Four years ago, Kayleigh Rose Amstutz manned the drive-through at a coffee kiosk. Now, the 26-year-old, better known as the flaming-haired drag diva Chappell Roan, is glancing down from the towering peak of pop stardom and anticipating the drop. “I think my career is going really fast, and it’s hard to keep up,” she confessed in June, tearing up at a concert in Raleigh. It’s still speeding. Continuing a record-breaking streak, Roan’s WWE-themed Lollapalooza set in August attracted what’s estimated to be the largest crowd in the festival’s history. Her streams have multiplied 20 times since the beginning of this year. And though she shrugged off a White House invitation on political grounds, that hasn’t stopped its boomer associates from lip-syncing “Femininomenon” on TikTok.
Roan, understandably, is freaked out by the magnitude of her fame. Last week, attempting to wrestle back control, she posted two TikToks calling out obsessive fans: “If you saw a random woman on the street, would you yell at her from the car window? Would you harass her in public?” she questioned. “I’m a random bitch. You’re a random bitch. Just think about it.” The rant is earnest, unmeditated, and slightly flawed in its logic — a “random bitch” she is not. Passion, not precision, is Roan’s forte. “Do not assume this is directed at someone or a specific encounter,” she wrote on TikTok. Her outcry has tasked respondents to make sense of nebulousness, resulting in some frenzied and directionless discourse. Online, one camp contends that she’s not really cut out to be a pop girlie if she’s bothered by something as minuscule as fans requesting photos. Yelling past them, the other set condemns skeptics for condoning stalking and harassment.
With her complaint, Roan has thrown the public back into the eternal debate about how artists should engage with fans and vice versa. Though the conflict has arguably intensified in the social-media era, there have always been irresolvable contradictions at the heart of stardom: To win audiences, celebrities must artfully balance exposure and mysteriousness, individuality and symbolism; they should be just like us and not like us at all. It’s now become a rite of passage for overwhelmed pop stars — recently Mitski and Doja Cat before Roan — to push their fans away at a point of crisis, insisting that they don’t know them. But they paved their careers with the illusion of intimacy, the sense they are singing to and for you.
It is easier to side with these vacillating artists, often tired young women, because the story of toxic fandom writes itself. Concert attendees are chucking objects — bras, wheels of Brie — and slapping their idols. They’re throwing tantrums over gentle pleas to set their phones down. In 2016, a fanatic shot and killed 22-year-old singer Christina Grimmie while she was signing autographs at her concert, a tragedy that’s been ossified into a cautionary tale. It’s no surprise that the press’s response to Roan’s remarks has been overwhelmingly sympathetic. The very culture writers assigned to analyze the situation most likely have direct experience with disgruntled stan armies who dog journalists for their “biased” coverage. Public expressions of solidarity from media figures who’ve accumulated enough of a following to be micro-celebrities form a reliable genre of coverage: My life is already hard, they say, I can’t imagine what it must be like for someone more famous.
These sort of statements are powerful as collective catharsis, workers commiserating over the job. But as a prompt for change, they seem futile and even silly, like screaming at a tsunami and expecting it to politely recede back into the ocean. Celebrity is exhausting and fans need to cool it, sure. But it’s hard to know what to do with that information. Fans who take it upon themselves to police their peers can be even more insufferable, and possessive, than the bad apples. So where do we go from here?
Barring a few outright misogynists, Roan’s critics are relatively levelheaded if sassy pop fans who believe that she made a tactical blunder. It’s not that her points aren’t valid, they argue; it’s that she could have conveyed her point in a smarter, more compassionate way. Roan represents communities previously neglected by the mainstream — queer kids isolated in Middle America, lesbians craving sex and fun — promising them a way out with her music. It’s natural for fans to revere her. “I don’t give a fuck if you think it’s selfish for me to say no for a photo or for your time for a hug … that’s not normal. It’s weird!” Roan gripes in her video. That’s fair, but imagine the recipient of this tirade as a starstruck tween whose heroes rarely visit their small town or a fellow drag queen trying to greet a sister.
Semantics are exhausting. Semantics are part of the game. When an ordinary girl steps into the role of pop star, she assumes an expanded set of responsibilities. Not necessarily yielding to every photo request, but crafting a smart media strategy around her decisions with the assistance of her advisory board (publicists, creative directors). Pop-music aficionados are attuned to the meta aspects of the enterprise, trained to find satisfaction in good maneuvers as much as good songs. This is why Swifties revere Tree Paine, Charli XCX disciples marvel over the Brat rollout, and some X users glibly proclaim that Roan’s crown should be given to Addison Rae, who has waged a very savvy campaign to become the new pop princess. For better or worse, Roan’s loose, rambling front-facing videos seem like an off-the-cuff rant from Kayleigh, raising the question of where her management went. Perhaps this works to her advantage, displaying the no-fucks-given attitude that makes her so beloved. But it also blurs the line between individual and persona that she so ardently insists upon.
Below the surface of some of this bristling, I think, is also the public’s growing fatigue from being asked examine our own complicity in the misery of stars. This year’s party-pop resurgence, led by Roan and Charli XCX, offered an escape from the therapized, chilled-out music of Kacey Musgraves or, to go back even further, the bummer anti-fame anthems of Billie Eilish and Lorde. (Just look at how Lorde’s fans greeted her Charli XCX collaboration.) It’s true that there are dark sides to celebrity, but by processing their woes publicly, not just privately, pop stars inevitably risk souring the mood or seeming tone-deaf to their listeners. It might still be the right decision. But it’s not the only one.
The case of Mitski is instructive. The 33-year-old is one of the most celebrated indie-rock singer-songwriters of her generation, but she’s long been suspicious of her unruly fandom. She’s addressed her alienation in her songs and interviews: “It was like everyone’s eyes were sort of glazed over, and they didn’t see me as a real person telling them to stop,” she said, recalling an uncomfortable crowd encounter. Things worsened during the pandemic after her music blew up on TikTok. So for her most recent album, 2023’s The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, she declined to do press, instead releasing her own video explanations of her songs. She opted to tour at intimate venues with assigned seating. The album itself was blatantly uncommercial, a suite of quiet country tunes with abstruse lyrics, released all at once, no singles. One song, “My Love Mine All Mine,” became Mitski’s first Billboard hit, but she enjoyed its success on her own terms.
Roan has already curbed her public appearances: “I’ve, like, pumped the brakes on honestly anything to make me more known,” she said in a recent podcast interview. We don’t know her next moves. Perhaps she might withdraw for a few years and return with an avant-garde album that shakes off the annoying half of her fan base. Perhaps she will bulk up on security detail or take inspiration from the too-cool actress Jemima Kirke and flip rudeness into lovable character quirk. Her musical predecessors have faced worse controversies — Lana Del Rey with “question for the culture,” Miley Cyrus with the Bangerz cycle — reeling and then adapting, plotting their next maneuver. In an interview from last year, Caroline Polachek, who shares a producer and publicist with Roan, noted that the electric pace of the music industry makes it impossible for artists to anticipate the arc of their career: “What advice, really, does one generation have to give to the next? … Every generation and microgeneration has to rewrite the rules and come up with new ways of navigating and creating meaning.” All Roan has to do now is think carefully and pick up the pen.
