “blown up.” Her manager makes clear that, “She’s really thoughtful about the experience for fans…especially venue selection, parts of town, gender-neutral bathrooms, like really creating a safe space, making sure that we prep building security on, you know, that there’s a large queer young community coming to this.”
In the time of “It’s giving…,” Chappell Roan—with all her layers of lyrical, musical, and cultural referentiality—is actually giving us so much, but also, delightfully, is simply being. The phenomenon of Chappell Roan is one that should be recognized as such because she embodies her own talent so well at the same time that it is clear that she is a canvas for performative transformation, cultural interaction, and productive, communal spectatorship. Now that she has gone viral, and is starting to experience the threatening insanity of fan culture, one hopes that she is still able to experience the world and the people within it as a space of possibility, even if it is hard to imagine these days that the world has the sense to both fully enjoy Chappell Roan, and just let her be.
Catherine Zimmer: Is not mad at you, she’s mad at the dirt
(Huge thanks to Barbara Herman, Chappell Roan co-obsessor and interlocutor.)
Lead Image: Jason Martin
Body Images: Screenshots from Chappell Roan videos