On September 28, summer inevitably began to fall in Chappell Roan. In a “Weekend Update” segment on Saturday Night LiveBowen Yang appeared as Moo Deng and compared the viral hippo’s plight to Roan’s own complaints about inappropriate fan behavior, cementing it as “A Definite Thing.” (In response to fan outcry over “a cishet gay man”sic) making fun of a queer woman,” Yang explained that the skit was made with love.) The segment capped a tumultuous week for Roan, with the singer’s comments about the presidential election sparking another round of backlash in the social media triggered. This caused her to cancel two scheduled appearances at the All Things Go Festival. “Things have become overwhelming over the last few weeks and I’m really feeling it,” she wrote on Instagram.

This hybrid is the latest installment in an exhaustive, months-long conversation about Roan, fame and stan culture. In August, she released a series of social media statements denouncing “predatory” fans and “rejecting the idea that I allow people I don’t know, trust, or distrust a reciprocal exchange of information.” Energy, time or attention scare me just because they express admiration.” A week later, she canceled two European tour dates due to scheduling conflicts, apparently with the MTV VMAs, where she made headlines again for being on the had an argument with a photographer on the red carpet. At the heart of all this drama is one undeniable point: No recent pop star has ever risen to fame as quickly as Chappell Roan. For an artist who speaks openly about her own bipolar disorder and depression, it’s all happening too fast for her to handle.

Although true diehards have known about her since 2020, Roan has gone from anonymous to ubiquitous to the general public in less than a year. your debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princesswas released in September 2023, but did not crack that billboard 200 chart until April. By July, Roan had half a dozen songs on the Hot 100. This summer is the Just reported on the rapid expansion of her live tour: she went from playing a 600-capacity venue outside of Sacramento to an estimated 80,000-person performance at the Outside Lands festival in San Francisco. Until the European cancellations, Roan was an endearing overnight success story, the quirky theater kid who had gotten his way while remaining honest and unfiltered, and most fans agreed with her decision to draw a clear line against pushy fans. But the canceled shows sparked the first backlash – one so predictable that Roan even incorporated it into the title of their album. The downside of her rapid rise is also becoming increasingly clear: Chappell Roan became famous before her brain.

I don’t mean this in a “your brain freezes at the age you became famous” sense, although 26 might actually be the worst age to be mentally stuck. I mean, it would be impossible for anyone to expand their self-confidence as exponentially as Roan’s public profile. Compare her to the other pop girlies of the summer. Before Brat Summer, Charli XCX had been in the trenches of pop for over a decade, long enough to develop a shrewd sense of how to control her media narrative. Likewise, Sabrina Carpenter was a former child star who was on pop music’s C-list for years before breaking through with her sixth studio album. In contrast, Roan hasn’t had the time to learn how to protect herself from the glare of the spotlight or to find the financial resources that other celebrities use to coddle themselves from the world. She has found herself at an unmanageable level of fame: famous enough to have stalkers and not rich enough to hide out on Lake Como.

Adding to Roan’s difficulties is that she carries a burden of representation that the others do not. As an outspoken advocate for the queer community, she now finds herself in the Dylanesque situation of being treated by her fans not just as a singer, but as a truthteller. (Funnily enough, Yang’s audience has a similar habit of seeing him as the paragon of political righteousness.) This, in turn, raises the stakes of every public statement she makes. Take the heat over the comments Roan made The Guardian in a Sept. 20 interview about not feeling “pressured to support anyone” in the U.S. presidential election. The interview was picked up by @PopFlop, a social media account dedicated to compiling quotes from female musicians in the most inflammatory manner possible, which echoed Roan’s comment that there are “issues on both sides.” (PopFlop later apologized, saying it “didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.”) Anyone who had ever woken up in their 20s knew that Roan was making a left-wing “both sides” argument, not a centrist one. Still, the quote led the internet’s biggest sleuths to suspect that an artist who spotlights drag and trans performers, sings vividly about lesbian sex and portrays heterosexual relationships as inherently unfulfilling may be a closet conservative. As part of social media’s guilt-by-association ethos, these people found the news that the singer was related to a Republican state politician to be a damning problem, as if 26-year-old women always held the same political views as their uncles .

In this position, other celebrities could be forgotten. Roan’s reaction was more like the normal person she was just a short time ago: feeling misunderstood, she tried to clarify her comments, but ultimately only deepened them. She posted two TikToks declaring that while she would vote for Kamala Harris, she would not officially support her in protest at the Democratic Party’s abandonment of “every marginalized community in the world.” Roan’s comments put her in the middle of the internet’s most intractable political debate, one that has torn leftists and liberals apart since the spring of 2016, ensuring that the never-ending saga of Chappell Roan continued for a sixth straight week.

In some ways, Roan was a victim of context collapse. In the online spaces where her fans congregate, such views are uncontroversial; It’s only when they come into contact with regular Democrats panicked by memories of 2016 that they become triggering. But her decision to pull out of this weekend’s concerts in the wake of the controversy suggests misplaced priorities, an artist who appears to care more about anonymous commenters than her own fanbase. She finds herself in a losing battle: the more time she spends responding to every possible criticism, the harder her job becomes.