Chappell Roan’s Live Show Is Very Good and Very Gay
An emotional dispatch from Chappell’s Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things Tour
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.
