Chappell Roan’s Controversies Won’t Define Her Career

“This world is bullshit,” Chappell Roan recently said, during an extended TikTok rant. “You shouldn’t model your life on what we think is cool and what we’re wearing and what we’re saying and everything. Go with yourself.” All right, fine, that was actually what Fiona Apple said on the VMAs in 1997 — and at the time, Apple’s dissatisfaction with fame briefly threatened to become the essence of her brand, overshadowing the brilliance of her music. But Apple continued creating, and her songs have long since outlasted any passing controversies.

Roan is a very different artist in a very different time, but people are still violently overreacting to strong opinions from musicians, especially female ones. Roan’s insistence on boundaries with fans, her pox-on-both-sides political opinions, and her pullbacks from an over-scheduled calendar may be dominating pop discourse right now (not to mention inspiring an actually quite funny Saturday Night Live sketch) but again, that’s temporary. If anything, she’s experiencing “pop-star growing pains,” as Rolling Stone senior writer Brittany Spanos — author of our recent cover story on Roan — puts it in the latest episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, which traces Roan’s rise and much more. To hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.

Elsewhere in the episode, we discuss Roan’s in-progress second album, and her mixed feelings about the project. She veers between worrying about living up to her breakthrough, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, aiming to make something even bigger, and pondering the idea of releasing something deliberately uncommercial to ease the pressure. But the unreleased new song “The Subway,” which she’s been performing live, suggests that she practically can’t help writing huge choruses at this point. And since she’s been obsessed with Joan Jett lately and has started covering Heart onstage, the next album may bring some of the rock influences hinted at on her debut to the surface.

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