Chappell Roan said "both sides had their problems". Why should I care?

04:00 BST - 02/10/2024

My Twitter timeline has been ablaze over the past few days because of certain comments Chappell Roan has made regarding the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

For those not in the know, Chappell Roan is a pop musician that’s blown up pretty rapidly rather recently; she has this sort of 80s throw-back sound to her music, which is rather queer in its lyrical content a lot of the time (Roan is pretty open about being a lesbian). I’m not really a fan of what little I’ve heard of her stuff, but I still intend to get round to listening to her debut (& as of writing, only) album one day. Now, recently Roan was the subject of a Guardian interview discussing the pressures her rapid ascent to fame has given her (put a pin in this one, it’s a good bit of foreshadowing), & the subject did eventually turn to her political takes; namely her refusing to perform for the White House due to their near-unconditional support for Israel during their renewed attacks on Gaza, & her saying “there’s problems on both sides” (referring of course to the Republicans & the Democrats - she is an American, after all) & encouraging people to engage with local politics. Pretty standard “left-leaning celebrity that’s not the most engaged with politics trying to comment on politics” stuff, right? Apparently, Twitter disagrees.

Some bootleg Pop Crave wannabe made a post with the quote (somewhat notably not linking to the original interview) & the timeline went ballistic. People have accused her of downplaying genocide & excusing wannabe autocrats, you know… the usual; & Roan was forced to further clarify herself in not just one, but two TikTok videos, which only further increased scrutiny. Things have quietened down a little now that she’s stopped responding, but it’s still something I see resurface every now & then; & my question to Twitter is: why the fuck should I care?

Seriously! Why the fuck should I care about Chappell Roan not being enthusiastic enough about Kamala bloody Harris? Sure, she’s not particularly the most informed of the details of the US political system (referring to her qualms with the Democrats by saying “fuck some of the policies on the left”, for example), but behind all the clunky wording all she ended up saying by the end of it all was “I’m voting Dem but I’m not happy about having to do so”; which is an identical position to at least a decent portion of the people blagging her about this whole debacle!

& even if she was saying that both sides are the same or whatever, is it really worth getting this worked up about? Really? There's this expectation that we seem to have nowadays for musicians to be politically perfect at all times & at the end of the day, that’s not really their job; especially if they’re not megastars. Roan is no Taylor Swift: her endorsement would not mobilise hundreds of thousands of people! “Guy who was gonna vote Dem but changed their mind after Chappell Roan said there were problems on both sides” is, I can bet, an astonishingly rare sort of person!

I have a feeling part of the reason Roan has it this bad is that she writes love songs that are undoubtedly queer (as I mentioned before, she isn’t particularly shy about being lesbian), & she’s expressed pro-Palestinian & pro-trans sentiments in the past (like the White House refusal, for instance); these two little things in this day & age are enough for people to expect her to be some sort of political mastermind! She hasn’t become famous specifically for being a successful policy-oriented activist; she is a musician who became famous for making music that appealed to progressives! There’s a bit of a difference!

I feel that one of the worst things about the way social media has eroded the boundaries between public figure & their audience is the way that basically every public figure is expected to give their takes on everything now. They have to make a statement on this issue or that issue, & that’s just prime for ill-informed people to make badly-worded, hastily-thought-out political prescriptions for the sake of looking good! & even if they do comment on something & give a somewhat understandable take to have, it’ll get picked apart, scrutinised & attacked until they issue an apology/correction that’s worded perfectly & doesn’t have any issues at all! How are people even supposed to know which takes are the correct takes on any given situation? There are so many people giving completely contradictory feedback that it just becomes a dense fog of noise, completely impenetrable!

It’s especially bad for Roan, whose status as a borderline mainstream celebrity is especially recent & rather rapidly thrust on her. She hasn’t had time to adjust to being famous in a truly global sense, as opposed to the cult classic niche status you’d expect an act like hers to get. As such, she’s still engaging with all this feedback & criticism in a way that’d probably be far more manageable & sustainable if she still had the mid-sized audience she used to, & I feel this probably wouldn’t have gotten as out of hand as it did if Roan didn’t feel the need to keep clarifying herself. It’s kinda sad, but fame incentivises logging off & handing your accounts over to your PR guy. Mitski learned that the hard way, & Roan may eventually learn that too.

Roan’s take was poorly-worded but nonetheless reasonable, & she was raked over the coals for it. Maybe I would’ve cared a couple of years ago, but now? I just can’t muster any shits to give. There are people actually involved in politics full-time I can save my energy for (I regularly bother my MP when I have the time to), instead of dealing in trivialities with a pop musician with broadly-progressive tendencies but not much knowledge of specifics. Get a life! Go do something more productive with your time, I beg you! You’ll thank me for it!