The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess

"It's undeniable: the era of Chappell Roan is upon us," says Constance Grady for Vox in the article Chappell Roan spent 7 years becoming an overnight success. Since her Coachella debut and the release of her single Good Luck Babe, Chappell Roan has had a massive blow-up. She went from having around 300,000 monthly listeners in Spotify to more than 10,000,000, in just a few weeks (currently she is at around 45,000,000 monthly listeners). However, in a series of TikTok videos, Chappell has called out some of her fans' creepy behavior which she has experienced both in person and online as her fame continues to expand. "I don't care that abuse and harassment is a normal thing to do to people who are famous or a little famous," she says in one of her TikTok videos.

Three current planetary transits perfectly illustrate Chappell's sudden blow-up in 2024 and its consequences. Uranus trine Pluto (2022-2032) explains Chappell's success in today's world, as her work explores queerness, camp, drag, and self-empowerment through authenticity. Jupiter conjunct Uranus (2023-2024) expounds Chappell's insanely rapid growth, as well as her success this particular Spring/Summer, as her music is flamboyant, joyful, funny, rebellious and cutting-edge. Lastly but not least, Jupiter square Saturn (2024-2025) discloses the struggles Chappell is having because of her sudden rise to mainstream fame.

Superficially, there are several reasons we can point out to explain Chappell's success this year: she toured with Olivia Rodrigo, stunned at Coachella, appeared on Jimmy Fallon, and performed on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert among others. By examining the planetary transits from this Spring and Summer, we can see how Chappell's success is also aligned with the cosmic forces at play. It seems like Chappell, in 2024, has been 'at the right place, at the right time' several times, but it has not always been like that for her.

Roan has been working as a pop artist for about a decade. She signed her first record deal with Atlantic Records when she was only 17 (now 26) and has been releasing songs ever since. For a long time, however, none of them seemed to quite hit. The Chappell Roan of this era was also really different to the one we know now. "At the time, the job was to sing dark, moody songs about the sadomasochistic thrill of being in love with a bad boy," says Grady from Vox. During this era, there was no hint of queerness yet in Chappell, and her presentation gave off a sort of witchy, brooding, Florence Welch-esque vibe (very different to the flamboyant, drag queen, campy sort of vibe she gives off now). But perhaps most importantly, this aesthetic is not one that feels authentic to her. As Grady says, "she was doing a variation of the melancholy indie pop sound and look that was then in vogue.”

It was when Roan moved to Los Angeles in 2018 that she was able to experience herself as a fully out queer woman, and thus, found her own unique style. “I was told this city is demonic and Satanists live here,” Roan told NME this February. “But when I got to West Hollywood, it opened my eyes [to the fact] that everything I was afraid of wasn’t always true–especially [what I’d been told] about the queer community. Going to gay clubs for the first time, it felt spiritual,” she added.

It was also then when she met Dan Nigro, her primary creative collaborator, who had, at the time, recently broken out in a huge way for his work on Olivia Rodrigo's Drivers License. Pink Pony Club, which was released in April 2020, was the first collaboration between Roan and Nigro. "There, we start to see the beginning of what we now know as Chappell Roan: hair worn loose and curly, vulnerability pushed forward but shame exuberantly chased away,” says Grady. Unfortunately, the single was both unpopular in the charts as well as within her label. The pandemic-filled era of April 2020 was not a great time for loud odes to the dance club. Along the same lines, the label disapproved of Roan shifting her aesthetic so abruptly. After two more not-very-successful releases, California and Love Me Anyway, Atlantic officially dropped Roan from the label.

But Roan was not going to give up all that easily. Naked in Manhattan was her first independent single. It is in this music video that we see Chappell's current campy aesthetic fully formed for the first time. As Grady describes, it features "fire engine red hair, elaborate hyper-femme outfits cobbled together from thrift store pieces, a pinup girl burlesque cheekiness." At last, Roan had found a style for herself that she truly loved.

