Chappell Roan is controversial, opinionated and the quintessential pop princess of our age

When Chappell Roan called her debut album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, she was prophetic. Roan, birth name Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, had has a meteoric rise and, depending on who you ask, is in the middle of a fall from grace.

To buy into that, you have to contend with traditional notions of a celebrity’s relationship with the public and what they “owe” to their fans, and Roan has, from the outset, defied norms and expectations.

Her tender lyrics and infectious synth-pop compositions kept her in the charts but her spikiness and lack of a filter has kept her in the headlines. She is opinionated, brash and unapologetic, and those qualities are rarely celebrated in a public figure, especially a young queer woman.

It may seem like Roan has rocketed out of nowhere. But like many artists who had huge breakthroughs, Roan had been working away in the background for years, posting YouTube covers and releasing an EP in 2017 through Atlantic Records. It wasn’t successful and the record company dropped her not long after.

Her 2020 hit Pink Pony Club was widely lauded but Roan really landed on the world stage with the release of 2023’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess album and the 2024 Good Luck, Babe single. As an aside, you have to admire an artist who respects the vocative comma.

All of a sudden, she was everywhere. She opened for Olivia Rodrigo, she was on her own world tour, she was performing at Coachella, Lollapalooza and the Governors Ball Music Festival, she was on Saturday Night Live, at the MTV Video Music Awards and on Sabrina Carpenter’s Netflix Christmas special, and she was winning Grammys.

She adopted a stage personality that drew from her influences including drag queens, and was never demure and was never mindful of pearl-clutchers.

She can be a contradiction, like all humans, although most of us have the benefit of not having all our word vomit recorded for playback.

Yes, that means Roan can say that she doesn’t want people to turn to her for political positions, that it’s not up to her to influence elections (she famously declined to endorse Kamala Harris in the 2024 elections but did say she would cast her own vote for the former VP).

But Roan has openly advocated for transgender rights, queer identity and the Palestinian cause. She turned down performing at the White House for a Pride event, citing “We want liberty, justice and freedom for all, when you do that, that’s when I’ll come”.

Does using her platform to back rights for minority communities and then declare people shouldn’t turn to her for political advice make her a hypocrite or does it just make her kind of messy?

She often refers to her own upbringing in a conservative, Christian family in the American Midwest. She recalled going to church three times a week. Her uncle is a Republican representative in Missouri’s state house.

There have even been weird attempts to “unmask” Roan as a conservative-in-disguise because of her relatives, but, honestly, who doesn’t have a conspiracy theorist in their family.

Roan said she never fit in or was comfortable in that environment, which is useful context for her public persona as someone who is finally able to push back against social restraints such as compulsory heterosexuality, a stance she expresses in Good Luck, Babe.

On a recent episode of the popular Call Her Daddy podcast, Roan admitted that she doesn’t know everything about every topic she has opinions on, but tries to as much as she can.

But that’s not the comment from Call Her Daddy that inflamed the torch wielders. Roan, 27, said she doesn’t know any young mothers her age who are “happy”.

“I literally have not met anyone (with young kids) who’s happy, anyone who has like light in their eyes, anyone who has slept,” she said.

Oh, boy, did the online brigade ark up. Angry mums on TikTok went off and said they were offended and even accused her of tearing down women and being a misogynist.

Roan was speaking from her own experience in the context of not wanting parenthood at this point in her life. Just as those TikTok mums felt Roan’s words invalidated their choices, their response demeaned hers.

Perhaps the uproar was so feverish because it wasn’t an isolated case of “here’s what I’m thinking”. The big one came when in August she called out “creepy” fan behaviour, revealing she had been harassed, bullied online, being yelled out from car windows and even that her family had been stalked.

“I don’t care that abuse and harassment is a normal thing to do to people who are famous or a little famous,” she posted in a video. “I don’t care that it’s normal. I don’t care that this crazy type of behaviour comes along with the job, the career field I’ve chosen. That does not make it OK.”

Roan had hit a nerve when she said she didn’t think it was selfish of her to refuse random requests for photos or hugs. She wanted to set a boundary between her work and not-work, and in parasocial relationships between some fans and celebrities, those lines aren’t just blurred but completely disregarded.

The comments were divisive. Many thought they were reasonable and sensible, while others condemned them, as if Roan “owed” them her success and therefore every aspect of her life.

Celebrities who demand to set the terms of engagement will often get their heads bitten off, and for someone like Roan, who is young, female and a new arrival on the scene, the instinct to be patronising to her and about her is too much to resist for some.

During her Grammys acceptance speech in February, she used the opportunity to ask record companies to pay a living wage to artists and to provide them with healthcare – “Labels, we got you, but do you got us?”.

Once again, it divided opinions between those who thought she was sending a message to those who controlled the capital about taking care of workers, and those who called her “naive”, as former music executive Jeff Rabhan did in a piece for The Hollywood Reporter.

Rabhan, 54, called her disingenuous for cashing a “fat cheque” while trying to frame herself as an outsider, and then proceeded to lecture her about the business of music. It wasn’t a good look but it did give fuel to the anti-Roan sentiment that had been fermenting.

Like any 27-year-old woman, Roan doesn’t know everything about everything, just like no 54-year-old man does either.

But when she speaks, people listen, whether they agree with her or not, or even agree whether she should or not.

That’s one of the reasons Roan feels like a public figure for our age – messy, provocative and very much herself.