The Chappell Roan Backlash Is Really About Us

“Meteoric rise” is a cliché. But since Chappell Roan’s debut album transformed her into a (femi)phenomenon practically overnight, it’s one that applies to her. Still, if, like me, you spend too much time online, you’ll be aware that the ascension of the self-proclaimed “Midwest Princess” recently hit some turbulence. It started back in August, when Roan posted a series of videos on TikTok, complaining about the “creepy behavior” of some of her fans. She said she felt “harassed” and mentioned members of her family being “stalked.” The videos were a departure from anything fans had heard from her before, and sparked a debate about whether celebrities should complain about their fame.

Then, last week, Roan was asked in an interview about the upcoming presidential election. In a now-viral quote, she said she didn’t “feel pressured” to endorse anyone, because “there’s problems on both sides.” The out-of-context remark led to days of backlash. (Many accused Roan, a lesbian, of being “uneducated” about LGBTQ+ issues amid Republican attacks on the community.) When she eventually responded in yet another video, she blamed “clickbait” for the furor. She clarified that she will be voting for Kamala Harris, but didn’t want to “settle” for what is on offer, particularly regarding the issue of Israel-Palestine. “This is not me playing both sides,” she said. “This is me questioning both sides.”

Watching the growing backlash against Roan has been frustrating. It seems to be concocted—primarily driven by quotes that have been stripped of vital context, then amplified online for engagement. I also can’t escape the feeling that the primary reason a lot of people dislike her is because she refuses to lower her voice to a comfortable volume. Really, the urge to tear her down is a much bigger problem than Roan’s views, or how she has chosen to express them.

Roan isn’t the only pop star who has called out their own fans lately. In June, when fans at a Charli XCX concert in Brazil started chanting “Taylor Swift is dead,” the inventor of brat summer herself responded on Instagram, saying she wouldn’t “tolerate” such behavior. Swift herself has thrown jabs at her fans in her music, too. In songs from her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, Swift rages at the “judgmental creeps” who “say they know what’s best for” her. (The lyric is thought to be a reference to fans who didn’t approve of her relationship with 1975 frontman Matty Healy.)

Ariana Grande’s recent lyrics also allude (more subtly) to tensions with fans and the media, following her relationship with Wicked costar Ethan Slater, who was reportedly married when they got involved. “You cling to your papers and pens / Wait until you like me again,” she sings on “We Can’t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love).”

And last year, Doja Cat spoke about fans who feel like she “belongs” to them. “My theory is that if someone has never met me in real life, then, subconsciously, I’m not real to them,” she told Bazaar. “So when people become engaged with someone they don’t even know on the internet, they kind of take ownership over that person.”

Why does the backlash seem so concentrated on Roan, specifically? Part of it is due to how quickly she became famous. It sometimes feels like we’re only comfortable with women in the public eye talking about the price of celebrity when we decide they’ve suffered enough for our liking. As opposed to someone like Swift or even Britney Spears—who released clapback anthem “Piece of Me” in 2007 amid widespread media harassment—there is a sense that, as a relative newbie, Roan hasn’t yet “earned” the right to complain.

There is a strange sense of ownership that has taken over this conversation, too, which also feels gendered. In response to Roan’s election remarks, a viral post declared that “we need to expect better from the people whose careers we finance.” Leaving aside the politics, and the relatively new expectation that musicians endorse presidential candidates, this is an odd way to frame being a fan, as if consuming someone’s art is comparable to being a shareholder in a company. It reminds me of the controlling tone many British media outlets took with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, when they were still working royals. “Meghan is trying to smash the royal family’s contract with the public: We pay, they pose,” wrote one prominent columnist, after she refused to stand in front of photographers holding her son, Archie, hours after his birth. The underlying message is the same: Don’t forget who owns you.

Speaking of Harry and Meghan, I can’t help but think that a lot of people would similarly benefit from admitting that their real issue with Roan isn’t her attitude toward fame, or her politics, but simply that she gets on their nerves. For me, this was summed up by the reaction to a viral video from the MTV Video Music Awards earlier this month, where Roan confronted a photographer who told her to “shut the fuck up” as she posed on the red carpet. Initially, a trimmed version of the video (without his provocation) was widely shared online. Some people really wanted the worst possible version of this story—that she had angrily screamed at a photographer for no reason—to be true. People whose first instinct was to assume the worst would be much better off just admitting they don’t vibe with her, rather than contorting themselves (and reality) to justify their feelings. It doesn’t have to be so righteous.

The media ecosystem is clouding our vision here, too. (And I’m not just talking about Fox News, which has been predictably triggered by a young queer woman who seems actively uninterested in male approval.) Ever since Roan first called out her fans, it’s expected that journalists will ask her about it in interviews. But these quotes are then cherry-picked and amplified on accounts like PopCrave, mining engagement out of the narrative that Roan is constantly complaining about something, or that she’s on some sort of downward spiral.

On one hand, I get it: People who continually position themselves as aggrieved can be irritating. But that doesn’t mean they’re undeserving of dignity and compassion—or that they’re wrong. Many of us are forgetting that Roan is only 26 and became globally famous very quickly. It’s an experience we can’t possibly imagine. “I don’t care that this crazy type of behavior comes along with the job, the career field I’ve chosen. That does not make it okay,” Roan said, as she described incidents of fan intrusion. Who can honestly say they disagree with that?

Noam Galai//Getty Images

Roan at the 2024 MTV VMAs in New York on September 11

Really, the anger at Roan reflects our own anxieties. Fame is probably the only thing that is more idealized in Western culture than money. And now that the influencer era has democratized fame more than ever, being famous for being yourself feels tantalizingly within reach for anyone who has a smartphone. Maybe this makes some of us even more angry with Roan. We don’t know her, or what her experiences are, but we do know that she seems ungrateful for something we’ve been programmed to covet above all else. Not only is she questioning our value system, she’s also shattering our fantasy.

Roan’s critics might argue that her video retorts have added fuel to the fire here. It’s a fair point, but the “fallen princess” narrative that’s being ascribed to her points to a much bigger issue. When I saw the account LizaMinnelliOutlives posting that the 78-year-old performing legend had outlived Roan’s “once-promising superstardom” after the younger star’s “abrasive remarks and red-carpet antics,” it became clear the backlash had evolved into a gleeful circus of public shaming.

And that’s our problem, because celebrities don’t generally set the rules of fame. We do. We’re the ones who keep saying we want them to be less guarded, or more political, but then punish them when they don’t express themselves perfectly, or when they deviate from our exact views. We make fame brutal, then criticize those who complain about it—unless they’ve paid their dues by being torn down a million times already.

These pressures aren’t going to disappear any time soon. Over the weekend, Roan became a punch line on Saturday Night Live, where she was compared to Moo Deng—the 11-week-old pygmy hippo whom TikTok has turned into a viral superstar. (A sentence that demonstrates how ridiculous this has all become.) The previous day, Roan had pulled out of a performance at the All Things Go festival outside of D.C., saying that “things have gotten really overwhelming the past few weeks.” I hope she finds a way to exist in the spotlight without letting it consume her, or sacrificing her principles. It would be a shame if her voice were drowned out by all the noise in the background.