A Fissure in Our Honeymoon with Chappell Roan

Chappell Roan is finally in trouble.

The pop phenomenon and queer icon is having a year for the ages. She was critically acclaimed for years but never that well known. But this year, the Midwest singer-songwriter, known for her single “Hot to Go” to the extent that it is now the subject of numerous memes, broke big after an unforgettable performance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April.

She has since sold out stadiums, taken over TikTok and topped the charts with her zeitgeisty singles “Red Wine Supernova,” “Pink Pony Club” and “Good Luck, Babe!”

Sometimes white artists come out of nowhere and the next thing you know, they’re on top of the world. Frankly, it can be a bit suspicious, especially when the talent is suspect, the lyrics are feeble and the music is only OK. In some instances, one might suspect that the whiteness is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. (I won’t name names. I’m sure at least one artist comes to mind for you, which means you know this too and, yes, that’s more than likely who I meant).

On the contrary, Roan is incredibly gifted. Her lyrics are funny. Her vocals are top tier. Her public persona and drag queen esthetic is all kinds of fun. While meteoric rises like hers are typically exclusive to white artists, she seems plenty deserving of all her success.

The public infatuation with Roan is still in its honeymoon stage, though. There’s much we don’t know about the new queen of pop. Roan has established herself as an LGBTQ2S+ icon, for example, which comes with a presumed political progressivism.

But that’s not a guarantee, especially for white Americans like Roan, 54 per cent of whom voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

Certainly not Chappell Roan, though. Right?

The Harris-Walz campaign clearly appreciates the singer, borrowing her orange-on-camouflage motif for branded trucker hats, and using Roan’s music on TikTok and during the Democratic National Convention.

The assumption has long been that the feeling is mutual.

An interview last week in the Guardian threw all that into question, however, as Roan explained why she had, until that point, refused to endorse Kamala Harris.

“I have so many issues with our government in every way,” Roan told the Guardian. “There are so many things that I would want to change. So I don’t feel pressured to endorse someone. There’s problems on both sides.”

Those three words — on both sides — were more than enough to trigger Roan’s first public backlash since hitting the A-list.

So much so that an irate Roan woke Wednesday morning to clarify her stance on TikTok to an audience of over three million.

“Endorsing and voting are completely different,” she said. “So no, I’m not gonna settle for the options that are in front of me. And you’re not gonna make me feel bad for that.”

She explained that she would vote for Harris but that she’s “not settling” for what her party is offering, particularly because Roan is critical of what she calls “completely transphobic and completely genocidal views” held by some progressives.

The fallacy of ‘both-sides-ism’

The rise of Donald Trump in U.S. politics has served as a crash course in false balance, the fallacy commonly known as “both-sides-ism,” which presents contrasting viewpoints as equally valid or invalid, regardless of public consensus or facts.

In the media, coverage that strains (or, in some cases, claims) to be balanced may offer credibility to baseless claims and bad-faith political figures who lean on false balance themselves as a means of misleading the public.

Beyond that, “both sides” became something you just don’t say after Trump employed this rhetoric in defence of the white nationalists who rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

There are “very fine people on both sides,” he said then, all but high-fiving the murderous mob on their way out of town.

It was concerning, then, to hear Roan use the same language in 2024. In the aftermath of her interview, she has faced criticism, even from notable figures within the queer community.

“If you’re a high profile figure in the LGBTQ+ community, you need to take a stand in this election,” said George Takei. “Both sides-ing it when our community is under direct attack from the GOP is an irresponsible cop out.”

A big part of what’s going on here is whiteness. It wouldn’t surprise me, demographically, if Roan, a self-described Midwest pop princess, came out as a Trump supporter while nobody was looking.

As with Taylor Swift before her, even in spite of the “Shake It Off” singer’s previous progressive political stances, it wasn’t so clear who Roan would be voting for, and sometimes she seemed loath to spell it out for us.

White conservatives might assume that Swift is on their side, and so long as no one says she isn’t, they’ll keep buying her music.

This is the dynamic that made Swift’s recent Harris endorsement so newsworthy.

Swift’s post-debate Instagram post was a big deal — so much so that Rachel Maddow interrupted Harris’s running mate Tim Walz on live TV to read him the whole thing in full.

In the wake of Taylor Swift’s endorsement, threats

The Harris campaign seemed relieved. It was never a sure thing, even after Swift’s 2020 documentary Miss Americana, which promised a newfound commitment to advocacy. Swift has been pretty tight-lipped on her politics lately, especially during her historic Eras tour, which has now surpassed $1 billion in revenue.

