Tox Report 64. The rise and fall and vertiginous rise and maybe fall of a midwest princess
Where the alter-ego ends and the real you begins
“Who’d want to be a female celebrity?” asked the headline on a 2021 feature I wrote for the Sunday Times. Britney’s conservatorship hearings were reaching the peak of their drama that summer, and though the #MeToo movement had mostly burned out with few concrete achievements, there was still a residual desire to revisit the treatment of women in public life — especially when that treatment was long enough ago for onlookers to feel a self-congratulatory detachment about it.
The signal female celebrity story of that year was the Chrissy Teigan cancellation, in which it was discovered that the model-slash-spicy-anti-Trump-tweeter had sent some earlier spicy tweets to a much less deserving target: Courtney Stodden, a reality TV also-ran who had become famous-ish as the child bride of actor Doug Hutchison (she was 16 and he was 51 when they married).1
Teigans’s tweets urging Stodden to kill herself might have seemed OK in the gloves-off world of the early 2010s internet. Ten years later, they looked like monstrous bullying, and Teigan’s career suffered badly for them. (Stodden, meanwhile, rode the wave of sympathy for all it was worth.) Social media had made Teigan — she wasn’t just a model, she was a model who did hilarious clapbacks! — but it had also exposed her to her ruin.2
At the same time, there was a coterie of younger female stars coming through who were, in Taylor Swift’s self-description, “internet babies”. They’d grown up with social media, and while they used it as natives, they also had an appropriately paranoid relationship with it. For previous generations, fame had been an unimaginably exotic experience: artists went into the tumult unprepared, while audiences largely struggled to understand how elevation to demi-god status could be anything but amazing.
Gen Z were different. They had been crafting their image for consumption (and themselves as product) since their teen years, thanks to Instagram. Whether the follower count was in the hundreds, the thousands or the millions, the perils and the penalties for failure were roughly the same. The thing that was previously most remote about stardom — which is to say, the actual “being a star” part — was suddenly one of the most accessible.
These younger celebrities, it seemed to me, had an understanding of their condition that wasn’t necessarily protective in itself, but at least meant they weren’t entering the arena in total naivety that way that, say, Britney had. And the artist I chose to exemplify this was Olivia Rodrigo, who had just broken huge with “Driver’s Licence”. She was 18 that year and her songs were about typical 18-year-old experiences: breaking up with a boyfriend, feeling too klutzy for adulthood, making yourself sick by comparing yourself to the perfect presentation of peers on social media.
So what that the ex was a Disney heartthrob, and the adult life she was stumbling towards involved being a pop star, and the peers were not schoolmates but girls you would see on TV. All these scenarios and emotions were the definition of relatable to the average teen girl or young woman — far from the weird denim virginity circus that Britney and Justin had felt like to me in the 2000s. Artist and fan in the 2020s exist in a kind of compact, defined by mutual agreement that their situations are fucked up.
Rodrigo’s success that year was helpful to my argument about the changing shape of fame, but it had a depressing knock-on effect for another singer. Chappell Roan had been signed at 17 after being spotted on YouTube, and in 2020 she had started working with Dan Nigro, who is also Rodrigo’s primary collaborator. “Pink Pony Club” came out exactly in time for all the real-world clubs to close under lockdown. It flopped, and Roan was dropped by her label.
When “Driver’s Licence” hit big, Nigro went back into the studio with Rodrigo to finish her debut album Sour, leaving Roan without a creative partner as well as deal-less. She returned to her parents’ home in rural Missouri and ended up working at a drive-through coffee shop. “It’s the classic Midwestern thing where it’s like, ‘We can make any candy bar you want into a frappé!’ It was not my favourite,” she later told Variety.
Do you enjoy intense close readings of pop culture? Then you will love my book Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties, which tells the stories of nine women who navigated celebrity in the 2000s: Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Janet, Aaliyah, Amy, Kim, Chyna, Jen.
Chappell Roan’s frappé days are now the stuff of myth because, as it turned out, this was only a temporary setback. At 26, she is one of the biggest popstars in the world. After two years of doldrums, she reunited with Nigro. “I was upset about my project not moving,” she told Rolling Stone. “I felt stuck and like no one was paying attention to me. [Dan] was just looking at me and goes, ‘You are going to run your career into the fucking ground if you don’t start doing shit on your own.’” She credits that pep talk with giving her the impetus she needed to throw herself into her “project”.
