Where were you when you first heard “Casual” by Chappell Roan? In your car on the way to a miscellaneous appointment? Sitting on the train listening to music with your corded headphones?
Maybe you were me, sitting at my desk sophomore year, struggling to finish my abysmally contrived Chemistry* OneNote. Or maybe you’re reading it for the first time here in this article. Regardless, her explicit sexuality immediately stands out, expressed freely in all her music.
From dancing “Naked in Manhattan” to performing at the “Pink Pony Club,” Chappell Roan’s explicitly queer music represents what it’s like living as a queer person amidst the backdrop of “traditional family values” of small-town America.
Born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz in a trailer park in Willard, Missouri, Chappell Roan always craved something greater than her small town but also held a sense of pride regarding it. Throughout her youth, Amstutz yearned for the vibrance of a big city like LA or New York, and as a closeted queer girl growing up in the heterosexual norms of small-town Missouri, she too yearned for the freedom LA would provide for her.
In her 2020 single “Pink Pony Club,” Roan sings that she’s “having wicked dreams /Of leaving Tennessee /Hear Santa Monica /I swear it’s calling me” and feels compelled to dance at a “special place /Where boys and girls can all be queens every single day.” This bubbly ballad was inspired by a strip club in her hometown as well as Santa Monica drag culture.
Because of the pandemic, the single didn’t perform nearly as well as one would imagine, and she was dropped from her label for her “poor” performance. While quarantining in Missouri, Roan released the synth Balad “California,” a reflection on her disappointment.
In the lines “to think I almost had it going /But I let you down,” Roan feels as though she’s let down her parents and her town, losing her one chance at fame and making her parents proud. She reflects upon the stark contrast between Missouri and California, “Come get me out of California /No leaves are brown /I miss the seasons in Missouri /My dying town.”
She relates the natural fall from her record label to the brown leaves that fall from a tree in autumn. Like a dying leaf, her voice falls in a descending melody, an example of word painting used when singing the words “brown,” “dying,” and “down.” This song encapsulates Roan’s desire to leave California and return home.
Roan’s career didn’t abruptly end after moving out to California. She took a year off and later released “Casual, Red Wine Supernova,” and “HOT TO GO!,” singles that would become popular on TikTok, with “HOT TO GO!” ’s chorus accompanied by its very own dance and a spunky acapella performance by the Williams College Euphoria.
“I got a tramp stamp that says princess, and I was like, oh my god, it all makes sense, like… this works.”
Roan’s debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, pays homage to her roots with an album cover invoking images of drag and pageantry. When describing the inspiration for the album title, she explains, “I got a tramp stamp that says princess, and I was like, oh my god, it all makes sense, like… this works.”
While family and friends from her conservative past may frown upon it, Roan’s unfiltered, sexually explicit music has attracted a large, majority queer fanbase that attests self-liberation requires rebelling against the cultural norms one grows up in.
Kayleigh Amstutz’s character of the trailer park pop princess shatters many heterosexual cultural norms as well as queer norms: She’s a woman who does drag. Her alter ego of “Chappell Roan” is described as a “Drag Diva that embodies Kayleigh on stage.” The drag energy gives her confidence that allows her to tackle large sets like Coachella and even open for Olivia Rodrigo.
On tour, Roan opens her shows with a local drag performer from each local queer community. In her own hometown concert, she recalls looking out into the crowd and thinking that she’d recognize everybody in the audience, but “I hardly saw anyone in the crowd I knew.” This revelation made her wonder, “Where were all these gay people? Were they hiding?” She continues, “The fear of me not belonging was broken by knowing that there are so many queer people here.”
It’s comforting to one’s inner child that they were never alone after all. In the end, Chappell Roan is doing this for her and to reinvent herself. On stage, she wears jewelry from Claire’s and the cowboy boots she would’ve worn at thirteen years old on a Friday night out with her family. Roan reflects, “I wanted to honor that part of myself here.” She makes the music she would have wanted to hear as a kid. Her newest single, “Good Luck, Babe!” takes on compulsory heterosexuality in a sapphic relationship and is on track to become her first top-40 hit.
Chappell Roan leads a new generation of pop music and brings with it a movement of queer revelry; she proclaims, “You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling.”
