this was written to be a video essay. maybe it eventually will be, i don’t know, but the ideal time to release something like that is long past; the relevance of the moment in which it was written (i wrote most of this in april 2024) is gone. my motivation to record and edit this is low; it would be a lot of time for something I don’t feel strongly about.
but I’ve been asked to share these thoughts, and leaving a mostly-finished project languishing in my drafts feels wrong, so here it is — the script, edited for text readability. enjoy.
note: Throughout this text I’ve interspersed youtube embeds to relevant music; these are all timestamped, and will take you directly to the part of the song that I’m referencing. your enjoyment of this text will be enhanced by listening to them for a few seconds each, especially if you’re not offhand familiar already.
Intro
If you’re a lesbian college student, as I am, there’s been no escaping the rising stardom of Chappell Roan. I first encountered her music on a trip with some friends last October, and I’ve been a huge fan ever since—although, I must admit, it took me a few weeks of listening to it on repeat to learn how to pronounce Femininomenon.
Chappell Roan is a relatively new artist: she released her first album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, in 2023. While Roan has released some music before this album, and some since its release, it’s this album that I’d like to talk about today.
Midwest Princess, textually, is about being torn between a traditional, conservative Midwestern upbringing and a queer community as a young adult. It’s an excellent album with a great deal of depth and polish, well beyond what most people would expect from a new pop artist, and I believe it deserves more critical acclaim than it’s gotten even on those merits alone.
Metatextually, Chappell Roan—or rather, Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, the singer behind the persona—is someone who was herself torn between her own traditional, conservative Midwestern upbringing and a queer community as a young adult. She wrote an album about someone very much like her, and that semi-autobiographical nature is important to understand when analyzing this album.
And, finally, in looking at this album’s impact, we’d be remiss not to mention The Midwest Princess Tour. Chappell Roan’s popularity has been selling out clubs and venues across practically every small city in the Midwest. This adds further commentary to the album’s message, and hearing it live gives us yet another layer of meaning to interpret.
To summarize: Midwest Princess told a story, that was deeply interwoven with the story of the real person who made it, and then, in its explosive success, it became a part of the story it was telling, and put quite a twist on the ending.
Part 1: The Album
What’s the Point of Midwest Princess?
The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is an incredible pop album full of danceable tracks, but it’s also an album that, in its more serious moments, takes itself incredibly seriously—something that, sadly, is often overlooked by casual listeners and critics alike.
One of Midwest Princess’s major influences, Chappell Roan has said in interviews, is another album about a small-town girl being swept away from her former life: Ethel Cain’s 2022 Preacher’s Daughter, a concept album that details a girl running away from home and being swept up in the wake of various abusers, ultimately being killed and eaten.
On its surface, Roan’s pop, palatable and bright, bears little resemblance to the somber, slow tones of Preacher’s Daughter, but the underlying themes of innocent femininity being swept up in forces beyond its comprehension or control is. uh. Well. That is the thing both of the albums are about. It makes sense, seen in that light, that Roan would cite Cain as an influence.
But the albums aren’t in precisely the same style—if Preacher’s Daughter were a dense, sprawling novel, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess would be a collection of essays, or a multimedia art project: small, tightly focused vignettes that, taken together, sketch out a broader story even if it’s never explicitly told.
In that story, a young woman leaves a small town, goes to LA, and discovers her sexuality and identity through a number of fun (and disastrous) relationships. She oscillates wildly between unearned confidence and soul-shattering vulnerability, and by the end, it’s unclear whether the protagonist stays in California or returns home.
The album’s final two tracks, California and Guilty Pleasure, suggest vastly different outlooks.
In the first, she sings “come get me out of California” in the chorus, asking—no, begging for an escape from the spectacle and “always-on” nature of show business. Just listen to how this song fades out into silence:
It evokes a retreat, a fade away from the pomp and performance that is all of Midwest Princess.
Contrast this, then, with the end of Guilty Pleasure—an exuberant, yodeling bridge into a final chorus, evoking nothing if not being pulled further and further into the performance—fading, yes, but in quite the opposite direction.
This isn’t a retreat away from pomp and performance, it’s a retreat into it—it’s the other choice.
Midwest Princess exists in the space between Midwestern guilt and queer joy—it is an album that is fundamentally about the tension between those two things.
