It’s been pretty much smooth sailing for Chappell Roan for close to a year now. Since the release of her debut album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, the 26-year-old singer has found more and more fans and climbed higher and higher on the charts. Turns out that every smooth ride will inevitably hit turbulence at some point: last month, Chappell called out sections of her own fanbase for transgressing boundaries in her personal life. “I’ve been in too many non-consensual physical and social interactions and I just need to lay it out and remind you, women don’t owe you shit,” she wrote on Instagram. The Instagram post – a short essay in carousel form – was a follow-up to an August TikTok in which the singer vented about people trying to stalk her and her family under the guise of fan behaviour. It laid out her boundaries in no uncertain terms. “I do not accept harassment of any kind because I chose this path, nor do I deserve it.”
It’s become a depressingly common refrain from stars in recent years, who increasingly have to contend with superfans who don’t understand the difference between standom and stalking. Ethel Cain has said in no uncertain terms that she would “love to have a much smaller fanbase” and that some of her fans make her feel like “a dancing monkey in a circus.” Mitski has retreated from any semblance of public life, including social media, due to fan overreach. Phoebe Bridgers, hardly known as a particularly reclusive star, told the website Them last year that “people … who claim to like my music, fucking bullied me at the airport on the way to my father’s funeral this year. Even Taylor Swift – who exists on a plane of celebrity that would seemingly inure one to public discourse – expressed the feeling that fans are taking too much ownership over her private life on “But Daddy I Love Him,” the centrepiece of this year’s The Tortured Poets Department.
Right now, mainstream-ish pop doesn’t have a unifying aesthetic – the stuff on the charts runs the gamut from Chappell-style pastiche to SZA’s unadorned naturalism to whatever Tommy Richman is doing – which means that the dominant narrative of pop stardom in the 2020s has become, by attrition, clashing with your own fans. The most interesting part of Chappell’s saga – headline news for its staunchness and delivery method, but unsurprising for anyone who follows pop closely and understands the general rhythms of a rise to fame – is working out what she’ll do next.
Chappell cut through because she offers a counterpoint to pop’s feedback loop.
It’s hardly new for a celebrity to feel constricted by fame: basically every pop star except Madonna has experienced a fame freakout at one point or another. But where artists like George Michael and Britney Spears were reacting to a craven media industry that sought to exploit their private lives and most vulnerable moments, stars in the 2020s are more often pushing back directly on their own fanbases, who have now internalised the tabloidy impulse to know everything about an artist’s private life under the guise of fandom. Artists have seen tabloid journalists and paparazzi as vultures looking to make a quick buck off their suffering for decades, but it’s harder to make peace with a group of people who both pay your bills and seem to have no respect for you as a person.
Doja Cat took a drastic path: she discouraged fans from self-identifying as “Kittenz,” a prospective fan army name a la Swifties or Little Monsters. “If you call yourself a ‘Kitten’ or fucking ‘Kittenz’ that means you need to get off your phone and get a job,” she wrote on Threads. (She later called one fan “creepy as fuck” and refused to tell another she loved them, “cuz I don’t even know y’all.”) In the immediate aftermath of her social media spree, Doja received backlash of the genre Chappell is receiving right now: Didn’t you ask for this by choosing fame? But while many stars might crave fame and popularity in the early stages of their career, it’s almost impossible to anticipate how that will look in real life. Doja’s antagonistic rejection of her fanbase – which carried through to her latest album, Scarlet – gave voice to a shared feeling that stars have about their fanbases but don’t say for fear of reprisal or backlash: “You follow me, but you don’t really care about the music.”
Doja’s response to fan behaviour is outlandish but kind of brilliant; I think there’s undeniably something thrilling about hearing an artist, especially one as famous as her, rejecting an infrastructure that’s often seen as crucial to maintaining and growing a career in pop music. But, instinctively, you just know that Chappell could never follow a path like that: where Doja built her career on trolling, Chappell’s success is predicated on earnest emotionality and the idea that everyone is accepted. Going villain mode can work for some, but I’d be willing to bet that it would cause something of an image issue for Chappell.
In many ways, the emotional landscape of Chappell’s music, as well as her rapid jump from niche concern to TikTok darling, is reminiscent of Mitski’s relatively recent mainstream rise. After going viral, Mitski retreated from most public life entirely and lay down ground rules, some clearly delineated and some implicit, for the way she wants her fanbase to interact with her. She deleted social media, set a no-phones policy at shows, and spoke out about “reductive” sad girl memes. Yet her fanbase has continued to grow, and – depending on who you ask – get more annoying. (Two fans were recently filmed at London’s All Points East festival camped out in front of the stage, watching Netflix as they waited for Mitski to perform, as other artists played). Mitski’s various appeals didn’t really assuage her superfans; although pleading with fans, and putting guardrails in place, seems like it might be the most likely route for Chappell to take when it comes to dealing with her newfound fandom, it’s not necessarily one that will deal with the root problem.
She could, of course, always take another road – dealing with it in music. This can either go very badly, and result in an album like Billie Eilish’s woe-is-me, fame-hating dirge Happier Than Ever, or go very well, and result in a song like FKA Twigs’s woe-is-me, fame-hating masterpiece “Cellophane.” But Chappell’s music has cut through this year precisely because it seems to offer a fantastical, accessible counterpoint to the insular feedback loop that pop became in the past half-decade. It seems like the only real option, when it comes to curbing the sharp growth of her fanbase that’s been occurring over the past year, is to make an album that outright rejects the sound she’s been focussed on thus far. This would make her something of an equivalent to MGMT circa Congratulations or Feist around the time of Metals, following up a pop crossover moment with a wilfully niche follow-up that alienates locals.
Or, maybe, she could just keep fighting with her fans. If hating celebrity is the overwhelming flavour of modern pop, maybe it’s worthwhile for a figurehead like Chappell to emerge, whose impassioned TikToks are far blunter and more legible than other musicians’ appeals to their fans, and which turn what is usually niche internet drama into mainstream news. Just like Madonna made a name for herself through sexual expression, and Taylor Swift through heart-on-sleeve earnestness, Chappell could be the popstar who embodies good-hearted antagonism for future generations. Good luck, babe.