But Swift faced an outpouring of fury as the MAGA movement dealt with her endorsement, which came hot on the heels of a flood of AI-generated images that painted her as pro-Trump.

Anti-Black racism has long propelled Swift’s career, from her feud with Kanye West to the praise she gets for political stances while Black activists laying the groundwork face only erasure. This is an artist with four Album of the Year Grammys this century, the same number as every Black artist combined, twice as many as modern Black artists and four more than Beyoncé, whose 32 Grammys are mostly in Urban and R&B subcategories.

White supremacists have praised Swift for her “sculpted Aryan form and angelic demeanour” and crowned her as the avatar for whiteness.

After all this, siding with Harris has to come off as ingratitude in circles like these.

“F you, Taylor Swift!” shouted conservative American commentator Megyn Kelly, on her show The Recount.

Elon Musk, meanwhile, threatened to impregnate Swift, which was deeply disturbing.

Even Donald Trump himself weighed in. “I hate Taylor Swift!” he wrote on the alt-tech media platform Truth Social. Elsewhere, he suggested that “she’ll probably pay a price for it... in the marketplace.”

Swift’s pop predecessors have. After Natalie Maines of the Chicks spoke out against the war in Iraq and the Bush administration amid her group’s time at the top of the mountain, the public backlash was severe. The then Dixie Chicks were blacklisted by thousands of country radio stations. The group received death threats. Maines was compelled to apologize.

Such are the dangers of weighing in on politics when so many white Americans are Trump supporters. It’s more fraught, of course, if your music is country — a genre whose preference for whiteness was on full display this year as two artists, Beyoncé and white rapper Post Malone, dropped country albums this year.

Beyoncé was played only sparingly on country radio, and her album Cowboy Carter was snubbed at the Country Music Association Awards. Many said she simply “wasn’t country.”

Post Malone, meanwhile, was seen as a natural fit for the genre, even though he established himself as a white rapper, an identity centred on the breakout single “White Iverson” and later bemoaned by Malone as a “struggle.”

Nobody held it against him. The album, F-1 Trillion, garnered four CMA nominations.

As it happens, Post Malone has never endorsed a political candidate, though he did once say he’d play Trump’s inauguration — for the right price.

A matter of ethics?

It seems this is a tap dance reserved for white artists (and certain white athletes, apparently). Only white artists who reach these incredible highs, after all, must be shrewd or keep mum about politics, for fear of alienating the anti-Black faction of their massive fan base. It’s hard out here for avatars of whiteness.

Black artists, on the other hand, are often assumed to be politically progressive, in large part because Blackness and liberalism have such significant crossover. In much of public discourse, they’re precisely the same thing, even if Black Republicans might insist otherwise.

There are outliers, of course. Many folks were surprised, for example, by Janet Jackson’s recent comments suggesting that Harris wasn’t Black.

“That’s what I heard,” Jackson told the Guardian. “That she’s Indian. Her father’s white. That’s what I was told. I mean, I haven’t watched the news in a few days. I was told that they discovered her father was white.”

The backlash was immediate. Even Jackson’s interviewer, Nosheen Iqbal, wrote that she was “floored.”

An apology followed, explaining that the singer’s comments were “based on misinformation,” but this too was misinformation. The apology was sourced to a man named Mo Elmasri who, it turns out, doesn’t work for Jackson and was not authorized to apologize on her behalf.

I digress. Much as whiteness keeps her on top of the music game, Roan is probably not playing coy to preserve market share.

Though we’ve seen this playbook many times before, Roan’s refusal to endorse Harris isn’t about holding down the centre — it’s about her leftist bona fides.

The singer has previously taken political stands against the Biden-Harris administration, especially over the ongoing war in Gaza.

As it has for many, her enthusiasm for the Democratic party has receded in the wake of the incumbent government’s support for Israel and its continued military attacks on the people of Palestine.

In June, Roan declined an invitation to perform at the White House’s Pride celebration, explaining to her fans that she would not support the Biden-Harris administration amid these ongoing atrocities. Even then, she was completely misread by the general public.

“I saw a couple of TikToks where they were like, ‘So she’s pro Trump?’ It is not so black and white that you hate one and like the other,” Roan told Rolling Stone in September.

In her most recent TikTok video on Wednesday, Roan was explicitly critical of Trump, but also critical of some of what the Democratic party has supported that, in her words, “has failed people like me and you, and more so, Palestine. And more so, every marginalized community in the world.”

“So no,” Roan said. “I’m not going to settle for the options in front of me.”