Chappell Roan and the Perils of Parasociality

I remember reading the headline “BRITNEY SHEARS” when I was eight years old. My mother sat behind it shaking her head slowly, a full-page photo of Britney’s vacant stare and half-shaved scalp obscuring what I could ascertain even then was a mix of pity and contempt. I’m pretty sure my mom still has that Daily News, saran-wrapped in a box alongside copies of the New York Times from every presidential inauguration since the second Bush, saved for posterity.

Not long after, I stood in the supermarket checkout line facing a tower of tabloid magazines as tall as I was—a bald Britney splashed across all the covers, a deconstructed flipbook of her infamous umbrella attack. In a few weeks, they’d be replaced with a new rotation of flash photos of celebrities stumbling out of bars or making out in hotel parking lots or daring to be seen in public without makeup. It was routine. But Britney’s breakdown was something more. Back in the 2000s, when the life cycle of a celebrity spectacle was considerably longer than it is now, her downfall was this epic, drawn-out saga. Nothing unites the public like giving them a once-worshiped falling star to point and laugh at.

When I was growing up, people spoke about “The Paparazzi” as if they were some faceless, shadowy entity embroiled in an ongoing frenemyship with celebrities. They were simultaneously a parasitic presence in the lives of famous people and a necessary evil for anyone who wanted to maintain their relevance. Their role in the public humiliation of these figures was tacitly understood as a sort of hazing ritual in exchange for reaping the benefits of stardom.

In a way, the job of the paparazzi was to humanize celebrities without empathizing with them. Part of the appeal of paparazzi photos and celebrity gossip magazines was in showing the normal, non-famous majority that not even the elites were spared from the basic indignities of being human. Stars, they’re just like us! They get their coffee to-go, they walk their dogs, they push their kids on the swings at the park, they trip and fall over while walking in too-high heels, they get wedgies and pick them in public, they have nip-slips, they cry on the phone with their exes, they puke in gutters outside packed nightclubs, they get arrested, they overdose, they go to rehab, they get sober, they relapse. All of this schadenfreude was (and, to a degree, still is) in service of broadcasting the moments in which a seemingly untouchable class of people are caught being human and punished through routine public shaming. We, the celebrity-obsessed civilians, get to watch the rich, beautiful and well-known get their comeuppance.

As much as we want our star-studded whipping boys and girls to be publicly punished when they do something we deem unacceptable, we also want the good ones to be our mirrors—to act as living proof of meritocracy. We want to see the perceived best parts of ourselves reflected back to us in the stars that we revere. We want our faves to be unproblematic and want them to age like fine wine as a reward for their good behavior. We want Ariana Grande to invite us to a slumber party where we all talk about our feelings. We want Taylor Swift to lock eyes with us from the stage and make a heart with her hands—hands that bear the friendship bracelets we made for her—and we want this to mean that she loves us back; we want the people she dates and hangs out with and votes for to be the ones we approve of. We want our favorite actors and musicians to always be happy to see us, the perfect strangers who approach them in public. We want them to see us as the long-lost best friend that they are to us, and we want them to embrace us accordingly.

“If you saw a random woman on the street, would you yell at her from a car window? Would you harass her in public? Would you stalk members of her family?” These were the questions asked by Chappell Roan in a recent video uploaded to her TikTok account. The obviously disruptive and invasive behaviors are the ones she brings up first, before mentioning more gray area fan interactions: Would you ask this random woman for a photo? A conversation? A hug? Do you think you’re owed these things? “Would you assume she’s a good person? Assume she’s a bad person?” Chappell asks. “Would you assume everything that you read about her online is true?”

In some ways, social media has made the concept of the paparazzi—at least in the way they existed in the 2000s—obsolete. Of course, these people still exist, but their job has been decentralized to a degree that now pretty much anyone with a decent smartphone camera and lucky timing can do it, at least a little bit. Even non-famous people can go viral overnight if someone films them doing something deemed strange or unacceptable in public. I think of an incident in which two women at a baseball game were doxxed and branded “mean girls” because, for a couple seconds in the background of an influencer’s TikTok video, they appeared to be making fun of her. Never mind the fact that the influencer herself was the one recording these people that she didn’t know without their permission and egging on her thousands of followers to be their judge, jury and executioner for the crime of being annoyed that a stranger was non-consensually filming them? We’ve been trained to accept potential surveillance at all times, as if by simply leaving the house we’re giving our consent to have photos and videos taken of us and shared across the apps. If you’re a public figure, that assumed consent is amplified to the nth degree. Any fan can snap a photo of a pop star looking pissed off and send it sailing on the choppy waves of the internet as hard proof that she’s a diva, a brat, a bitch.

