Chappell Roan: Midwest Princess Tour
Cain’s Ballroom
June 5, 2024
Watch Chappell Roan’s recent videos on social media and you’ll see crowds ballooning: huge and storied attendances at Governor’s Ball, Boston Calling, and Coachella all speak—as even Elton John has—to her rise as pop’s next femme-camp it-girl. It’s not too surprising. Roan’s potent mix of gay pop, emo-driven hard rock, drag aesthetics, and catchy singalong choruses are practically begging for viral spread. The multi-block line of pink out the door of Cain’s Ballroom on a hot Wednesday night reflected that exponential trajectory: Chappell Roan’s Tulsa stop on her Midwest Princess Tour was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a star rise in real time.
It’s likely that, by this time next year, Chappell Roan’s crowds will be too large for the casual fan to even get a slight glimpse of the star. That’s why this show was so important, and so good. At Cain’s, sold out at its capacity of 1,800 though it was, the singer felt accessible, present, talking to us as if she knew us, almost like a small-town girl coming back home and making good.
In a way, that’s what happened. Roan’s roots stem from the Springfield, Missouri, area, less than two hundred miles away. This middle-America geography features prominently and romantically in the Chappellverse. In her encores “California” and “Pink Pony Club,” Roan lamented the loss of seasonality in the heat lamp of Los Angeles (“I miss the seasons in Missouri, my dying town”), and dramatized her mother bemoaning her distance and her career choice: “I can hear your southern drawl a thousand miles away, screaming, ‘God, what have you done?’” It was satisfying to end the night with one of Chappell’s catchiest and most tragic choruses.
Indeed, there was a tragedy about the show, though it was quiet, and easy to miss. It would be simple to focus on nothing but the hits: her drag queen openers were hilarious and energetic; her backing musicians were vivacious and talented; her performance was powerful, exciting, demanding, physical — and at times a little reserved. In the show’s soft moments, Roan’s tender personality shone through. In between the massive crowd stomping out the “HOT TO GO!” dance on the spring-loaded floor and the pitch-perfect Gaga pop of “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl,” Roan teared up during banter with the crowd, discussing her disbelief at her own stardom, her thankfulness at being able to do what she loves. In a show full of songs whose honesty is drenched in camp, we witnessed the facade falling, for a moment, away: we seemed to see Roan realizing, in real time, that her life will never be the same. In the months between her viral Coachella moment in April and now, her star has been rocketing. A quick look at Google Trends shows the singer’s search frequency doubling, then tripling, then quadrupling upon itself. Chappell Roan is likely very overwhelmed. She put on a hell of a show in spite of it.
The implementation of a theme for the show (“Midwest Princess”) made the crowd its own kind of spectacle: pink sparkles, high heels, and camouflage-printed tees blended together into an aesthetic that was less impression and more inspiration. In pushing the Tulsa crowd to play with the aesthetics of the Southern Midwest (whichever geographical signifier Oklahoma happens to occupy; when she called us the Midwest the crowd started yelling at her), she allowed us to be ourselves, which is one of the reigning themes of the Chappell Roan lyric. Find a way to live the longings in your heart, she warns in “Good Luck, Babe!” or you may suffer the ultimate karmic punishment: you’ll be miserable and lame, or perhaps worse — Chappell Roan will write a kinky banger about you.
Roan’s pop is perfect for a place like Tulsa. Just between the rural and the urban, the sense of being a “big-small-town,” the urge to be unknown and familiar all at once: all these dichotomies find a natural resolution in her music. It aspires just as it fears that aspiration. It craves Santa Monica; it needs rural Missouri. We are all these things, “Pink Pony Club” says: we are each of us here for a purpose greater than our roots, and yet we are tangled up in them. We cannot escape, even as we often do. We find ourselves in the extremes, hands to the sky, just as often as we oscillate back to the center. Guess there’s only one thing to do: keep on dancing.
