You have to stop the world just to stop a feeling

(On Chappell Roan)

The most deep 90’s thing that ever happened to me was when I saw Lady Miss Kier and Super DJ Dmitry from Deee-Lite shopping in The Body Shop on Kings Road, the very month Groove Is In The Heart was number 2 in the charts. I was thirteen years old, at that stage where part of your face are growing at different paces - my expression was long, my hair was short - you don’t understand you look like the glorious person you’re going to become, reflected horribly in the back of a spoon. I was not feeling all that great about myself the afternoon Lady Miss Kier (who had such an off the chain body she was wearing her Pucci catsuit out in the wide world, in The Body Shop) signed an autograph:

“EMMA! YOU are DEEE-GROOVY!!!”

At the peak of her fame, she gave me a flake of her aura and if an investigator ever searches for clues under my nails like they did with Laura Palmer’s corpse in Twin Peaks (which I also deeply invested in at thirteen) they’d find I’ve been clinging to her opinion of me for decades.  Amazon two star reviews, floating around the ether, saying my memoir is narcissistic? Lady Miss Kier put a riposte down in writing!

The media’s default setting is to fretfully ask how icons of popular culture shape our children’s minds but, let me ask you the same question with a different intonation: how do they shape our children’s minds? And this is where I point you to Chappell Roan, and think how lucky for those kids coming of age with her music and her persona, as I was in the era of Lady Miss K and Neneh Cherry.

The 26 year old singers debut album is called The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess and came out last year to critical acclaim, so so sales, “queer” devotion (so much queer devotion that someone Chappell labelled “some Twink at Google” altered the search engine so when you type her name it says “Your favourite artist’s favourite artist”). Her success was so minor that she wasn’t invited to flex her boundless creativity at The Met Gala despite going to a major awards ceremony dressed as Miss Piggy and appearing on stage as The Statue of Liberty.

Touring as the opener for pop princess Olivia Rodrigo, she started to build towards “overnight sensation”, despite having been making music for a decade (like Rodrigo, Roan’s producer and collaborator in songwriting is Dan Nigro). Her latest single, “Good Luck, Babe!” was released last month and is everywhere, her first to crack the top ten. The cheery exclamation point of its title conjuring the Gen Z “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” (hint for anyone unfamiliar with Bob Dylan - it’s not alright). Another pop princess, Sabrina Carpenter - who like Rodrigo is the old school binary version of feminine - recently covered it.

I was doing something domestic when “Good Luck, Babe!” stopped me dead in my tracks, the blood rushing from my face then rushing back in like the ocean.

“You have to stop the world just to stop a feeling” go the heart stopping words of the melodically effervescent chorus. Oof. How many of us recognise this impulse: When you drink or binge and purge or cut, you stop the world just to stop the feeling. It was so confronting. And so danceable!

I’ll say, when I first heard it, I was reaching for a Kelloggs box in the cereal aisle because that’s cinematic, but I might have been hanging the laundry, trying to think laterally about how to make underwear dry in a summer of English rain. I don’t think I’ve been this messed up by a dominant song that was absolutely not intended for me since the Moana soundtrack (of that, I recall breaking down in a back street in Glendale).

With Moana I lost my composure at ‘We Know The Way’ because, though it’s a Polynesian story, it spoke of what I connect to most in Judaism (“We tell the story of our elders in a never ending chain”). But I was also crying for what Lin Manuel Miranda has brought to popular culture. That someone that gifted and that pure hearted has been accepted by the majority. We are so used to some version of the story of Van Gogh, dying penniless and despised. You want to get on your knees when the right person receives love in their life time. This is compounded by the fact that the two extraordinary ballads on Roan’s album - ‘California’ and ‘Casual’ - make, between them a a call and response to ‘The Boxer’ by Simon and Garfunkel. Songs about not getting to become what you moved to the city to do, about not being loved, and going home in shame.

Consider the album title - The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess. The midwestern is very much part of the story (Roan is from Missouri). It means you have more to lose. You’ve come from further away. You didn’t grow up with this kind of experimental fashion and music like a London girl or NY city kid - it means you found it and it saved you.

The experimental look? Well, if you seek out her YouTube clips from when she was a teenager, Chappell had the same small, delicate components as Olivia Rodrigo or Sabrina Carpenter. But come the time of stardom, she was evoking Better Midler in her baths period, a triangle of long curly red hair, and like Bette she is a pocket Venus (curvy but compact). She sometimes dresses as Divine (John Waters’ muse, who was a man dressed as a woman). She definitely calls to mind comparison with vintage Cyndi Lauper in that, if you are spectacularly talented, if your octave range is unimpeachable, you don’t have to be serious. “What is happening here?” Is the best you can ask for in art, and in sex.

It isn’t wrong at all to want to be pretty. But it’s interesting to be pretty and chase what shapes that can be arranged into. Gaga did that too, but Gaga is efficient and increasingly so. Gaga takes herself so seriously, like when she made the Best Supporting Actress round table stare at their collective feet as she said “You know when you pretend to drink and you really feel drunk??” Now Gaga’s not wrong to take herself seriously - she’s fantastically talented! And women should have confidence in the importance of their art. But Roan’s lightness of touch, paired with her great singing and songwriting skill is, if not a relief, then certainly a release.

Chappell Roan is complicated, contains multitudes, is a freak, is achingly vulnerable, had deliberate lipstick stains on her teeth for a key gig (The NPR Tiny Desk performance). This is of interest in a culture of performative moral narcissism. The whole body exhale of watching someone who is overtly performative and they actually know they’re doing it.

‘Hot To Go’ Includes the immortal couplet “Baby do you like this beat? I made it so you’d sleep with me” and when I heard it, I wanted to punch the air. THIS IS WHY WE MAKE ART. I don’t know if it’s why Colm Toibin makes art - but it might be!! It’s why I write books and then I - if it’s a strong piece - forget that’s what I was doing and it becomes it’s own thing. But that’s where it starts: who I want to go to bed with, and how what I’m working on will draw them to me.

I know I’ve quoted a lot of her lyrics, but as a crafter of sentences, I truly admire them- with a final shout out to ‘Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl’:

“Making out whilst the world collapses”.

If the world is about to end, and she’s the band on the Titanic playing us out? Well that’s a great fuckin’ band to go on. Like I said, when I first heard her, I was figuring out how to get my laundry to dry. In a summer of Chappell Roan and English rain, maybe the right answer is: you wear weird things as underwear or no underwear at all.

A Chappell Roan adjacent Playlist:

Rock Lobster by B-52’s

All of the World Clique album by Deee-Lite

Just A City by Voice Of The Beehive

Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

All Through The Night by Cyndi Lauper

Long Long Time by Linda Ronstadt

A Chappell Roan movie list

Hairspray (original)

Mean Girls (double bill of both)

The House Bunny

Ladies and Gentlemen The Fabulous Stains

Times Square

Wish Your Were Here (so British, but Chappell is prime “Up yer bum!” energy).