Chappell Roan is everywhere this summer, it seems. In the span of a few short months, she has broken into the mainstream and attracted record-breaking crowds at music festivals across the country. Her rise to fame has felt so rapid and stunning that it has been the subject of entire investigations, including one by The Washington Post. That’s why it read to many as a surprise when, as a guest on Drew Afualo’s podcast last month, Roan revealed that she had “pumped the brakes on, honestly, anything to make me more known.” Fans were blurring the lines between Roan as an artist and Roan as a person, and she had become worried for her safety.
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Last week, Roan doubled down on those comments in TikToks calling out “creepy behavior” from fans — including stalking her family and other abuses. “Would you stalk [a random lady’s] family? Would you follow her around? Would you try to dissect her life and bully her online?” she asked in the first video. In her follow-up, she expressed disagreement with the idea that harassment and abuse from fans is a necessary side effect to major commercial success, calling such expectations “weird.”
Roan was already concerned about the lack of privacy associated with fame in early September, weeks before her album was even released, and months before she’d see her first hits on the Billboard Hot 100. Speaking with The Post back then on a Zoom call, she said that she was trying to make space for herself. “I get overwhelmed very easily,” Roan said, calling herself “really introverted and a homebody.”
This is something Roan, 26, had tried to prepare for. Her real name is Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, but she had taken on a “drag name” to separate herself from her work as a performer. It was a smart and “protective” move, according to expert Kristin Lieb, a professor of gender and marketing at Emerson College who researches the music industry. But it wasn’t enough to keep Roan’s offstage life private.
“Celebrity culture is weird. I think it’s really bizarre and really unhealthy,” Roan told The Post last year. When it came to the parasocial relationships fans would form with her, and the type of engagement they expected from her as a performer in the public eye, she was at a loss: “I don’t really know what to do, because I don’t know any artist who has escaped the expectations of people that think they know the artist.”
At that time, fans were upset with her for printing her album on black vinyl rather than colored. It wasn’t a reaction that Roan had expected. “Don’t get mad at me. I’m just a random girl. I think people forget I’m just a random girl. I’m literally just a rando,” she said.
Her next steps were unclear: “I don’t really know what to do about it, except make the boundaries higher and higher.”
The problems Roan hinted at would continue to fester as her career skyrocketed.
Back when she spoke to The Post, her U.S. on-demand audio and video streams were at 1.01 million, according to entertainment insights company Luminate. Last week, when she took to TikTok to address harassment from fans, her streams hit 101.34 million. The difference is a staggering increase of more than 9,900 percent in just 11 months.
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Though other newer pop stars such as Doja Cat have also made headlines for calling out aggressive fan behavior and taking a step back from the public eye, Roan is among a vocal few calling for an overhaul of what celebrity should mean. Kate Lindsay, a journalist and an author of the internet culture newsletter Embedded, said that other artists, those like Harry Styles or Taylor Swift, who have long been accustomed to the horrors of the public eye, might take Roan’s example and follow suit.
“Up until now, I think it’s something people write off, ... [saying], ‘You’re not able to control your fans. It’s a losing battle,’ and I think that’s why the reaction [to Roan] has been split,” Lindsay said. “There are people who are like, ‘It’s part of your job,’ and there are people saying, ‘It doesn’t have to be.’”
She continued: “What [Roan]’s asking for is kind of a big cultural unlearning of how we see the people of our adoration and this relationship the internet has created. She’s kind of asking like, ‘Let’s undo that.’ And that’s a big ask, but also a valid thing to ask.”
Intensely devoted and engaged fan cultures, seen through examples such as Beatlemania and the “Moonwalkers,” have long endured, but the advent of social media has brought heightened public visibility to these communities that have changed the contours of celebrity, said Erin Meyers, a professor at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., who has studied the intersections of celebrity, new media and audience cultures.
“Part of engaging with a celebrity is now also seeing everything that their fans are contributing to their image and to their place in culture,” she said — and the power they wield has been more striking than ever. In the name of their idols, “stans,” or die-hard fans, have influenced elections, bolstered economies and triggered legislative action.
And seasoned pop stars such as Swift and Lady Gaga — who rose to fame as Twitter and Instagram came to prominence — have famously leaned into fan culture.
Swift, for instance, hides cryptic clues, or “Easter eggs,” in places such as songs, music videos and social media posts, which, in turn, incites more sleuthing and speculation among fans.
“For someone like Taylor, it’s a great way to connect and feel that community that I think is so much a part of her fandom,” Meyers said. “But it also easily tips over into too much,” leading to controversy.
In recent years, there have been accusations that stars such as Swift and Selena Gomez have used fans to instigate online bullying. In 2019, Scooter Braun claimed that his family received death threats from Swifties after the singer alleged a long-standing feud with the former manager following reports that he had acquired her recording masters. And last year, a purported feud between Gomez and Hailey Bieber ignited a massive cyberbullying pile-on between their respective fandoms. The onslaught started after Gomez commented on hate videos about Bieber on TikTok.
“I think that Chappell Roan and younger stars of her generation are coming in with a different sense of what celebrity even is or needs to be in order to connect to the fans,” Meyers said, adding that they’re talking about “the way that social media relates to mental health.”
Lindsay said that online fandoms often “feel a sense of ownership over the person they’re stanning.” Sometimes, that entitlement can go so far as to lead fans to behave antagonistically against the object of their admiration, criticizing them for small decisions one day or defending them against perceived attacks another.
Online, a long-running meme about how female celebrities are adored until immediately, inexplicably they’re not — aptly dubbed the “Jennifer Lawrence effect” — still makes the rounds whenever there’s a scandal or a new star to scrutinize. Some of Roan’s fans worry her fan base will turn on her, too.
“I do feel a sense of protectiveness [over Roan],” said Lee Romaker, 23, a fan who feels a connection with Roan as a queer Midwesterner living on a coast, “and I hope her fan base stays genuine, and I hope it does not turn destructive because of how big she gets.”