This isn’t to suggest that hazardous fan behavior is solely a product of social media. In 1995, Selena Quintanilla was fatally shot by the president of her own fan club who’d worked her way up to a managerial position at the Tejano singer’s boutiques. The Beatles were stalked by fans who’d had an iota of the fandom material—photos, television appearances, newspaper articles—that fans of similarly ubiquitous artists have access to today, and like Selena, John Lennon was murdered by someone who purported to worship him. It’s no coincidence that the term “stan”—one that elevates fandom from something that you like to something that you are—is a portmanteau of “stalker” and “fan,” or that it originates from Eminem’s song “Stan,” in which the titular character, furious that his idol Eminem won’t respond to his letters, drives off a bridge in a drunken rage with his pregnant girlfriend tied up in the trunk.

Instances of physical violence or even murder are, of course, the most extreme cases of fans disregarding the boundaries and safety of their favorite artists. They make up a miniscule portion of unethical fan behavior, but just because they’re outliers doesn’t mean that they don’t exist on a spectrum (albeit at the far, far end of said spectrum) of parasocial entitlement. Violence—or even the threat of violence—doesn’t have to be present in order for the target to legitimately fear for their safety, and a violation shouldn’t have to have already occurred in order for a boundary to be set.

Once, I ended up in a conversation with a man who wondered aloud why women thought catcalling was “such a big deal.” He said that if there was no touching involved, there wasn’t any real harm in a wolf whistle or a “compliment” shouted from a car window. I wanted to assume that he was well-meaning, and that because getting catcalled wasn’t a part of his lived experience, he was just trying to better understand its impact. I tried to explain that the absence of these more obvious offenses didn’t mean there was no threat at all and that, no, I don’t think every man who yells “Hey baby!” at a woman on the street wants to abuse or assault her, but that even a seemingly innocuous remark itself is enough to suggest the presence of another, more severe threat.

I know logically that the man on the corner yelling at me probably isn’t a rapist, nor do I think that what he is doing on its own constitutes a violent act, but 1) it’s rude, and 2) even the suggestion of entitlement or aggression is enough for me to put my guard up. He probably won’t keep following me down the street or try to grab me, but because other men who’ve initiated a similar kind of interaction with me have done exactly that in the past, I’m gonna keep my head down and walk a little faster just in case. I am by no means drawing exact equivalencies between my own experiences of public harassment and the experiences of celebrities and the fans who disregard their boundaries. I’m merely trying to illustrate how entitlement—to someone’s time or their physical space—is a slippery slope. If I routinely had strangers following me around in public, yelling my name, trying to touch me, sneakily taking photos or videos of me, making my friends and family members uncomfortable, etc., I might also be wary of more “normal” fan behaviors like asking for a hug or a selfie.

It’s also worth noting how little time a star like Chappell Roan has had to adjust to her level of fame. By now, anyone who’s read anything about Chappell Roan on the internet has probably seen the line graph charting her number of monthly Spotify listeners since the release of The Rise And Fall of a Midwest Princess last September—a number that increased from 1 million to 43 million in just four months. Chappell’s name has been mentioned frequently alongside other stars who’ve been catapulted from middling to mainstream fame during the summer of 2024, like Charli xcx and Sabrina Carpenter. But while Charli and Sabrina have been in the spotlight to at least some degree for a decade or more, Chappell’s ascent is an extremely condensed version of theirs, giving her less lead time to essentially learn how to be famous.