Midwestern culture, for those unfamiliar, values nothing if not modesty—sexually, yes, but also in a more personal sense; humility, even, to the point of putting others above oneself. If you accidentally bump into a Midwesterner, they’ll apologize to you; an East Coaster would scowl or glare.
Queer culture, on the other hand, is about—well—pride! Queerness is about being open with sexuality, it’s about being unapologetically yourself, taking up the space you deserve—it is, in many ways, diametrically opposed to some core aspects of Midwesternness.
And, of course, undertones of evangelical Christianity are strongly present in the Midwest, a religious practice that is often intensely opposed to queer people existing, a hatred that is often reciprocated in queer people’s attitudes towards religion and the Midwest.
The dominant queer culture and the dominant Midwestern culture are often at odds, and so the intersection between queerness and Midwesterness is something that hasn’t been explored much in media to this point. The stereotypical queer person is coastal, from LA, NYC, Seattle, or some other major metropolis. The stereotypical Midwestern person, especially outside of big cities, is… if not explicitly homophobic, oftentimes more subtly so.
So what do you do, when you’re Midwestern and queer? Your upbringing demands that you act one way, your community suggests another, you’re the rope pulled taut to the point of breaking—
Well, if you’re Chappell Roan, you write Pink Pony Club, literally making that dialogue explicit, quoting your mother on one hand and evoking the club, a space in support of sexuality and loud, brash self-expression, as the opposition.
It’s extremely relevant that Pink Pony was the first single published for this project, years before it would eventually release.
Then, you build an entire album around that core, fleshing out those ideas, poking at different facets of them—and you have The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, an album exploring that tug-of-war dialogue within the self.
I’d like to talk now about two specific ways that it does this: the recontextualization of conservative/homophobic language, and consistent musical choices that directly contrast queerness from Midwesternness.
Reclaiming The Polite Insult
The first way that Midwest Princess accomplishes this lofty narrative goal is through the recontextualization of language that is typically used by Midwestern homophobes to ‘politely’ slight queer people.
Instead of using these things in a derogatory context, though, Roan reclaims (or satirizes) this language that’s not-quite-slurs, but that she, as a queer woman from the Midwest, is certainly used to hearing in a less-than-positive context.
Midwest Princess’s adornment of peppy party tracks with this reclaimed language is subtle at first, but once you start hearing it, you can’t miss it.
Pink Pony Club is unsubtle in this regard. It features Chappell reflecting on her “wicked dreams of leaving Tennessee”, worrying about how “it’s gonna cause a scene” — Midwestern respectability at its finest, nothing worse than causing a scene — and, in the chorus, letting it be known that the club is “where she belongs”—something that might be hurled as an insult, but that she instead chooses to wear with… well, pride.
Guilty Pleasure, too, is drenched in synths and queerness—and, of course, shame, too. How could this song not be about unlearning shame as a Midwestern queer? The song is literally called Guilty Pleasure what do you want from me here.
There are so many absolutely brilliant moments throughout this song: The pre-chorus: “shame on me, and shame on you”, the fadeout—and I’d be remiss not to mention the dazzling couplet from the chorus, “Oh my god, you are heaven sent / with your dirty mind, yeah, you’re perverted”—God, heaven, perversions, there’s so much packed into this and it manages not to feel overdone!
Guilty Pleasure is a perfect antidote to shame, reclaiming its language and framing to say “you don’t have to worry about this anymore”.
The album’s other songs are subtler, but the theme is undeniably present.
After Midnight, for example, turns the cautious words of a mother on their heads (once again pitting Mother against The Club), shouting exuberantly that “everything good happens after midnight”, and the song wears its “freakiness” proudly.
I could pull out these themes forever, but I think three is sufficient to demonstrate my point. Midwest Princess is intentionally engaged in the reclamation of conservative language about queerness, and that’s part of how it contrasts and ties together those two core themes.
The Sounds of Two Worlds
The second way that Midwest Princess explores the Midwest/queer dichotomy is in its production, specifically the instrumental choices used for different songs.
In brief: Midwesternness on this album is represented by acoustic sounds, especially string instruments and pianos, while queerness is represented by digital production and pounding drums.
This makes sense—Chappell’s model of queerness, as discussed in interviews and made extremely apparent by Pink Pony Club, is shaped by, well, queer clubs and bars, and so many of the queer songs she writes are set in and around those spaces—think about After Midnight, Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl, HOT TO GO!, and, of course, Pink Pony Club itself.
