What a difference a year makes!
On August 11, 2023, Chappell Roan released “Hot to Go!,” a cheerleading synth-pop bop—”like 'YMCA' but gayer,” she said at the time—that heralded the impending release of a debut album from a young artist eager to make it big after the disappointing collapse of a previous record deal.
Exactly 12 months later, Roan stood onstage Sunday afternoon at the Outside Lands festival as pop's biggest new star: a red-headed dynamo in a blue-sequined majorette uniform teaching an audience of tens of thousands how to do a dance everyone seemed to already know.
“This is the outfit I wore in the video,” she said of her “Hot to Go!” outfit, panting slightly under the hazy San Francisco sky. “It’s f—ing hot.”
The crowd that gathered at Golden Gate Park was just the latest Roan has assembled over the course of a festival season that began with her viral appearance at Coachella in April; the 26-year-old has since dominated New York’s Governors Ball, where she memorably dressed as the Statue of Liberty, and Chicago’s Lollapalooza, where she is said to have played the largest daytime set in the show’s three-decade history. (In a summer of crowd-size bickering between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Roan’s endless aerial shots of festival hordes have left them both looking foolish.)
Roan has also been putting up incredible numbers on the pop charts: This week, her slick, brilliant 2023 LP, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” hit a new peak of No. 3 on the Billboard 200, while no fewer than seven of its songs are on the Hot 100, including “Good Luck, Babe!” at No. 6, which is the highest the single has charted since it dropped a week before Coachella.
The crowd during Chappell Roan's concert at Outside Lands on Sunday.
(Live coverage)
At least part of Roan’s success can be attributed to listeners’ hunger for music from new (or perhaps renewed) faces; the same goes for recent streaming successes from artists like Shaboozey, Tommy Richman, Benson Boone, Teddy Swims, and Sabrina Carpenter, the latter two of whom also performed prominently at Outside Lands.
But only Roan was preceded onstage by a miniature marching band that meandered around the festival grounds, following fans wearing pink cowboy hats as it played a raucous version of “Hot to Go!”
In fact, despite the singer's omnipresence on social media lately, Chappellmania (which actually began just before Coachella when she toured as an opening act for Olivia Rodrigo) has become a distinctly live phenomenon that people are yearning to participate in in person.
Well, most of them: “It’s so weird that VIPs think they’re too cool to do this,” she said Sunday, after noticing that some of those near the stage didn’t join her in dancing to “Hot to Go!” “Do it or I’ll call you on stage!”
The sense of community Roan has quickly established has something to do with a post-pandemic desire for real-world connection; it has even more to do with the fact that she is the first major pop artist to achieve high-level stardom as an openly queer person rather than someone for whom coming out was a crucial part of their celebrity narrative.
In San Francisco, fans held up handmade signs that read “BUTCHES FOR CHAPPELL” and “TWINKS FOR CHAPPELL,” a sign of the powerful identity politics at play among his followers (and another thing that made this concert a lot more fun than a campaign rally).
Both factors, though, seem secondary to the old-fashioned showmanship Roan offers onstage — the eye rolls, the blown kisses, the gun-toeing, the head nods. On Sunday, she went full-bore during “After Midnight,” something she knew full well not to nag anyone (VIP or otherwise) into repeating. As vigorously as she moved, her voice was brave and precise on “Femininomenon” and “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl,” to name two of the incredibly catchy, ’80s-tinged songs from “Midwest Princess,” which the singer made with Rodrigo’s most trusted collaborator, producer Dan Nigro, after Atlantic Records dropped her in 2000 and she moved home to a small Missouri town from Los Angeles.
Chappell Roan's performance on Sunday was the latest in a series of much-talked-about festival appearances.
(Live coverage)
Pop music works in cycles, and what Roan seems to have understood sooner than most is that, after a decade defined by Lorde and Billie Eilish and their many murmuring fans, the culture was returning to the color and spectacle of 2010s-era superstars like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. For probably half the songs in Roan’s Outside Lands concert, the screen behind the performer and her three-piece band displayed key lyrics for audience members to sing along with; it was pop spectacle as a shared public ritual, not pop spectacle as a private bedroom confession.
Still, Roan’s special sauce — and the quality that will likely bring her a slew of Grammy nominations this fall — is the surprising emotional directness she brings to her glossy neo-new wave anthems. You can feel it on the gorgeous “Casual,” which is about a woman struggling to reconcile the intimacy of a relationship with her lover’s insistence that they aren’t tied down, and the astonishing “Good Luck, Babe!,” in which she warns a friend who has decided to marry a man that one night she’ll wake up and realize “you’re nothing but his wife.”
Is “Good Luck, Babe!” a sad song? A happy song? A song of regret or revenge? The way Roan performed it Sunday — breathy and yearning, but with a slight growl — was all of those things. “You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling,” he sang, and you knew exactly what he meant.