Charli xcx got years to be “famous, but not quite” (as she puts it on her song “I might say something stupid”), having a couple radio hits like “Fancy,” “I Love It” and “Boom Clap” to pay her bills while she made music for a devoted but not exactly mainstream fanbase. Sabrina got her start as a Disney Channel kid, and while we’ve seen time and time again the lasting emotional, developmental and psychological toll that child stardom can take, she’d had more media training and a more steady entrance into the limelight than an overnight success like Chappell. A year before posting her video calling out invasive fans, Chappell was working as a camp counselor while releasing promotional singles for her debut album to streaming numbers in the hundred thousands. She was what you might call “indie famous.” A month before posting the video, she played a set at Lollapalooza and drew one of the largest crowds in the festival’s history.

I’ve heard stories from other “indie famous” artists, even ones with a tiny fraction of the fame that musicians like Chappell Roan have received, who’ve been stalked, doxxed or harassed by people who claim to be their fans. I’ve heard of “indie famous” artists who’ve had to move out of their homes or get law enforcement involved. If it can be that bad for someone with maybe 100,000 monthly listeners, someone who still has to work a day job, it’s understandable why someone at Chappell’s level of exposure would get so defensive.

It’s especially understandable when you consider how personal or autobiographical songwriting can complicate the artist-to-fan dynamic. In a 2019 article for Nylon, Caitlin Wolper spoke to female musicians—all of whom, to varying degrees, could be considered “indie famous”—about the difficulties of setting boundaries with their fans, and used what music writer Sasha Geffen has called “asymmetrical intimacy” to describe the way fans feel as though their resonance with an artist’s work equates to a knowledge of that artist as a person. Chappell Roan has said that, though she sings about a lot of her real-life experiences, the character of “Chappell Roan” is not herself—she’s a drag persona, or a Hannah Montana-style alter ego. Part of the reasoning behind giving herself a different name and a theatrical look specifically for performances was to create a deliberate separation between her public and personal life. It reminds me of a question singer-songwriter Sidney Gish posed in the aforementioned Nylon article: “If you saw a mall Santa in a men’s room, would you sit on his lap?”

It should be inspiring to see an industry outsider from a humble background achieve success simply because she’s hardworking and talented, but it sours the story when she’s thrown into the world of pop stardom with minimal to no protection against the dangers that come with it. Even if Chappell Roan had the time to prepare for what it was like to be a world-famous popstar, even if she’d been briefed on the entitled, exploitative, or just kind of strange ways in which people would interact with her on a daily basis once her songs were playing on the radio, it still wouldn’t be justified. While many have extended sympathy to Chappell in the wake of her expressing concerns about her boundaries being disrespected, I’ve also seen people insinuate that she’s being ungrateful or that she’s “not cut out for fame.” They say that invasive fan behavior comes with the territory and she should just quit whining and accept it.

None of this is me simply crying “Won’t someone please think of the poor celebrities?” Celebrity culture degrades artists and fans alike. It enforces pre-existing hierarchies and creates new ones by establishing a class of people to whom normal rules don’t apply. If you’re famous, you’re afforded certain luxuries that “normal” people aren’t, and the implication is that you pay the price for wealth and acclaim by sacrificing things like privacy and personal space. The celebrity’s ego is inflated, as is the public’s idea of them, to the point that in the fan’s mind, their favorite celebrity is simultaneously ultra-real and not real at all. Chappell Roan can be a figment of your imagination and she can also be your flesh-and-blood best friend.

I am not claiming that we can dismantle celebrity culture—a pervasive and stubbornly embedded symptom of capitalism—overnight, but I am suggesting that we can try to see famous people in a way that’s a little more normal. Idol worship and idol endangerment are two sides of the same coin. When you remove the pedestal, you also remove the need to knock the idol down from it. “I’m a random bitch. You’re a random bitch,” says Chappell Roan—it’s one of the most unexpectedly salient points she makes in the entire video. At the end of the day, famous or not, everyone is just that: a random bitch. Maybe if we didn’t see celebrities as these untouchable, godlike avatars, we wouldn’t have the urge to watch them fail. Maybe if we acknowledged them as flawed, fallible and human from the get-go, we wouldn’t need to cut them just to prove that they bleed the same blood we do. Maybe if we already understood that stars are just like us, we wouldn’t need to go to such extreme lengths to prove it.

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, currently based in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has appeared in The Alternative, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Post-Trash, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.