After 10 years in the shadows, the young woman became a figure in American pop in the space of one summer. And she hides nothing of the emotional distress that this sudden notoriety has caused.
Is the new muse of the American pop scene already running out of steam? Chappell Roan, 26-year-old singer nominated this Friday, November 1 at the NRJ Music Awards in the international revelation category, is having difficulty getting used to her recent notoriety. Having become an essential star in the United States in the space of a few months, the young woman is showing signs of fatigue::
“I don’t feel very well today,” she said in mid-June, letting her tears flow in the middle of a concert in North Carolina in front of a packed house.
“I think it’s because my career is progressing very quickly, and I’m having a hard time keeping up,” she continued. His rise has, in fact, been meteoric. His first album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princessreleased to almost total indifference in September 2023, finally ranked number 2 in American sales in June.
In the meantime, Chappell Roan released the irresistible Good Luck, Babe!one of last summer’s hits, which propelled her to the forefront. In the wake of this success, no less than seven titles from her album climbed into the American Top 100 in the space of three months, she reached 44 million monthly listeners on the Spotify platform, and broke records attendance at prestigious festivals.
While she has been evolving in the music industry for almost ten years, young American audiences have suddenly adopted this incendiary redhead, her resolutely queer lyrics, her electrifying pop and her eccentric aesthetic reminiscent of Lady Gaga’s debut. . Making him taste, just as brutally, the bad sides of notoriety.
“Very conservative and Christian”
Initially, however, there was no indication that Chappell Roan would one day rouse crowds by singing about his sapphic loves in extravagant costumes. Born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz on February 19, 1998, she grew up in a small town in Missouri within a religious community. She received an education there that she described as “very conservative and Christian” in the columns of the Associated Press, and went to church three times a week.
“I was very curious about pop music, and I couldn’t pinpoint why I felt connected to it,” she tells NME. “(These songs) were about a lifestyle that was unknown to me. I was very brooding, very prudish.”
Everything changed when she discovered Los Angeles, around 2016: “I was told that this city was demonic and that it sheltered Satanists. But when I arrived in West Hollywood (LGBT district, Editor’s note) it opened up for me eyes. My first evenings in a gay club had something spiritual about them.”
First failures
At that time, Chappell Roan had already released his first pieces independently, under his birth name. If she is in the city of angels, it is because this first attempt allowed her to obtain her first contract, at 17, with Atlantic Records. The first big meeting of her career came a few years later when she crossed paths with Daniel Nigro, songwriter, who has since worked with Olivia Rodrigo.
But Atlantic Records was disappointed by the lack of public interest and, in 2020, broke the contract between it and the young singer:
“I felt like a failure,” she recalled to the Guardian. “But deep down I knew that wasn’t the case.”
So Chappell Roan returned to Missouri, worked on her music independently and saved the money she earned as a drive-in saleswoman in order to move back to Los Angeles. This time, she gave herself a year to break through: “If nothing happens by the end of the year, it’s a sign that I have to come home,” she said to herself.
The singer reunites with Daniel Nigro and multiplies the singles. His taste for synthesizers from the 1980s – and for the fairer sex – is asserting itself (Naked in Manhattan), as well as his appetite for crude texts (“We’re in the back seat and you’re giving me cunnilingus” – Casual).
“It’s a way of expressing myself that was forbidden to me growing up in a conservative, Christian town and home,” she tells Vulture.
After a year 2021 spent promoting her music on TikTok, she joined a new major in 2022, Island Records. Then came the opportunities that allowed him to finally reach the general public.
2024, year of glory
The same year, she opened for Olivia Rodrigo, who then unleashed all the passions. When she launched her first tour in her name, in February 2023, it was sold out. September arrives and the timid release of The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. It would take a few more months for Chappell Roan, then the new face of alternative pop, to become a superstar.
The singer made headlines in March with a remarkable performance at the Tiny Desk from NPR, the world’s most popular pop scene. She honors the aesthetic of drag queens, which she claims in interviews: the singer combines her signature makeup (white foundation and colored eyes) with teeth spread with lipstick, as well as a wig clownish in which cigarette butts are lost.
