When Chappell Roan , a year-old pop artist from the Midwest, stared dead straight into the live-stream camera during her performance at Coachella this year and introduced herself as "your favorite artist's favorite artist" and "your dream girl's dream girl" in a nod to drag artist Sasha Colby, the line landed like a prophecy.
This year, from TikTok feeds to television, Roan, with her mass of curly red hair, irreverent pop bangers and fantastic, cartoonish costumes, has felt increasingly inescapable. She has dominated festival stages this summer at Coachella and Governors Ball, so much so that festivals like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza had to move her to bigger stages, and her increasingly massive crowds have created safety concerns.
Her Tiny Desk performance, which she delivered in disheveled prom attire and a wig stuck with cigarette butts, has 4 million views and counting. Her '80s-inspired power ballad single this year, "Good Luck, Babe! This is all I've ever wanted. It's just heavy sometimes, I think. Her music has an easy-to-root-for, mouthy, unpolished charm, trading in varying shades of disco, synth-pop and rock, unified by Roan's cheerleader theatricality and queer, outcast streak. In interviews and social media clips, Roan can be soft-spoken and dry, clear about the delineation between her real identity and "Chappell Roan," a throwback to an escapist era of Lady Gaga and Sasha Fierce.
But on record and on stage, immersed in her persona and underneath layers of glitter, she's the gay party girl extrovert of her dreams, singing about running around Manhattan kissing girls before she had ever kissed a woman in real life. In its hyper-confidence, Roan's big personality makes The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess entirely her own, but also like a door through which her listeners can walk through and experience her fantasies for themselves.
And all of this β the live performances, the cultivated persona, her humor β has made Roan's sparking star power distinctive and grounded in a moment where the music industry, and its ability to break dependable new artists, is chaotic.
