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Chappell Roan’s fame is a drag Stars need to cultivate closeness

My kink is Chappell Roan. Stephen J. Cohen/Getty Images

My kink is Chappell Roan. Stephen J. Cohen/Getty Images


September 19, 2024   5 mins

“I feel like fame is just abusive,” Chappell Roan admits in a recent interview. “The vibe of this — stalking, talking shit online, [people who] won’t leave you alone, yelling at you in public — is the vibe of an abusive ex-husband. That’s what it feels like. I didn’t know it would feel this bad.” The last 12 months have seen the 26-year-old go from cult favourite to global cover star, and as she’s grown more popular, the behaviour around her has grown more unpleasant. When strangers decide that they love you, some of them show it in strange ways.

Roan has described, how a stalker turned up at both her hotel room, and her parents’ house in Missouri. In another incident, a group of fans figured out her flight information and met her when she landed in Seattle, where one man was so enraged by her refusal to sign an autograph, airport police had to intervene. Another time, while out at a bar celebrating a friend’s birthday, she was grabbed and kissed by a fan.

If Roan weren’t famous, all these things would be obvious instances of harassment or assault. But she is famous, so — to the people who do them, at least — such actions exist in a grey area. She has sought her celebrity, and this is what celebrity consists of, so therefore she consented to this attention when she started releasing music.

She was discovered on YouTube at 17, signed to the label Atlantic, and then dropped in 2020 when lockdown stifled was should have been her big breakthrough. She spent two years rebuilding herself to where she is now: tickets for her British tour started at £20 when they were released in March; if you want to go to her London concert this weekend, it will now cost more than £600 on the resale market.

“Fame is the experience of being owned by millions of different people.”

Those prices tell you something about the determination of Roan fans to get close to their icon. It’s a passion that, when it turns sour, tips into disturbing intrusion and harassment. This becomes even more disturbing when you realise that what she’s undergone is pretty normal for famous people. In April this year, for example, a woman was sentenced to prison and placed under a 10-year restraining order for stalking the singer Harry Styles, after sending him 8,000 cards in a one-month period.

More often, though, it’s a woman being harassed by a male obsessive. The “public woman” is, historically, a euphemism for prostitute: by making herself visible, the crude logic goes, she precludes herself from refusing any attention at all. That is witnessed by the list of female artists who have offered support to Roan, including Lady Gaga, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX. The singer Mitski sent an email: “I just wanted to humbly welcome you to the shittiest exclusive club in the world, the club where strangers think you belong to them and they find and harass your family members.”

As well as finding private support, Roan has made a public effort to set boundaries. In August, she issued a statement on Instagram urging fans to leave her alone when she was “not in work mode”: “I don’t agree with the notion that I owe a mutual exchange of energy, time, or attention to people I do not know, do not trust, or who creep me out — just because they’re expressing admiration.” She reiterated on TikTok.

One notable thing is that Roan’s pushback has, so far, been near-universally well-received. Yes, some individual fans have called her entitled or selfish for refusing to cater to them, but in the press, the reaction has been largely celebratory and supportive. That’s a shift from a generation ago, when fan intrusion was largely treated as a fair tax on the pursuit of public attention.

In 1999, a psychiatrist writing in the Guardian claimed that having a stalker was “the ultimate fashion accessory”. Three years earlier, the New York Times had chided Madonna for seeking special treatment after she asked to be excused from testifying in the presence of the man charged with stalking her: the headline read “Even You, Madonna”. (He was ultimately convicted, despite the defence’s efforts to claim Madonna was acting in the courtroom as she acted on screen.)

In the 2000s, that attitude was enthusiastically embraced by a voracious celebrity gossip culture. Gawker — the now-defunct New York gossip blog — was even shameless enough to have a feature called “Gawker Stalker”, reporting live sightings of celebrities around the city. After the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel attacked the website over this, Gawker went on the offensive in a luridly self-righteous post.

“Stalker-style treatment is a description of public people’s lives in public, and is also treatment that anyone with any kind of media or online presence […] is now subject to,” it read. “The only difference is that celebrities are protected somewhat from these verbal attacks by ‘piles of money.’” In other words, celebrities are only being treated the same as everyone else, and even if they aren’t, their celebrity status itself precludes them from sympathy.