The songs were not the problem. She needed to nail the presentation. She already had her stage name (her birth name is Kayleigh Rose Amstutz). Now she transformed her image, turning herself into a vision of DIY drag queen excess — perfect for her lyrical themes of sexual exploration and lesbian self-discovery. And she committed hard to her social media presence. This is what she had to say about social media in a 2022 interview with the Oxford student magazine Cherwell:3
Q. On social media, more and more artists craft personas with a “curated authenticity” so that they can give fans an inside-look at their lives while maintaining a semblance of privacy. What demands do you face in terms of social media content and presentation?
A. It’s everything. Social media is the most demanding part of my job. Daily. I can’t really hate on it because it’s pushed me forward and people know about me because of it, though it’s the most soul-sucking part of my job […] To some people, it comes naturally, and those people really soar, so it makes you feel bad about yourself if you try hard and it doesn’t work. To be honest, any video that I put out about my music automatically doesn’t do as well as a video of me doing something stupid, saying something nonsensical.
It would be 2024 before Roan moved “beyond the realm of being merely ‘gaymous’ [that is, having a dedicated gay fanbase] into genuine crossover success”, as a writer for the website Them put it. But even when she was still relatively obscure (the Cherwell interview notes that she had 28.7 thousand followers on Instagram in 2022; now that number is 4.4 million), you could tell that she was ambivalent at best about the demands of social media and being a public figure.
In August this year, Roan seemed to reach a breaking point. She put a statement on Instagram, telling fans to keep their distance: “When I’m on stage, when I’m performing, when I’m in drag, when I’m at a work event, when I’m doing press […] I am at work. Any other circumstance, I am not in work mode. I am clocked out. 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 also (and this is probably the most damaging part) cancelled two dates of her European tour and rescheduled one at short notice, leaving fans out of pocket for travel and hotels.
This is not the first time Roan has tried to establish a hard line between her public and private selves. In 2023, she told a New York Magazine interviewer that she thought of “Chappell” as an alter-ego, like Hannah Montana in the Miley Cyrus Disney show: a way to have the “best of both worlds”, superstar by night and normal girl by day. Having a “fake” self to show the world meant, in theory, that the “real” person could be sheltered.
But the character Cyrus played in Hannah Montana was actually called Miley (just the surname was changed): the protection of the alter-ego only existed in the world of the fiction, and if anything served to heighten the public’s thrill in believing they had access to the “real” Miley. Roan seems similarly confused about which was the “real” her. To Cherwell, she said: “I have never felt super connected to my real name Kayleigh […] I do still wish my name was not Kayleigh in real life.” It was becoming Chappell, she’s said, that allowed her to understand her sexuality. Which suggests that the “real” persona might be the Chappell one. The Cherwell interview is even headlined “A New Authenticity”.
I don’t raise this to victim blame (being at the centre of a fandom is harrowing, and if anyone doubts this I suggest you watch the One Direction documentary This Is Us and think hard about Liam Payne’s haunted face after he’s survived an encounter with the people who allegedly love him most in the world). I raise this to point out that Roan is in an invidious position.
Her promise to her fans is one of reinvention into a new self even more “real” than the original, and it’s a promise that has particular appeal to a queer fanbase that is drawn to the idea of throwing off constraining old identities. For example: there was a personal essay in HuffPo a few days ago by a middle-aged woman who credited Roan with allowing her to embrace her bisexuality.4 Enabling fans to become their “real selves” is an intense connection for any artist to form with her audience, especially when that artist’s persona has also helped the artist herself to discover she’s a lesbian.
