For some reason, Chappell Roan seems to draw the worst kind of attention to herself, and this time she didn’t even have to do anything. In case you missed the latest attempt to spark up some controversy surrounding the singer, let me introduce to the completely absurd nonissue used to fuel the ongoing hate train against Roan.
Brazilian football player, Jorginho, and his wife, Catherine Harding, accused Roan of sending over a member from her security team to reprimand the couple for allowing Harding’s 11-year-old daughter to ‘harass’ Roan during breakfast at their hotel in São Paulo. According to Jorginho’s Instagram post, his stepdaughter — who was left in tears by the incident — had done nothing but walk past Roan’s table and smile. A day after Jorginho’s claim, Roan responded to state that she had no clue of the incident and that the security guard in question wasn’t even with her. Roan apologised on the security guard’s behalf and shared her sympathy for Harding and her daughter.
Shortly after many on the internet had erupted to use the event as evidence of Roan’s bratty, obnoxious mean girl persona, Pascal Duvier (the security guard in question) came to clear the air. As it turns out, Duvier was not at part of Roan’s team and instigated the interaction with Harding solely out of his own initiative. Well, it’s a good thing then that everybody was extremely normal about the situation and nobody overreacted or used it to smear the reputation of Roan’s relationship with her fans…oh, wait.
Chappell Roan has made her feelings about boundaries between her and her fans abundantly clear ever since her entry into the mainstream two years ago: she values her privacy. Roan chose to stand up to the stalkerish, creepy type of behaviour that she was experiencing from overly entitled fans — the type that’s usually seen as the cost for pop stardom. Although at the time she was praised for her blunt assertion of boundaries between fans and their idols, there were still those who insisted that surrendering your privacy and catering to the expectations of your fans, whenever and wherever, is the price pop stars should pay for their fame and fan support.
The debate between choosing when to respect a pop star’s privacy, or not, ultimately boils down to the public’s ambivalence to when certain fan behaviour can be justified. People can’t seem to decide whether pop stars should be afforded the same right of privacy as any other stranger you pass on the street would, or whether their artistic contribution and exalted status alienate them from this. Of course, pop stars simply can’t stop being famous as soon as they step off the stage and detract attention from themselves and, of course, there is the notion that — as Jorginho abrasively directed to Chappell Roan in his statement — without their fans, pop stars would be nothing (because, I’m sure every single person who listens to an extremely popular singer is a deeply devoted super fan and not necessarily someone who just whacked on the Hot Hits UK Spotify playlist…). So, surely, pop stars should completely forgo their privacy and succumb to the attention from adoring fans and obsessive haters alike. Don’t pop stars arguably owe that attention back to the public for all their hard effort supporting them? After all, songs don’t stream themselves and merch doesn’t sell without someone buying it!
I’m possibly being overly facetious, but I personally believe that pop stars shouldn’t have to withstand attention that they don’t want when they’re not performing or promoting their music. Maybe I can’t understand the idea of anticipating attention from someone who doesn’t know I exist, even if I do adore their music. I just can’t shake the conviction that, ultimately, you’re nothing but strangers to each other. In the words of Chappell Roan herself: “I’m a random [person], you’re a random [person]”. Fans letting adoration for a pop star devolve into the belief that at any time they’re entitled to an interaction with them starts to feel a little (if not a lot) parasocial to me. Obviously not all attention is equal in its intention or level of obsession, but I can’t be the only one who maintains a healthy amount of cynicism towards interactions between artists and their fans. It’s more often than not the fame that makes people venerate a pop star anyway, less than their actual talent. Consider how many unknown talented people there are who, whilst their talent still may be appreciated, aren’t utterly revered by other people in the same way that pop stars are.
For me, the debate surrounding pop stars’ right to privacy produces a different, maybe more important, question: why does an audience feel like they need to connect with the artist personally, to connect with their music personally?
“Chappell Roan 08” by Jason Martin is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.