This contrast is extremely apparent listening to Pink Pony Club, where the first verse—set with Chappell still in Tennessee, being called by LA but not yet having answered—is set to a gentle piano:
Then, once she’s in LA, the driving force of the music is taken over by a powerful synthesized sound, which persists into the next verse, taking over where the piano played before:
After the second chorus, though, in the bridge, where Chappell is remembering her family and thinking of her mother, the synthesizer fades and the piano’s back once again:
And after the final chorus, as she reaffirms her devotion to the club with the words “I’m gonna keep on dancing”, the synthesizers are as exuberant as ever, and the piano and softer acoustics are nowhere to be heard.
This pattern can be seen throughout the album. In songs where she’s thinking of home almost exclusively, like California, the instrumentation is almost exclusively acoustic.
On the other hand, in tracks like Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl or HOT TO GO!, the music is almost exclusively electronic.
You could argue that this is just a matter of the sections of music that are more upbeat being about queerness, and the slower sections being about family and Midwesternness, which would make the association between instrumentation and theme merely coincidental.
But what about Coffee and Casual? Both are slower ballads about exes and hurt feelings, but Coffee conforms much more closely to traditional Midwestern “standards”, and is explicitly about a man, whereas Casual is—well, it’s about casual sex, so less typically Midwestern, and the gender of the other party is never specified (well, except in the music video, where she’s a woman).
Coffee, the more “typically Midwestern” song, features extremely acoustic-heavy production with little percussion:
whereas Casual, despite being a slow track, leans heavily on a base of percussive, more produced music—and is significantly closer, in its themes, to queerness—or at least further from “normal” Midwesternness.
So it’s not just about the sound or tempo of a song—I believe that this is sufficient evidence to make the claim that this instrumental difference is meant to coincide with a song’s lyrical themes. If you’re not convinced, listen to Midwest Princess again with this in mind—it’s all over, once you start listening for it.
I could spend the rest of my time analyzing the text and sound of this wonderful album, digging into every song, and while I’m tempted, I think it’s important to examine it in more ways than just that—because if we want to understand Chappell Roan and her work in its true context, we need to look at the person who made it.
What we need now is to understand the connection between the writer Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, and the mask named Chappell Roan that she wears.
Part 2: The Writer
Semi-autobiographical Pop Albums
Midwest Princess, as I’ve previously articulated, is a semi-autobiographical album that’s based on the real lived experiences of Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, but while parts of it are directly accurate to her life (California, for example, reads to me as directly true to Kayleigh), other parts are more fictionalized.
Pink Pony Club’s protagonist/point-of-view character is from Tennessee, not Missouri, but is otherwise relatively close to what Kayleigh’s said about her experience.
Other songs, like Red Wine Supernova and Casual, imagine entire relationships and situations that Kayleigh hasn’t experienced—that’s pure Chappell Roan.
This style that I’m calling semi-autobiography—half autobiography, half character portrait, all channeled into a compact narrative—is present in one other extremely notable pop album.
I haven’t seen Midwest Princess compared to this album much before—but without this album and its influence on the pop sphere, I doubt The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess would look anything like it does today.
I’m talking, of course, about Taylor Swift’s sixth studio album, reputation.
If you’re somehow unfamiliar with reputation, let me summarize to give you some context.
When reputation was written, Taylor Swift’s public image was as bad as it’s ever been. Conflict with other celebrities, media slander, and other scandals marred her.
She went dormant, disappearing from the public eye for months. When she re-emerged, it was straight into the hype cycle for reputation, an album that, on its face, exaggerates every stereotype and insult flung at her and paints it as part of the character.
This album is, essentially, a character portrait—but not just any character: it’s the character of “Taylor Swift If Everything They Said About Her Were True”. Like Midwest Princess, reputation is semi-autobiographical: it plays with the truth, exaggerating for narrative consistency and effect.
Songs like Ready For It and I Did Something Bad revel in promiscuity, while Look What You Made Me Do and This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things play up elements of irrationality and capriciousness.
But! At the same time, reputation concerns itself intently with the difference between public image and private life. In Delicate, Call It What You Want, New Year’s Day, and others, Swift makes clear that — even if this character she’s painting projects a mask of indifference — she’s also fundamentally reliant on other people.
The tenderness, caring, and weakness that’s expressed in these songs makes reputation an excellent argument for separating the public mask from the real person within—not to say that the mask isn’t real, but simply to remember that that isn’t all there is.