Any journalist suggesting in the same way today that Roan is somehow asking for it or too privileged to be affected by the behaviour would have a hard time, largely because social media has given artists a direct line to their own fandoms — and those fandoms a direct line to anyone who criticises their heroes. And Roan’s connection to her fans is unusually tight, even in these intensely parasocial times. When she returned to Missouri to rebuild herself, it wasn’t her songs she put the most effort into: it was building her presence on TikTok.

With no label to push her, she had to build her own following; and because her songs and her act focus on ideas of sexuality, self-discovery and release from repression, that following has bonded to her tightly. For many fans, her work has helped them to uncover and express the most intimate truths about themselves. She told the Face: “I can’t read my DMs anymore, because I cry so much. But when people are like, ​‘Whatever you’re doing, it helped me’ — I don’t think any award or any money or whatever can be exchanged for that compliment.”

This is emotionally powerful. But it’s also the intractable paradox of fame in a social media era. You become successful by cultivating closeness with your audience; from that closeness, some people are going to extrapolate a relationship that extends further than is healthy. Roan’s fans believe that, through her work, they have found the truest version of themselves.

From there, it is only a short step to imagining that they also know the truest version of her, and that if they could only attract her attention, she’d recognise the bond they share.

It’s telling that one of the fan behaviours she’s announced she will no longer tolerate is people trying to attract her attention by shouting her birth name (Chappell Roan is a stage name): another manifestation of the fantasy that they know her secret self. The irony is that her act draws heavily on drag, an art form that is all about concealment in plain sight. For Roan, her elaborate costumes and mask-like makeup act as a division between her public and private selves. For the extreme and obsessive fans, this simply represents a challenge to be overcome: an act of coquetry inspiring them to up their pursuit.

Clearly, it is untenable for anyone to live with the demands placed on Roan by her most obsessive fans. But it is also impossible to see how her reasonable need for privacy can be balanced with being the kind of celebrity to whom fans send highly personal messages about their own coming out story. At the moment, Roan’s best defence against the cadre of over-proprietorial fans is a cadre of slightly less proprietorial fans who are at least responsive to her requests about boundaries. It is a choice between two different ways of being treated as a possession, one slightly less destructive than the other.

Fame is not power — or at least, it is not only power. Fame is the experience of being owned by millions of different people, each of whom is certain that their small, splintered version of you is more true than the version of you anyone else could have; each of whom believes that their love entitles them to be loved in return. The only way to survive is to bury the “real you” out of reach and let people pour their devotion into a person who doesn’t really exist. Otherwise, everyone ends up like Orpheus: annihilated by those who claim to care the most.


Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer.

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Brett H
Brett H
16 days ago

There must be a point where an entertainer crosses the line from entertainer to megastar. But they seem to be driven by either managers, record companies or their own desire to cross that line. There’s nothing to stop them managing their trajectory and settling for just entertainer. No one has to be huge, especially when the consequences are clear for everyone to see.

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
16 days ago
Reply to  Brett H

Like sports stars, unsure of how long their peak earning period will last, they have a perfectly natural desire to make the most of it while they can. Hard to stop then if it really takes off.

Jonathan Andrews
Jonathan Andrews
16 days ago

Well, I don’t know. In the olden days famous footballers would have testimonial games from which they’d receive the ticket money and buy a pub or tobacconist and live a quiet life (with, hopefully, some special and unusual memories.

There’s a clip on YouTube of a reporter wandering around Liverpool asking people if they recalled the Cup Final in 65. He only happened to ask the goalkeeper; a very ordinary OAP.

Brett H
Brett H
15 days ago

Hard to stop then if it really takes off.
I guess that depends on how much money you think you need.


Graham Cunningham
Graham Cunningham
16 days ago

Celebrities….where would we be without them? Well (many of us would say) a lot better off? If only we could just re-tighten the entry requirements. I mean radically re-tighten them….back to those celebrity halcyon days of yore. Some people should be celebrated Yes…great leaders, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs and so on. It would still be a very long list…Shakespeare, Beethoven, Einstein and so on would still be in there… along with thousands of others of their elevated kind – even a smattering of Rock Stars. The list would just no longer be added to at the rate of one every day (or do I mean every hour?) https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/all-the-pretty-celebrities

Dylan Blackhurst
Dylan Blackhurst
16 days ago

Okay. So this reads a lot like the complaints of every pop star ever.