Since the summer of 2022, we have been going through the planetary transit of Uranus trine Pluto. I believe that because Roan's work so brilliantly encapsulates the energy of this archetype in several ways, she has begun to take off since then. Uranus is typically associated with rebellion, freedom, eccentricity, breakthrough, sudden change, creative-trickster-rebel energy, unpredictability, instability, among other things. Pluto, conversely, is often associated with power, depth, intensity, sex, transformation, the cycle of death and rebirth, the underground in all senses, the taboo, among other things. Thus, when these two planets come together in an aspect, it is common to see themes of lgbtq+ rights, female empowerment, the awakening of countercultural impulses, the liberation of Dionysian energies, shifts of power, and deep striving for change. All of this we see in Chappell Roan.

As the singer herself (whose real name is Kayleigh) tells Vox about her on-stage persona, "Chappell was all the things Kayleigh was ashamed of." She wears clown-inspired makeup because, as she says, "that's what the country boys called gay people in my hometown: clowns." Interestingly, and as we have covered recently, the clowncore makeup trend also has a big association with the Uranus-Pluto transit. As Grady points out, Chappell Roan (the persona) also "plays campily with the signifiers of her small-town background [and] is unapologetically sexual in ways that her creator cannot quite bring herself to be." Chappell Roan, for Kayleigh, is a way of reclaiming her power after decades of struggling with her queerness. And that, of course, is very Uranus-Pluto.

Right around the time when Chappell really blew up, in the Spring/Summer of 2024, the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction was in its peak. When Jupiter, the principle of expansion, growth, progress, elevation, success, good fortune, honor, recognition, aggrandizement, excess, broadening horizons, among other things, meets Uranus, we tend to see themes of dramatic breakthroughs, quantum leaps, the surprising resolution of problems, unexpected openings and opportunities, but also going too far and experiencing false breakthroughs. We can see all of this very clearly when it comes to Roan.

Furthermore, Jupiter-Uranus is characteristic of a sense of incurable, infectious optimism, as well as feelings of heightened aliveness. We can also see both of these within all of Chappell's work. As Grady says, the energy of The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (Chappell Roan's first album), "comes from the palpable joy of finding oneself and rejecting old beliefs." About a sapphic crush, Roan sings in Naked in Manhattan, "touch me, baby, put your lips on mine" and "could go to hell but we'd probably be fine."

As the planetary archetype of the rebel-trickster, Uranus embodies this energy, which is strongly reflected in both the Uranus-Pluto and Jupiter-Uranus alignments. We can see Uranus Pluto as the empowerment (Pluto) of the rebel-trickster (Uranus) and we can see Jupiter-Uranus as the celebration or aggrandizement (Jupiter) of the rebel-trickster (Uranus). Chappell being a rebel and a trickster herself, makes art that embodies these two archetypes perfectly. “What makes Chappell Roan so compelling to watch is that as a character, she stands for a profound release, an unshaming," says Grady. "She is the artistic culmination of a long search for self-discovery, and you can hear the joy and celebration of that search in the music,” she adds.

As stated, in a pair of TikTok videos on August 20, Roan called out fans for overstepping her boundaries. “I don’t care that abuse and harassment — stalking, whatever — is a normal thing to do to people who are famous or a little famous, whatever,” she said. “I don’t care that it’s normal. I don’t care that this crazy type of behavior comes along with the job, the career field I’ve chosen. That does not make it okay. That doesn’t make it normal. Doesn’t mean I want it. Doesn’t mean I like it,” she added.

It seems like no coincidence that we are seeing Chappell struggle with her massive blow-up and newfound mainstream fame at the same time that we are beginning to go through the transit of Jupiter square Saturn. When Jupiter meets with Saturn, the principle of limit, structure, contraction, constraint, strict authority, responsibility, seriousness, among other things, we tend to see themes of expanding too much too soon, the need to cut back and readjust after premature or excessive expansion, the paradoxical failure of success, as well as the price of fame, popularity, growth, being elevated or honored.

We could also see themes of Uranus-Pluto in the fact that Roan is standing up for her own rights as a celebrity (when it is so rare for celebrities to do so), as Uranus-Pluto is associated with change and reform, as well as female empowerment and shifts in power. "The way I see it, the only way this is going to change is if people like Chappell Roan make videos like that,” says YouTuber D'Angelo. “The only reason things don’t change is that people just allow them to continue, the way they’ve always been,” he adds.