The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is very similar, in this way. It’s easy, listening to this album, to be deafened by blaring synths and the gorgeous cacophony of Roan’s club music, and not hear the quieter, more elegant tracks about what happens on the ride home—but Midwest Princess can’t be reduced to just one of its component pieces.
Like reputation, Midwest Princess is a focused, precise conceptual album that won’t always be recognized as such because of catchy pop singles. But the contrast between catchy singles and both albums’ deeper cuts, like New Year’s Day and California respectively, demonstrates that—even if some songs on their own don’t seem like it—the album as a whole has a great deal of emotional nuance.
I think the comparison goes deeper than that, too. In both albums, the central, conceptual character is a heightened version of the real artist behind the work — the Taylor Swift presented by reputation is an exaggerated version of every stereotype that was thrown at her in the era, and Chappell Roan in Midwest Princess is an exaggerated version of the massive ups and downs that Kayleigh Rose Amstutz experienced getting started in the music industry.
Both of them push outward with a powerful, independent energy, projecting that the world can do them no harm in songs like Look What You Made Me Do and Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl. But both albums simultaneously portray the fundamental reliance of their central characters on other people, in songs like Delicate and Casual.
Even the structure of the order of the tracks is similar between the two albums! They have a similar number of songs — reputation carrying fifteen to Midwest Princess’s fourteen.
Both albums open with some of their most “mask-on” songs, Femininomenon and Ready For It establishing the characters as they would like to be seen before turning the heat down steadily. They still carry energy through their opening lineups with End Game and Red Wine Supernova, but by track 5, Taylor is playing Delicate, Chappell is playing Casual, and the characters are exposing their vulnerability to the audience for all to see.
This, too, is an important part of the albums’ stories—it’s no coincidence that despite being relatively “chiller” songs compared to the rest of their respective albums, both Delicate and Casual got music videos and are widely respected as some of the “best” songs on both albums, Pitchfork calling Casual the “high point” of Midwest Princess and complimenting Delicate in a review that’s otherwise quite unkind to reputation as a whole.
If you listen to either album straight through, it feels like layers peeling away, giving you insights into more and more facets of this character who’s so much more complicated than the mask they wear.
Pop full of bravado is steadily revealed as false—or at least incomplete—as the albums’ hard-hitting ballads take apart the deeper emotions of their characters.
It’s a brilliant formula. It’s why reputation is my favorite of Swift’s albums, even before the re-recording releases. And it’s clear, I think, from the similarities we’ve just outlined, that Chappell Roan took some inspiration from it.
I risk going too far, however, with this comparison. reputation is the sixth studio album of a megastar coming off a world tour (and mired in career-threatening scandal), while Midwest Princess is the first album of a young queer woman trying to make it in LA.
Both of them were written in a way that’s closely tied to their writers’ experiences, but since those experiences were extremely different, so are the albums.
reputation revolves around someone who’s in the public eye, and is deeply concerned with, well, reputation—how it’s shaped, how it shapes us, and, ultimately, how it can just… fade into the distance to make a quiet moment possible.
Midwest Princess is about someone moving from a small, conservative town to LA to seek their fortune, finding queerness and joy along the way, and having to reckon with their place, split between two irreconcilable worlds.
reputation was written to be performed in stadiums. Midwest Princess is written for clubs, local venues. I could go on. Despite their thematic similarities, the albums inhabit different worlds.
These are two of my favorite pop albums ever. But ultimately, I think Midwest Princess is a better album than reputation!
Midwest Princess captures a more relatable subject matter than reputation does (unless you’re another global superstar, in which case I’m sure reputation was highly relatable to you).
Midwest Princess brings an absolutely unmatchable amount of energy to its ups and downs, swinging from one polar extreme to the other, rising to a higher pitch of passion than Swift manages in reputation, and then diving deeper into the depths of despair.
On her debut album, Roan pulls out better pop songs than pop legend Taylor Swift can write!
Beyond that, the framing of the album as a cohesive story about a character is much stronger in Roan’s album than Swift’s.
Swift has, partly out of necessity being the biggest pop star in the world, had to sanitize parts of herself to make them more palatable. Just look at Swift’s 2022 track Karma—
I loved this song, I thought it was really fun, and then, I heard the hook to My Kink Is Karma, a single off Midwest Princess, from the first time:
After hearing that in the car with my friends, my first words were: “oh, this is what Taylor Swift wanted to write.” I don’t think I’ve listened to Swift’s Karma since without wishing, a little bit, that it were Chappell Roan’s take on the theme instead.
