Running with Chappell Roan

Listening to the breakout artist of the summer on the run.

Midjourney generation.

I’ve caught the bug for Chappell Roan.

I’m not sure how it happened. I’m usually into more instrumental stuff, the sort of music that makes up the playlists of insecure male strivers—Hans Zimmer, Ludwig Göransson, YouTube “flow state” videos.

But Roan’s oddball rawness hooked into my ears with the first notes of her breakout hit “Good Luck, Babe!” The tune’s retro backbone, harkening back to Kate Bush, drew me in with its synthy melody straight out of the 1980s.

The song, a pop lambast against compulsive heterosexuality, struck like thunder. After hearing it once, I listened another 7 times. I spent the next weekend cycling though her latest album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, each song an exquisite dish in a multi-course meal of awesome.

Up till now I’ve never been particularly keen on pop music.

Growing up, I was into sounds one might pejoratively label “Safety-School Cerebral.” Think Ben Folds, Regina Spektor, Imogen Heap. Mildly heterodox and inoffensively contrarian, the stuff that cleverish kids from the suburbs listened to on their bedroom CD players instead of the mainstream boy bands, hip-hop, divas, and nu metal that defined the musical scene of Millennial adolescence.

But this summer, decades later, I’m somehow hooked on the popular new girl at the top of the billboard charts.

Roan is Lady Gaga for Zillennials. Her wardrobe bright, eclectic, and camp, making it hard to bring your eyes away from her. She performs in drag within a frizzle of feathers, face paint, and sequins. Her presence is commanding, blazing red hair elevated into exaggerated silhouettes.

Roan’s writing is unabashedly queer. She sings stories of red-wine-fueled affairs with female playboys, oral pleasure in passenger seats, puns about sex toys, and the thin promise of straight love.

It has resonated with millions, even normies like me.

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As I ran alone last weekend, I pondered why. I jogged along the wide and empty roadways of Oakland’s shipping port, clipping past the terminals with their towering stacks of shipping containers. Headphones were in and I was listening to Roan’s hits. With each track, a deep “Yeah!'“ zinged out of me as I bopped along.

Why am I so moved by her work, which is written from a perspective so seemingly different from my own background, one so vanilla a friend once described me as a “serial monogamist”?¹

I think the answer is desire.

Roan’s songs revolve around desire. In her case uncensored, often unashamedly horny desire. But she delivers this yearning with such pathos and accessibility that it’s easy for a listener to inhabit the singer’s subjectivity, to see your own desire reflected back in her words.

In “Femininomenon” she describes the danger of straight male love. “Same old story, time again,” she sighs about a friend who should have listened to the warnings about a man: “You sent him pictures and playlists and phone sex” but he disappears the moment a meet-up is suggested.

The danger however is actually getting the man:

You pretend to love his mother
Lying to your friends about
How he's such a goddamn good lover
Stuck in the suburbs, you're folding his laundry
Got what you wanted, so stop feeling sorry

The deeper problem is bad choices. Specifically bad choices that constrain one’s true desires, one’s real self.

Similarly, “Good Luck, Babe!” centers on unrequited longing for a lover who represses themselves in order to align with social norms. The hinge moment of the song projects forward into the future when Roan’s lover suddenly realizes what she’s become:

When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night
With your head in your hands, you're nothing more than his wife
And when you think about me, all of those years ago
You're standing face to face with "I told you so"

This is explicitly about the dangers of inauthenticity, especially sexual inauthenticity. To be clear, Roan is singing about queer love between women. I doubt she particularly cares how straight white men like me interpret her lyrics. I know they are not for me.

And yet, I can’t help but enjoy them. Because they prompt me to consider all the safe choices I’ve made in life, all the choices I let inertia or social norms make or not make for me.

I’m living through the sort of events that usually define midlife crises. New kid, job kinda sucks, creativity feels stifled, right-wing autocracy threatening to overturn western civilization—you know, the usual stuff when you approach 40.

It’s the stage of life when you’re overwhelmed by a tidal wave of mundanity: laundry and diapers and bills at home, performance reviews and hiring committees and meetings at work—the greasy hustle of a corporate ladder designed so that if you’re not climbing you’re at risk of being cut in the next round of layoffs.

But arriving here was a choice.

Small wonder then that as Roan’s voice makes stellar leaps across octaves, my heart soars. “I told you so,” she exclaims in “Good Luck, Babe!” and listening I inhabit both the I and the You, talking to myself in the abstract, surveying the ruinous mediocrity that defines the landscape of my creative life. I listen and wonder, “Is this it? Is this all there is?”

“Well,” answers the Me of 20 Years Ago, who thought the only life worth living was one of ideas, “I hate to say, but I told you so.”

‘Ruinous mediocrity’ is an unfair accounting of my creativity, but that’s the point of good music. It taps into the sentiments and multitudes of your self that make you want to scream into the heavens. Chappell Roan lands like dynamite in a mash of gasoline yearning. Yearning for what it might mean to truly live the way you want, even if you don’t know exactly what that is. Your insides explode with desire for something, anything! Just give it to me. I’m hot to go!

And that is a marker of great art.

So as I listened, running through the port of Oakland, my pace quickened over the bayside tarmac. Roan ringing in my ears as I trotted on. I grew older with each passing second, with each pocketing footstep. But I felt, if only for a moment, a little bit younger.

Thanks for reading.

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Here’s a little pop-playlist based on my summer listening. It’s heavy on Chappell Roan with others mixed in. Ideal for easy or moderate efforts on foot or bike, you might still find yourself jazzed enough to take off on a flyer.

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Tweets of the week (DNC edition)

1. Guilty.