Illustration by Jessica Bromer

My friend Lou is visiting from Australia. We do silly things together, like watch Love Island and listen to music. Lou shows me the video for Chappell Roan’s “Casual,” which follows a girl and a mermaid in a situationship. I’m fascinated. The song is good, too: the slow pumping synth and zesty lyrics contrast with the video’s overall sense of campiness.

I laugh it off, thinking this is another artist my friends and I will talk about but who will remain coded in proximity to community, a secret, a love language for what we love together like girl in red or Rina Sawayama. Someone I can ask new friends about, a question inside a question about who they might be as well as what they love.

And then I hear another Roan song (“Good Luck, Babe!”), and another (“Pink Pony Club”). They get poppier and poppier, reminiscent of ’80s pop ballads I love because of my mother but also somehow the feeling I had when I first began loving Taylor Swift in 2008. Something maybe about the storytelling and the texture of feeling for women who are “different.” I have the feeling that I’m sure everyone has when they start to like an artist, a sense of discovering something both about yourself and in them.

It seems that sense of discovery is viral. I am one of many who fell in love with Roan’s music. By the middle of summer, she’d garnered hundreds of millions of streams. She’s performed at Coachella and Lollapalooza. What’s catching traction online, though, isn’t just her fame but her reaction to it. Roan has stated bluntly, “I told myself, if this ever gets dangerous, I might quit. It’s dangerous now, and I’m still going. But that part is not what I signed up for.”

Roan is being praised for setting a precedent for a new generation of artists and celebrities. She talks about having worked at a drive-thru and scoffs at the media for their surprised or sympathetic reactions. “Most people work horrible jobs.” Commenters cherish the rise of a queer working-class artist—but I wonder about the continual obfuscation of her whiteness, which prevents a certain honesty about her impact and how she’s able to make it.

Roan’s fame picks up pace, and so does her reaction. In August, she releases a series of TikToks. She speaks directly into camera, her iconic curly red hair up in a messy bun. “Would you go up to a random lady and say, ‘Can I get a photo with you?’ And she’s like, ‘no, what the fuck?’ and then you get mad at this random lady?” Should we expect a smile from celebrities and a customer service voice, or should we stay away—knowing that certain actions are expected in the workplace and certain boundaries are in place outside of it?

The celebrity as worker and fame as abuse are interesting arguments to make. When I ask Toronto-based producer Anupa Mistry, who also worked as a culture writer and editor, what she thinks, she says: “…[Roan’s] rancor is valid, but it’s ultimately focused on individual behaviour change on the part of fans and photographers, rather than a condemnation of the institutions of power that fund and amplify and set the terms of fame. She’s young and trying to work out if it’s possible to have an encounter with the music industry on her own terms. But even her ‘controversies’ generate value for her label.”

The idea that Roan’s candor is commodifying feels oddly manipulative. Mistry names what has been on my mind too: race and gender. Privilege, even when it seems absent or well-accounted for. “Do we read Roan’s demands and boundaries as more valid because she is white and cisgender? Her queerness suggests transgression only in its continued association with the American heartland, [the Midwest]. I’ll always think of Thelonious Monk or Lauryn Hill when I think about the costs of pushing back. What about Doja Cat’s shenanigans? When it got to be too much she pushed back and people didn’t like the way she did it.” But Roan’s pushback is applauded.

This brings me back to an original instinct I had ignored. As my enamourment with Roan begins to fray, I scroll her YouTube Shorts. In one, she says: “I wanted to be a cheerleader in high school. But I just never felt like I was that kind of girl. I don’t know. I am, now.” It reminds me of Swift’s rise to fame and her beloved video for “You Belong With Me.” Roan makes people feel seen in a similar way: you’re different, but all the things you want can happen to you too. The really distinct marker here, the key to their mass marketability, is that they’re both white American women.

My friend reposts Roan’s recent photo in Interview magazine on her close friend story, wild-clown themed of course. She writes: If I got straight famous, I’d unravel too. There is a point in math where a limit approaches infinity and cannot be quantified further. There is a point in fame where you simply cannot get more famous than you already are. Did Chappell Roan set out to become Mitski famous and ended up Taylor Swift famous instead? Did she strive toward success, the way any artist does, only to accidentally strive too far, primed by her personal privilege and positionality?

I can’t imagine how disconcerting it must be to be in Roan’s position. When talking about her with writer and poet Victoria Mbabazi, they say: “As a Black femme I understand what it is like for people to look at you as a shiny object and think that your existence giving them life means that’s where your life ends. Usually this ends in a disillusionment for both me and the person who dehumanized me into a fictional version of myself.” The parasocial toxicity artists endure is inexcusable and should be checked.

Yet the question I’m interested in when it comes to Roan is not whether fame is good or bad, whether she’s right or wrong, but of what she makes visible in the culture of celebrity, the purpose behind her commodification. And to me, that’s the power that white women have had and will always have. White women’s palatability imbues their art with the power of “relatability” even as it appropriates from communities, cultures and precedents that are usually created by Black and brown people who are then excluded from the material success of their own legacies. Roan’s drag persona and her lineage with activist, drag queen and queer icon Sasha Colby, a trans woman of Native Hawaiian and Irish descent, is a key example. Roan’s slogan, “your favourite artist’s favourite artist,” comes from Colby’s own tagline: “your favourite drag queen’s favourite drag queen.” This is indicative of the ecosystems of cultural transmission and inspiration, which can be appropriative and can not; which can be racist and can not, but which are undergirded by the uncontrollable, uncontrivable machinery of white supremacy. Intentionally or otherwise, Roan’s inspiration and interpretations in this lineage suffers from a sore reality: when white cis people do it, it suddenly just makes sense to a mass audience.

Don’t get me wrong though: Roan and her team are using Roan’s privilege to do good work. They’re against ticket resellers. She pushes back against rude photographers and makes clear contributions to queering pop. In the fall, she made a political stand by refusing to endorse either U.S. presidential candidate and by invoking Palestine.

But I believe it works against her when she refuses to own her success in all of its complexities. Part of me remains suspicious, reluctant as a fan, unable to fully trust or believe her when she has not once acknowledged her own positionality. It’s a place I’ve been before—with friends, coworkers, lovers—why does privilege do what it does and how do we make sense of the discomfort we are left with? How does this affect our ability to make sense of each other, to feel seen and heard?

I guess it just reminds me of the limits. Both for Roan and for myself and for celebrities like Kehlani, Janelle Monáe, and Victoria Monét, who have done similar work as Roan but were not afforded the same understanding: on the toxicity of the industry, on queerness, on politics, in terms of Palestine. What can celebrities offer us and what we can offer them? What are we owed and what do we owe each other?

My original instinct plateaus. I’m left with an old feeling, despite and maybe because of its flattening effect, a feeling like the popping of a balloon at the end of a party, sad and stalwart in its reminders. Clichés that are cliché as pop music itself, maybe because they stick around in the same way.

Sometimes you get where you’re going only by going too far. Sometimes what we think of someone has nothing to do with who they actually are.