You make emotionally charged music. You reveal your inner most thoughts (real or not you decide). You parade around on TV or better still social media where you can be watched over and over and over again. And then you find you have developed a huge fan base. Wooohoooh!

But wait a minute. This fame follows me everywhere. Boooohoooh.

Bored of stars complaining. These are self inflicted wounds. Fame is not a tap. You can’t turn it off and on. It doesn’t work that way. It never has. Are these people that stupid that they haven’t figured that yet?!

Everything in life has a cost. You want fame? You want all the goodies that go with it? Well guess what, it comes with a cost. Deal with it. Remember you chose the path.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
16 days ago

If it were me, I would at least get off social media.

Philip Hanna
Philip Hanna
15 days ago

It sounds to me like she is dealing with it, or at least learning to. A little bit of empathy goes a long way, and sometimes we complain about things that we know we can’t do anything about.
Also, I don’t think post Y2K fame can be compared to pre Y2K fame. People are especially thoughtless and cruel online. So you get to add that to the “normal” stuff like stalkers, paparazzi, and ignorant fools rushing you for your autograph while you are trying to grab your luggage.

Dylan Blackhurst
Dylan Blackhurst
14 days ago
Reply to  Philip Hanna

I agree with you up to a point. But it appears that we have an epidemic of empathy at this point in time.

There are people genuinely struggling to make ends meet.

Meanwhile popstars, footballers and celebrities are complaining about paparazzi, over zealous fans and social media. And they are society’s victims?

Really?!

This performative ‘just be kind’ empathy overload is warping culture and society more broadly.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
16 days ago

On the few occasions i’ve happened to find myself in close proximity to someone ‘famous’ my reaction has been to studiously ignore them – to just let them be.

An example: in the mid-1970s i was at Lord’s watching a test match, having sourced a ticket outside the ground being offered by someone who could no longer attend (not a tout) at a bargdin price in a section of the ground i wouldn’t normally be able to afford. I found myself sitting abour four seats along from Mick Jagger. It was clear he just wanted to enjoy a peaceful day at the cricket and the last thing i’d have wanted to do would be disturb that. Everyone else did the same.

When i hear of the lengths some people will go to, to gain access to and harrass a celeb i wonder is we’re part of the same species. How utterly sad and devoid of any personal significance their lives must be. It feels like a different form of consciousness.

Do celebs deserve to be treated any differently from anyone else? Of course not. They may have a talent which may or may not elicit admiration, but that’s it.

Alphonse Pfarti
Alphonse Pfarti
16 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

I was ordered a cheese toastie at the Edinburg Fringe a few years ago and had no idea that I was standing waiting next to Sophie Waller-Bridge until a teenage girl came up and asked her for an autograph. Likewise, I remained composed.

Dennis Roberts
Dennis Roberts
16 days ago

I walked past Paul Daniels in a Tescos once. We made eye contact but I stayed calm and was able to restrain myself from hassling him.

Jonathan Andrews
Jonathan Andrews
16 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

I had a conversation with Kevin Peterson once as England were preparing at my employer’s playing fields.
Nice chap. Big bloke. Good cricketer.

I don’t much envy famous people but, like everyone, there are good and bad sides to their lives. There are no shortage of successful stars of stage, screen and music who live pretty quiet lives. My sympathy is limited.

ralph bell
ralph bell
16 days ago

Thanks, a very illuminating piece.
It confirms the view that some people (the stalkers) are so me, me, me, they will harm others to get what they want for themselves.

Chris Whybrow
Chris Whybrow
16 days ago

There’s a joke about Good Luck Babe in this situation somewhere, I just know it.

Stephen Feldman
Stephen Feldman
16 days ago

When shes no one again her problem will vanish.

Judson Vereen
Judson Vereen
3 days ago

Can I post a comment?
edited: Yes, yes I can.

Last edited 3 days ago by Judson Vereen