How To Know Where You Stand on Chappell Roan While Your House Is Underwater

Despite Chappell Roan bursting onto the scene from nowhere sometime in the last year, so quickly that I really had no time to digest who she was, learn how her name was pronounced, and distinguish her from Sabrina Carpenter in my head before I was already shamefully out of the loop. Nevertheless, it is October 2024 and I still have a impeccable record of never going on Google to actually figure any of that out. A record I intend to keep throughout the writing of this article, if only because I’m writing this at work and having her Wikipedia up is more blatantly not relevant to my work than an open Word doc, but I don’t think I’m kidding anyone. So, while there may be some misinformation in this article, I make up for it with the purity of my insight based entirely on the piecemeal perception I have of this girl that has been formed one tweet at a time.

Let me break the current situation down for you (to the extent that I understand it). Simply put, Chappell Roan is voting for Kamala Harris but not endorsing her. For some reason this opinion, which I would have expected was the case for the majority of Harris’s bloc, has kicked off a firestorm of unprecedented levels around Chapell Roan. I have even seen the words ‘tour cancellation’ and ‘mental health’ mentioned in the context of Roan but who knows whether this is related to any of that.

At the same time as this, we have been experiencing a bout of floods wreaking havoc seemingly all over the world, which is nice because it makes it relevant for my American readers just as much as my British readers, maybe moreso. The British floods are, like any good British thing, more understated and sophisticated than the gung-ho hurricane floods in America. In America however, there has also been a disappointing “[Insert President] doesn’t care about black people”-type response from the Biden-Harris administration, which ties in nicely to the Chappell Roan stuff. You see how all news is interlinked and no story exists without the background of many others? Neither one of these stories could have happened without the other, they’re symbiotic. I believe there are also floods in Poland recently, so a hearty hello to any Poles that are sleeping in a community centre and reading this with the last few flickering percentage points of phone charge that you have left.

So, as the rain was cascading down the motorway/highway and you were speeding home to check on your house, you might have been served up a video by the algorithm on your social media platform of choice. I’m not going to judge those who drive while on their phones, it’s the only way to keep up with this gripping 24-hour news cycle at the same time as drafting evacuation plans in your head. Anyway, this video was of Chappell Roan, an American popstar, talking to the camera about her politics, saying “Fuck some of the policies on the right… but also fuck some of the policies on the left.” You’d really think no one could have a problem with this take, who disagrees that all politicians are bad? No one, right? Anyway, personally I didn’t watch more than a minute of one her videos because she has a voice like a cartoon character. Not that I don’t like cartoons but seeing a cartoon voice come out of a live-action face crosses wires in my brain that don’t need to be crossed. I’m sure you’ll have experienced the same thing if you’ve ever seen an interview of a Simpsons voice actor doing their trademark voices rather than going off the grid and pretending not to be a real person, a place in society that their occupation should surely dictate. Unfortunately, even if, like me, you just watched the first minute, your car was likely washed away by the flood waters in that time because apparently water levels only need to be 30cm deep to carry a car downstream.

One factor that I admit will split the viewer base of Roan’s video into agreeing or disagreeing with her, is whether or not they hate women. This might seem counter-intuitive because disagreeing with Chappell Roan in this instance means that you’re an outspoken fan of Kamala Harris (who is
also a woman), but any true woman-hater will not think it through that much, for them it’s simply a case of hating the woman who is in front of them righ now, don’t get hung up on the big picture. If you had abandoned your car to the flood and were wading back home with the video fresh in your mind, you might reel at the suggestion that you’re a misogynist. ‘I hate Chappell Roan but not because I’m a misogynist, I reel at that suggestion!’ you were probably thinking as you struggled through the wet rubble to save your wife and daughters trapped in the house. But if you look just beneath the surface, you’ll see that any kind of problem with a woman could be a result of unconscious misogyny. For example, you might think you hate them because they have a cartoon voice, but really you hate to hear a young woman speaking earnestly. Unlike me. For me it’s just the cartoon thing. And let’s be real, the fact she’s young does bring on a lot of hate, people hear a young woman speaking with confidence and they automatically jump to tell her why she’s wrong. If it was some old woman like Maggie Smith voicing strong opinions in a TikTok it wouldn’t have even made the news. Well, maybe it would now, but for a different reason. On top of that, I found out recently that Chappell Roan is a drag queen! Great, yet another historically male profession that the affirmative action crowd have given over to women. First they came for lawyers and doctors, then they came for ghostbusters and drag queens. At this point the only exclusively male profession left is a rent boy but I bet that before you know it there’ll be women having sex with men for money as well. Mark my words, the SJW elite will insist on a female rent boy popstar before the year is out. If you’re wondering how any of this is related to your home being full of water and all your possessions being destroyed, just relax, I’m getting to that.

These are treacherous waters for Chappell Roan to navigate and I do sympathise with her. It would be easy to assume that endorsing Kamala Girlboss would be a home-run of free publicity, but it’s hard to account for a young demographic that actually knows what’s going on in the world. In an era where people can see genocides in the Middle East and trans rights abuses at home, it’s increasingly hard to be the new Liam and Noel Gallagher, the ultimate representative of the cool working-class, cuddling up to Tony Blair and his neoliberalism. Besides, Charli XCX seems to have already filled that niche by riding the wave of Kamala Harris optimism and having her street cred dumpstered in the eyes of the real tastemakers (online ultra-cool leftist critics like yours truly) as a result. The best thing Chappell Roan could have done for her reputation is just not commented one way or another, or maybe she could have said that she was going to vote for some wild third-party candidate like RFK Jr and just see what the consequences of that would be, it would certainly give her a distinct image.

And with that, it looks like we’re out of time for this week’s distillation of the implausibly important goings-on, so we’ll get to all that flood damage next week or whenever the news agenda dictates that there’s time for it.

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