Roan fills her songs with innuendo, crude humor, and unapologetic queer joy in a way that fills my little gay heart. Just listen to the bridge from Red Wine Supernova!
Many people cast her as “tasteless” or “irreverent” for lyrics like those, and I can see where they’re coming from—but I think they’re wrong!
Just look at how Pitchfork describes Femininomenon’s place on the album:
“As the album opener, “Femininomenon” feels like a test of listeners’ tolerance, designed to drive away those that can’t hang with the excess of it all. At the same time, such gags function as decoys, distracting from how sturdy and studied Roan’s songcraft actually can be.”
Femininomenon isn’t a decoy! It’s as much part of the album as any track! It’s just highlighting a different part of the story that Roan wants to tell, and using different genres to do it is just part of Midwest Princess’s genius! The “excess” and “studied songcraft” both are fundamentally part of the story that Midwest Princess is telling!
Midwest Princess treats several subjects with a great deal of care, it just doesn’t care to do so for all of them. How could you call California’s heartwrenching exploration of homesickness “tasteless”?
Ultimately, it’s in these wild swings, the bold, brash excesses in every direction, that Midwest Princess distinguishes itself from reputation.
If reputation is a gorgeous painting, Midwest Princess feels like being thrust into a world of clubs and loneliness and the joy of 3am and the pain of hanging up the phone and Chappell Roan you’ve transported us into this world.
To comprehend just how Midwest Princess accomplishes this, we need to look into the life of its creator, and understand what I mean when I call it a ‘semi-autobiographical’ pop album.
Kayleigh Rose Amstutz
Unlike Taylor Swift, Kayleigh Rose Amstutz wasn’t given a name with the consideration of how it would look on a resume, headline, or poster.
Amstutz was brought up in a small conservative Midwestern town, Willard, Missouri. With 6,000 people in the rural Midwest, it’s certainly not where you’d expect a pop star to come from.
She was discovered by Atlantic Records when she was posting covers of other songs on YouTube during the latter half of high school, and signed with them and moved to Los Angeles while still only seventeen years old.
After the release of single Pink Pony Club in April 2020 didn’t go as well as her record label hoped (a party song? in April 2020? Unlucky, really), they dropped her, and she had to move back to the Midwest.
She describes being dropped in interviews as “the best thing that could’ve happened in my career” because it “lit a fire under my ass, like, I have to try to make this work.”
She tried to make music while back in the Midwest, but eventually decided to move back to LA, releasing singles as an independent artist and gathering further acclaim before ultimately signing with Island Records and releasing The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess in mid-2023.
The album had been years in the making. Pink Pony Club came out in 2020, and throughout the three and a half years between Pink Pony and Midwest Princess, Kayleigh Rose Amstutz never stopped writing music, wrapping experiences and thoughts from an entire era of her life into this album.
Her story, and the self-discovery that she’s been doing throughout the creation of this album, bled into the songs in countless ways. In interviews, she discusses how, despite pressure from labels and producers to change the sound, the lyrics, the vibes—she knew that she had something that was good, and she kept it how she wanted it.
Now, she may have known it was good, but even she was surprised by the response it received. Midwest Princess immediately generated acclaim, and started a wave of public excitement that’s carried her celebrity to new heights.
One place that rising stardom has manifested has been, of course, The Midwest Princess Tour, and any story about this album’s impact on the world would be incomplete without talking about it.
(Editor’s note: again, i wrote this in early 2024, before Good Luck, Babe released and Chappell blew up. Much of the following is loosely outdated as a result)
Part 3: The Tour
Summary of the Tour
The Midwest Princess Tour was Chappell Roan’s first headlining tour, though she’s opened for acts like Olivia Rodrigo before. In it, she visited venues of around 1,000 people across the world, but was predominantly focused on the United States and, within the States, the Midwest in particular.
In each stop, Roan’s team found local drag queens to perform her opening act, which made every show different and connected her headlining performance to a smaller, more local community.
Especially in places where drag has been banned, or restricted to 18+ shows, these performances had a significant impact on the local community.
The tour has been wildly successful: Roan’s popularity has skyrocketed since it was scheduled. Nearly every show has been sold out, with resale prices (at least, in one city where I was hoping to see it again) around $150-200 per ticket.
