In 2022, I saw Chappell Roan open for Olivia Rodrigo on her one night stint as the SOUR tour support act. I saw her again a few weeks ago play the main stage of Outside Lands, on the tail end of the festival circuit that catapulted her into superstar-levels of fame. So much has changed for Chappell Roan between these two performances—the dramatic increase in crowd size, the fact that everyone knew every word to her songs, that she has become something of a household name—but one thing was eerily similar: although she performed her heart out, running around the stage and singing like a Broadway star, she did not look happy.
In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Chappell disclosed that she was in outpatient therapy for her bipolar II directly before and after that 2022 performance. Days after her set at Outside Lands, she posted a set of TikToks that indicated she was struggling deeply with fame, and the ways that people assumed they had access to her because of it. In the Rolling Stone piece, she quoted a note from Mitski, whose fans are also known to be rabid: “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.”
In a recent profile on The Cut, Jojo Siwa, a person who has grown up on the Internet, told her interviewer, “I gave up my life, essentially, for the world.” She has a pragmatic and eager attitude towards fame, seeking attention, without care for whether it be positive or negative. Her manager called her “the CEO of the attention economy.” Jojo Siwa has been the center of multiple highly publicized controversies; it seems that by her metric, she’s been highly successful.
Child stars seem to take the negative aspects of their popularity on the chin, naturally having more longterm experience with the lack of privacy that fame entails. If you never get to be a normal person, walking through the grocery store or crossing the street, do you really miss it? That kind of thing must shape you from a young age, with the extreme being Jojo Siwa’s case, where her reward pathways are entirely determined by her drive to maintain relevancy in the capricious public eye.
Chappell Roan brings up a good point in her TikToks: “I don’t care abuse or harassment, stalking, whatever, is a normal thing to do to people who are famous […] I don’t care that this crazy type of behavior comes along with the career that I’ve chosen. That does not make it okay.” Is this really something someone should take on the chin? Why have these behaviors become so normalized in fan culture?
The way that the music industry is currently structured incentivizes musicians to yield to their fans’ desires; whereas they used to market themselves to labels, streaming has removed the barrier between artists and their listeners. The line between an inspiration and an object is a thin one. Additionally, social media gives fans a false sense of closeness to their idols, but it’s never enough. It’s a pretty good marketing tactic on the part of a small artist to make their audience feel like they’re all friends—until suddenly you have 100,000 screaming fans at Lollapalooza, some inevitable fraction of which think you owe them something for their patronage.
There’s something specific and shared by the artists with these notorious fanbases that I can’t quite put my finger on. Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, to some extent Clairo, and now Chappell Roan come to mind—whatever they have is something that Jojo Siwa does not. People want to know things about them that you shouldn’t really ever want to know about anyone who’s not your friend, and maybe not even then. It’s an obsession, one that typically does not extend to men, and one which is inherently violating, cruelty and disrespect posing as adoration.
There must be a breaking point, and maybe Chappell Roan will be the final blow. Celebrities are not your friend; they are not your story to inhabit and twist. Maybe we should stop rewarding people like Jojo Siwa with press for prostrating themselves to the public. The hard truth about your favorite artists is that if you love them so much, you should leave them alone.
I just saw this and find it to be an impressive article about the difficulties related to fame.