Chappell Roan’s Live Show Is Very Good and Very Gay

Saturday night in Queens, New York, the stage was set straight outta Grimms’ Fairy Tale, a Poe fever dream, Maleficent’s palace, or all three. Wearing a maroon and gold Victorian gown, a pirate hat, and lace-up knee-high boots, Chappell Roan descended down a gothic spiral staircase singing “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl.” Her all-femme band, clad in puff-sleeve taffeta dresses, chugged along with the fury of a metal group as fog machines worked overtime. By the second song, “Femininomenon,” the crowd’s volume overtook Chappell’s powerful live vocals: the spoken-word bridge felt like some kind of mass conversion to lesbianism, with its cheers about how that man couldn’t get you off.

The entire show felt like an act of swearing off men, the journey that’s animated Chappell Roan’s work since she entered the pop mainstream early last year. In my view, 2023’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess represented her breaking point with toxic male behavior, and every song since then has been Chappell living in a post-man world. Now she writes freely about her love and loss of women, sometimes in opposition to men (like on “Good Luck, Babe!” or service-top anthem “The Giver”), which does give off a competitive vibe. It’s a pop campaign for W4W. There were so many sapphic interludes in the show, where Roan got on her knees, arched her back, and worshipped at the altar of a bandmate’s guitar. At times this resembled the act of scissoring; it was also extremely sexy. If a Boygenius show sits at a 6 or 7 on the sapphic scale, Chappell live is an easy 9. 

We typically think of big pop tours as coinciding with a new album, but I found it fascinating to witness Chappell in this in-between moment that’s been going on for a year and a half now. The demand was such that Roan could sell out the 13,000-person Forest Hills Stadium, four times over, almost instantly (that’s roughly equivalent to three nights at Madison Square Garden). Dressed in pink cowboy hats and generally fabulous looks, the fans knew every single word; they organized themselves so that rainbow lights dotted the upper decks during “Kaleidoscope.” The setlist was no surprise: She played all of Midwest Princess, plus every single since then, early song “Love Me Anyway,” and her chill-inducing cover of Heart’s “Barracuda.” But the caliber of the performance went way beyond someone touring behind their debut. 

Roan is the pop main girlie most likely to front a rock band at this moment in time. She has a natural way onstage; an understanding of when to strut the runway, when to headbang, when to skank, when to kneel down in a power stance, when to sing to a blonde wig on a mic stand, when to flash a stank face (like during “Casual”). Her dancing is that of a girl in her bedroom, plus a hefty dash of drag queen charisma. She understands the power of a good outfit change, and also of nipple tassels. But the *thing* about seeing Chappell Roan live is her vocals—they’re as good, if not better, than on her recordings (“The Subway” really hammered this home). I have seen a lot of great singers over the years, and the list of those who’ve induced heavy tears in me is short: Aretha Franklin, Beyoncé, Moses Sumney, and now Chappell. 

It was the “Barracuda” cover that broke me first. The skill it takes to even emulate Ann Wilson’s vocals, a performance that oozed with self-possessed sexuality, the recognition of Heart, the chugging power of the song itself. It took me back to the little kid place, which is an emotional longing I’d describe as: If I’d heard or seen this art as a kid, it could have helped me. Maybe it’s a girl thing, or a queer thing, or a general outsider thing, but pop music—specifically because of its mass reach—is an artform where I’m pulled back to the little kid place often. Someone like Chappell feels important in that way, and she knows it—she built it that way.

“I just needed a place like this so bad when I was 13, 14,” she told the crowd on Saturday night, “just because I wanted to dress up however I wanted to, I wanted to wear makeup and look weird. And so, I hope you know that you’re welcome here however you showed up today… you are cherished.”