That makes any rupture of this intimacy a more bruising betrayal. If Chappell is in “Kayleigh Rose mode” in her day-to-day life, is the Chappell who meant so much to so many anything more than a phantom? If she feels able to break her commitments to her audiences so abruptly, the fans might start to suspect that there is no substance there. (Online, fans are theorising that the “scheduling conflict” she cited in cancelling the Europe dates is actually an invitation to perform at the VMAs, which would mean she chose the higher-profile event over the people who’ve supported her in the last few years)
Everyone with a public profile needs a boundary. “There’s a part of me that will always be just for me,” said the singer Aaliyah, whose experience of being groomed and sexually abused by her mentor R Kelly likely made her exceptionally conscious of the split between her image and her private self.5 “It’s too much to process if I don’t have division between the two,” Roan told New York Magazine. “It hurts my feelings when people say mean things about me online. But it doesn’t hurt my feelings as much if they’re saying it about Chappell. Then it’s just them commenting on the art.”
Patrolling that division is a skill. In the brilliant New York Magazine profile of Charli XCX, there’s a moment when the journalist tries to draw Charli on the subject of the song “Sympathy is Like a Knife”, which internet sleuths (including me) think is about Taylor Swift. “You do the silence game. But I know that well — where you go silent and want me to talk more. But I don’t care about it being awkward,” says Charli. “We’ll sit in silence.” It’s a fantastic power move, and one that takes fantastic levels of self-assurance to pull off.
Roan does not have those levels of self-assurance. (It probably helps Charli that she’s 32 and has experienced a less compressed version of Roan’s early-over-achiever-to-disappointment-to-overwhelming-success trajectory; and it probably doesn’t help Roan that she has a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, making her more than usually vulnerable.) A boundary has to be enacted to be meaningful; demanding it point blank is a sign that you don’t, in fact, feel competent to establish it.
I agree with Roan that she deserves her privacy. I worry that the choices she’s made have left a great confusion over where her public and her private selves diverge — I suspect that she herself is not entirely sure. Social media has made her, and it has exposed her to something she cannot control. The “internet babies” know how poisonous celebrity can be. But that doesn’t mean they know what the antidote is. It doesn’t mean they want their celebrity any the less.
Gimme, gimme more…
For UnHerd: the sad story of Katie Price, the body entrepreneur reaching the limits of her body.
For Intelligence Squared: a conversation with Molly Roden Winter about her book More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage. I will level with you that I am a sceptic about both ethical nonmonogamy and people writing about their sex lives — but this book is at once humblingly frank and infectiously joyful about the possibilities of life (not just the horny possibilities either), and I loved talking to Molly.
Robin DiAngelo, a plagiarising chancer? Literally never have I been less surprised.
James O’Malley on what happens when serious disorders are turned into identities (paywalled, but you should pay).
Deeply unsettling report from CrimeCon, the event where true crime fans go to hear from the victims of true crimes: traumatic bereavement as celebrity (via
.)Lana Del Rey is not dating an alligator boat captain and I’m more disappointed than I should be.
I cannot get enough of the David LaChappelle photography for the Charli XCX New York Magazine feature. The Paris Hilton days are BACK, baby:
I especially hate this story because Hutchison plays the monster in one of my favourite episodes of The X-Files:
The signal male celebrity story of 2021 was Armie Hammer, cannibal; which turned out to be less a #MeToo story and more a classic bit of celebrity sleaze with a figleaf of social justice.
One of the things that makes Roan interesting is that, because of her halting progress towards stardom, she’s given more and more revealing interviews than a lot of artists in her position.
I’m happy for this woman but how is she my age and didn’t get this from Madonna?
For more about Aaliyah’s navigation of fame, there’s a book you should read.
I’ve just finished reading Toxic — which I really enjoyed, especially as a Gen Xer who pointed and mocked and bought Heat along with everyone else — and to see this kind of analysis applied to Chappell Roan (who I think is terrific) is really interesting. I’d love to see her be as successful as she deserves in a way that’s manageable for her. I think if we’ve learned anything from Britney and Aaliyah (to choose people you wrote about) it’s that the people they surround themselves with need to enforce those boundaries too. She needs a Tree Paine, a Liz Rosenberg. Here’s hoping she will find them and keep enjoying the music part for a long while to come. Great article - thank you.
I may be misinterpreting Sarah, but I thought her point wasn’t about whether Roan is a good artist or has loadsa fans (your good self included), but whether those self-protective adjustments you’re referring to will turn out to be palatable to HER, especially in the long run.