In the process comes the ultra-efficient Good Luck, Babe!a dance ballad about his relationship with a girl who does not admit her homosexuality. The synthesizers are reminiscent of the 1980s, its high chest evokes that of Kate Bush, Gen-Z is won over by this waltz of genres.
With this title, she unleashes crowds all summer long at the most prestigious festivals in the United States. After Coachella in California, she headed to Tennessee for the Bonnaroo festival, which offered her a larger stage than expected to meet fan demand. A few weeks later, she made Lollapalooza history by attracting 110,000 spectators, an unprecedented number for the festival.
First distress signals
New recognition in September when she performed for the first time on the MTV VMAs stage. A must for all American stars for decades, which has hosted the debuts of Madonna, Britney Spears and Taylor Swift. Chappell Roan delivers a spectacular pyrotechnic performance, this time disguised as Joan of Arc.
Throughout this exponential rise, however, Chappell Roan regularly sends more and more obvious distress signals. The one who has always been transparent about her fragile mental health – she revealed that she suffered from bipolar disorder in 2022 – is alarmed by the invasive behavior of her fans. “People are starting to behave like crazy people, they follow me, they know where my parents live, where my sister works,” she confided in July to the podcast Comment Section:
“A few years ago, I said that if I was followed or harassed, or if my family was in danger, I would stop. And here we are.”
In August, the young artist made a major misstep by directly attacking her fans, to whom she did not hide her anger: “I don’t care if it is considered normal to abuse or harass famous people” , she says in a video on TikTok. “And if you think it’s selfish of me not to agree to take a photo with you, I don’t give a damn.”
Comments very rarely made by American superstars, rather formatted to take care of their audience… probably rightly so: this video generated many negative comments on the Web, with no one now seeing Chappell Roan as an ungrateful careerist.
From there, the machine gets carried away: in the age of social networks, the singer’s slightest actions are (negatively) commented on by just about anyone. Like last weekend, on a red carpet, when she recognized a photographer who allegedly shouted at her during a previous event and approached him to demand an apology.
Each time, the same reactions: when some praise his frankness, many others are annoyed by an attitude that they consider presumptuous:
“I’m sure she yells at the waiters when they forget her lemon slice in her diet coke,” one user commented after this latest incident. “Chappell Roan is starting to get a little boring,” said another.
The final blow comes when she refuses to give public support to Kamala Harris against Donald Trump in the upcoming American presidential election.
“There are problems on both sides,” she told the Guardian in September. “I encourage people to use their critical thinking.”
A daring absence of bias, in American show business where everyone clearly displays their political support. Accused by Internet users of playing into the hands of the Republicans by refusing to stand behind the Democratic candidate, the young woman published a video to clarify that no, she “will not vote for Trump”. But the public pressure did not subside, so much so that he had to speak again the next day with a new video, visibly exasperated:
“Yes, I’m going to vote for Kamala, p*****,” she said.
She added that she despised Donald Trump, but was also disappointed by the Democratic Party’s position on LGBT people, the Palestinian cause and “all marginalized communities in the world”, hence her reluctance to provide public support for Kamala Harris. .
“I was overwhelmed”
So many controversies which obviously had their impact on the morale of this brand new star: at the end of September, she announced that she was suffering from severe depression, which she attributed to the radical change in her daily life. In the process, she canceled two dates to “give priority to (her) health”:
“I’ve been overwhelmed these past few weeks, and I’m feeling it,” she confided on Instagram.
“Fame is abuse,” she sums up again to The Face. “The harassment, the insults on social media, people not leaving you alone, yelling at you in public. It’s like an abusive ex-husband. I didn’t know it would be this hard.”
Already, the digital vultures are predicting a short career for her, judging her too ill-equipped to take on the downside of success of which she has barely tasted. It is perhaps precisely this paradox which makes acclimatization so difficult: having become madly famous in one summer after a decade of anonymity trying to become so, Chappell Roan finally sends all the signals of the one who dreams that the merry-go-round is ‘stop.
