CoSign is an accolade we use to put our stamp of approval on an up-and-coming artist or group who is poised for the big time. For June 2023, we’re highlighting LA-based pop star Chappell Roan and her debut LP, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.
There are plenty of ways to mark the “arrival” of a musical artist these days: viral success or a performance on Saturday Night Live, a Coachella debut or a Harry Styles cosign. But not often does a talent arrive in the most dramatic and unabashed fashion, asserting their identity with a shout of, “I am here, and I am the one you’ve been waiting for.” Kaleigh Rose Amstutz made just such a proclamation with her 2020 single as Chappell Roan, “Pink Pony Club.”
The song, which already serves as a beloved “cult classic” for Roan’s legion of fans, epitomizes her journey from shy, midwestern princess to proud, bombastic pop star. She addresses her disapproving, conservative mother as she justifies her move to Los Angeles: “I heard there’s a special place/ Where boys and girls can be queens every single day,” she sings, working up to her liberation in real time. She gives voice to her mom’s concerns, launching into a theatrical chorus with, “I know she’s gonna scream/ God, what have you done?/ You’re a pink pony girl and you dance at the club,” But instantly retorts, “Oh mama, I’m just having fun/ On the stage in my heels is where I belong.”
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With “Pink Pony Club,” Amstutz completed her transformation into Chappell Roan, embracing the pop idol she’s created for herself. As the song’s lyrics suggests, however, it’s been a long process to assume this identity, and it has required her to search inward. “The version of myself now was birthed out of necessity,” she tells Consequence at the Gold Diggers recording studio in Los Angeles, “because when you start uncovering ‘inner child’ work, every day or every session of therapy is like, ‘Oh my God, I did not know I was like that because of what happened in my childhood.’ So I feel like Chappell Roan is a project that is dedicated to my younger self that never felt the space to be this version of myself.”
Opening up that space has given a wider breadth to the young pop star’s career. “Pink Pony Club” marked the beginning of a fruitful period of collaboration with songwriter and producer Dan Nigro, with whom she would spend the next few years crafting her debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (out September 22nd). Throughout this era, via word of mouth in queer communities and the Los Angeles music scene, Chappell Roan has become your favorite pop star’s favorite pop star, toured alongside Olivia Rodrigo and Fletcher (with more dates with Rodrigo scheduled for next year; get tickets here), and assumed the role, as Roan says, of a “mini queer icon.”
A great deal of Roan’s reinvention comes in the fact that she’s embraced her queer identity, and The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is indebted to these discoveries. This results in Roan not just leaning into the exaggerated camp language of big budget diva pop, but re-appropriating things from her past of which she was previously taught to be ashamed. “The whole mood is kind of a satirical ‘fuck you’ to my upbringing as this oppressed girl who feels like she can’t be anything more than a wife or a mother, or can’t be anything more than something pretty to look at who should be smiling all the time,” she says. “The mood board is kind of like this bratty, in-your-face, lewd, lyrical, gaudy girl. It’s kind of like white trash-meets-thrift store pop star.”
She goes on to mention her “tramp stamp” tattoo, which reads “princess” on her lower back. “This is actually a very meaningful tattoo, because it was the tattoo that was made fun of the most by my community growing up,” says Roan. “It represents ‘trashy’ and ‘whore,’ just all of the negative, misogynistic things that women get. But the ‘princess’ aspect of it comes from me always feeling pressure to uphold a standard of being ladylike and a good Christian girl that never makes mistakes, to be appealing but not overly sexual… There are just so many rules, so getting a tramp stamp that said ‘princess’ was kind of like, ‘fuck you!'”
