The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess
My! Two! Cents!
I was once a Buzzfeed girlie. I still have the app on my phone, even though they fired the majority of their staff, shelved their award-winning investigative journalism department and now churns out stuff like ‘Your Food Choices Will Reveal Which Crumbl Cookie You Should Order.’ Today, as I mindlessly scrolled, I saw this article:
Before I get into it - I want to be clear my issue here isn’t with the journalist who wrote this article, nor is my real intention to defend Roan. I love her music, but I don’t feel strongly enough about her (or any celebrity) to feel defensive on her behalf. I think my irritation at angles like these is the way they fail to point that we - society, celebrity news, social media, PR firms - do this to women in the public eye all the time. We build them up, place them on impossibly-high pedestals, then the moment they’re overexposed they are gleefully torn down - the same platforms who once praised her now salivating with indignation.
Roan - who exploded into mainstream adoration this year - recently made headlines for coming out with a series of statements that quite firmly asserted her boundaries. They came from someone who had been catapulted into a level of scrutiny and adoration that she had no warning off - and whose entire life had changed as a result, both for the better and the worse. In these videos, she was direct, “I don’t give a fuck if you think it’s selfish of me to say no to a photo,” and spoke about the harassment of her family and the security risks she was facing. The nature of fan culture and parasocial relationships has morphed the world around Roan into an anonymous mass of people - some of whom support her in ways that don’t cross lines, others who seem so frantic in their adoration they trample over those lines, and others who actively want to cause her harm. She cannot differentiate between them, becuase she doesn’t know them - and how can you stay safe from that? In trying to answer this question, Roan broke the bizarre golden rule of celebrity-dom - cater to complete strangers, any time of the day, any day of the week, no matter what you’re doing or how you’re feeling. Good for her.
The response online was fascinating. Naturally, there was a range - people praised her honestly, expressed sadness at how afraid she sounded, scoffed at her arrogance, got upset that she hadn’t recognised ‘the good fans’, raged at her, and debated whether or not she was ‘allowed’ to hate fame. Even people whose opinions I usually respect and appreciate seemed to go down this rabbit hole. A podcast whose work I love spent a while trying to unpack whether or not a woman who wants her art to be famous - who goes on stage with a clear persona - was also allowed to demand anonymity in her day to day life. (Yes). In one of her videos, Roan asked the viewer if they would go up to a random stranger and ask for a photo, trying to point out how, in her reality, she is the random woman. ‘But she’s not a random woman,” the podcast pointed out, “she’s Chappell Roan.” Which is precisely the point Roan was trying to get across. She is not Chappell Roan when she’s just out in the world, off-stage, not in drag. She’s a random bitch (her words). And she’s begging us to see that too.
I know that many famous people cultivate and exploit this idea of approachability and constant stardom. For every story about a rude or badly-behaved celebrity there’s a heartwarming story of the humble, kind one, who only ever seems to feel gratitude for their success. That is indeed, lovely, but so rarely a role women are allowed to occupy. The second they are considered to have ‘made it’ the countdown begins - and in the age of accelerated internet, it feels like the countdowns have gotten faster. In a handful of months, Roan went from beloved, iconic darling to entitled, passive-aggressive bitch (not her words), and articles like this are a big part of the reason why. The piece focuses on fan reactions to Roan’s sudden, very last minute cancellations of two shows due to scheduling conflicts, then points to (unverified!) rumours that she cancelled in order to attend rehearsals for the MTV Video Music Awards, where she’s due to perform. I.e. - maybe, she’s putting her career above her fans, which is of course, unacceptable. Never mind the fact that we don’t fully know a) if this is true, b) what contractual obligations she might be under and c) how big something like this might be for her career. And if it were true - are female singers, artists, writers, actors allowed to make strategic career decisions ad take huge opportunities that they know might not be offered again, or do we only support them when they’re serving us? I know this is a lazy argument - but if Roan were a man, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Is it nice that Roan cancelled a few shows, with a bit of a vague explanation? No, that sucks, and must be incredibly frustrating to fans who have spent money on travel and accommodation they now cannot get back. I get that, and I think there is room for valid criticism about that. But as always, the punishment does not fit the crime. Especially when the crime is written about in the most hyperbolic way possible. I’m sorry, but when cancelling a few shows is described as “sparking controversy”, I think it undermines the way media then reports on public figures who have actually done controversial, problematic things - who have harmed other people in serious, tangible ways. It seems flattening and inappropriate.
The other issue I have with this article - and on TikTok - is how random people’s opinions are being reported on as news. This is objectively a wierd thing for us to do, right? I know the internet is our cultural watering hole, but I find it really odd that a throw-away comment is being treated as a fact, even if that comment is being echoed by several, even hundreds, of people.
Lines like this imply that we are all secretly in agreement that Chappell Roan is in fact, disrespectful. The underlying message - especially when the opinions presented are all uniform - is: she’s bad. She deserves a pile on. She flew too close to the sun. Now watch her burn.
I don’t yet fully know how I feel about this new weaponisation of fan commentary - some of which is balanced, and some of which is worthy critique. It makes me uncomfortable, and it falsely implies that a vocal minority represent an entire fanbase…but on the other hand, people are allowed to express themselves online, are they not? It’s not like these comments were written in the knowledge they would be co-opted as part of a narrative, right? The comment section is as much a space to learn and critique as it is to dogpile and rage post. Or is that too generous of me?
Buzzfeed does a lot of articles like this - often side by side with articles like ‘11 Famous Women Who The Internet Woke Up One Day and Decided To Hate For No Valid Reason’ which at least made me laugh. They’re far from the only media platform that does it, obviously, and I don’t think we’ve yet reached the peak of fan culture, unfortunately. What I do find breathtaking is how quickly Roan has been cycled through the process of public womanhood - once, the build-up to tear-down pipeline would have taken a year or two, at least. For Chappell Roan, it took a single summer.
…Not that she's really going anywhere, of course. The gap between online sentiment and reality thankfully looms large here - and I am excited about her music and performances of the future. I hope her belief that negative articles and comments are all, in fact, bots. And should she come back this way, I will definitely try and see her live.
Back in 2023, Rolling Stone interviewed Roan before she was due to tour with Olivia Rodrigo and wrote ‘the title of Roan’s album captures her arc so far, from breaking out of the Midwest to find herself, to arriving in L.A. and questioning whether she’s “cut out for Hollywood.”’ I find it both poignant and deeply prescient that the album that sparked her massive success also predicted her inevitable “demise”. Perhaps now that internet has decided she’s not as shiny and perfect as she used to be, some of that pressure will finally ease off. Perhaps not. We know what the internet does to women it does not like.
A quick favour. I love writing these posts, and I intend to do them for free for as long as I can. If you enjoyed reading this, forward it to a friend (or three) who you think might like it too. It helps massively, because validation from strangers is truly the only thing that makes the horrors bearable for me.