I saw it in Des Moines, after a long drive with a few other people from my college who were similarly obsessed—and the night was magical, something that stating facts and figures can’t possibly capture. So, I’d like to depart from any semblance of critical objectivity, and tell you how this tour made me feel:
What This Tour Did To Me
Both Chappell Roan, the character, and Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, the person, were young queer kids in the Midwest who didn’t feel like their queerness had a place here in the Midwest. Both of them went to LA to find that place.
And now, through the Midwest Princess Tour, both of them are back here, forging that place for Midwestern queer kids like them.
Midwest Princess acknowledges the seeming impossibility of reconciling queerness and Midwesternness, shame and joy, into one thing. Chappell Roan, the character, only escapes the contradiction by leaving (and for that matter, so does Kayleigh herself).
But now they’re back, playing this tour in all kinds of small Midwestern cities, bringing local drag queens at every show to perform in front of local crowds, using a national presence to strengthen local queer communities in places where, ‘traditionally’, they’d have been relegated to informal whisper networks and a couple of bars.
Hearing this show, in which she performs all of Midwest Princess, in a room full of people from all over my state (or any other Midwestern state), is an incredible experience.
Whether they’re doing the explicit media analysis or not, every single queer Midwesterner in that room knows, on some level, what that album is about—knows it’s about us, people struggling with the same inherent contradiction we struggle from.
Every song landed exactly right: that album was meant to be performed in rooms just like the one I was in. Upbeat party songs let us dance, sadder, more downbeat songs let us reflect, and the living, beating heart of Midwest Princess, the push and pull of those two cultures, is alive in every single one of us in that room, the whole way through the night.
By the time Chappell Roan gets to Pink Pony Club, the last song of the night, the message is burned into all of us—that the apparent conflict of culture doesn’t have to be there, that we can be Midwestern and queer, and that there are thousands and thousands of people just like us selling out shows all over the Midwest.
The Impact
Midwest Princess, the tour, is the perfect answer to Midwest Princess, the album. Because the album says, here’s this tension between who we are, our queerness, our community in that, and where we’re from, our region, our community in that. The album exposes that tension, documents it in all kinds of little forms.
And then you go to this show, where a thousand queer people just like you have sold out this room, and you’re all coming here for the exact same reason, and the tension is still there, but you’re not alone in it, and just by existing there, you’re proving that the tension isn’t irreconcilable, that we can have community as queer Midwesterners and we don’t have to sacrifice any part of ourselves to do that.
Chappell Roan understands this impact well. In an interview, she talked about how Pink Pony Club is a song about the impact that a safe, queer space had on her as a young woman, and she’s incredibly happy to be able to provide the same space to others:
“all I want to offer as a human is to make a space where there is joy, where there wasn’t before. that is like magic, to be able to walk into a room that was empty, and there was no feelings, and now there’s feelings, like, of happiness. I don’t think there’s anything else that I could want more than that.”
Through this incredible art, Chappell Roan has captured something fundamental about Midwestern queerness, and is making masterful pop songs, too.
She’s quickly becoming a star. Already, I feel lucky to have gotten to see Chappell Roan in a thousand-person room—because the next time I get the chance, it might be in a stadium of ten thousand, or more.
(I wrote that in April 2024. Still hope I get to see her again, but yeah, there’s no chance it’ll be in a room that small.)
Conclusion
Pop music is not going to singlehandedly change the world, and Chappell Roan has never been trying to.
But music—and art in general—can give voice to feelings unspoken, make a new space visible, and for the thousands of people who filled rooms several nights a week on The Midwest Princess Tour, that space is full of people feeling those same once-unspoken feelings we are.
The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess doesn’t say anything about how to “solve” the contradiction of worlds between Midwesternness and queerness. Even the tour doesn’t do that—maybe the contradiction stops mattering for a night, but hungover in the morning it’s still as there as ever.
Chappell Roan, in Midwest Princess, has voiced the contradiction, given us a place to start, and, perhaps, helped us connect to the people who we’re going to start with.
Now, it’s up to us — the people who give her her Spotify streams, her YouTube views, her concert audiences — especially the queer Midwesterners — to do something about it.
Chappell Roan might be the loudest voice talking about Midwestern queerness, and she’s brought the tension to a new degree of awareness—
but the contradiction will be solved by people like us building community, caring for each other, and bringing the two worlds, which for so long have seemed diametrically opposed, into some kind of common orbit.
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