Anti-Chappell Roan Aktion Now!

Have you been enjoying Pride Month? I know I have. Seeing the gays and theys at Folsom warmed my pervert heart, the elders being out and proud with their jockstraps, the pups cuddling, someone on stage gleefully getting their ass beat. The corporatism that dominated June’s queer festivities over the 2010s seems like it’s largely been abandoned as the freaks fought back, demanding their shit be transgressive and unmarketable once again, screaming fuck Bank of America and Lockheed Martin. It’s too bad then, that one insufferable, near-ubiquitous pop queen has been dampening my good time. 

Chappell Roan is the physical manifestation of pinkwashing. Despite the authenticity push and the honest love for drag and gay pop, clearly the board room at Island are cackling as an avalanche of sapphic women line up in droves to purchase tickets to the most queer focus-group tested pop star we’ve seen since Hayley Kiyoko failed to catch on and pivoted to young adult romance novels. For too long has pop been the realm of the gay man-marketed star, the Gaga’s and Katy Perry’s soundtracking bar nights across the country; now, witness the lesbian icon that also happens to follow in the canon of RuPaul’s Drag Race. k.d. lang wept. 

You can tell all the posturing and costumes are an attempt to recreate Annie Lennox or Grace Jones, which would be all well and good if the music didn’t sound like more laundered Jack Antonoff loosies that have become part and parcel of the modern pop economy. Uninspiring choruses, bland synths, maudlin confessional lyrics, the whole gang's here. The consequences of Swiftian culture wreak havoc on Roan’s sound, which can be summed up in a single, blanket term: Annoying. On first glance this could be a reductionist critique, calling something annoying is personal preference writ-large, to brand it this way comes off as trite. However, given the theater kid grandiosity, the overt drag looks, the woe-is-me origin story, there is a prepackaged annoyance built into Chappell Roan’s identity as a musician. 

Perhaps this is what is so exhausting about the COINTELPRO-esque push of Chappell Roan across the internet and into real life. Take away the gimmicks and what are you left with? “Making pop fun again” like so many stans have belted? Her aesthetics have blinded many into thinking she is far more interesting than she actually is, rendering the music an afterthought while she’s proclaimed mother. You don’t actually like music, you just like the idea of it, of someone cosplaying pop star serving you slop from a trough.

I swear to god lesbians, you deserve better than this. You deserve better than Chappell Roan, MUNA, and a girl in red, inoffensive music designed for sapphic TikToks and Twitter fanpages, different flavors of the same indie/synth/alt-pop shit sundae. You deserve music that has teeth, has sex, has any kind of edge to it rather than sanitized Pride parade-core, a grotesque inversion of the scary queer faggotry of the 80s and 90s, or even the bombastic, legitimately fun drag music of the ballroom era. But will better come?