Kamala Kool-Aid Supernova: The Appropriation of a Midwest Princess
Florida Man vs. Chappell Roan (a fellow 1998 baby)
Dear Chappell Roan,
Our children are watching.
I can’t believe it. After all that we’ve done for you! You turn your back on us now? Remember the Lollapalooza stage?! Chappell! Look at me when I’m talking to you! How dare you! Endorse Kamala … now! It’s a “Feminomenon”!
The Woes of Being Born in 1998
Pop sensation Chappell Roan is only 39 days younger than me. I was born on January 11, 1998. She was born on February 19, 1998. She could have been in my high school graduating class, so perhaps I feel some sort of cultural kinship to her. No, I never plan on dressing in drag, nor am I a “Midwest princess”. However, perhaps both she and I suffer from some political malaise and apathy for which liberals online are criticizing her.
It’s weird being born in 1998. I feel as if our birth year is forgotten in some liminal space between millennials and zoomers. We were born in the twilight of the 20th century. Technically, we are zoomers because Generation Z begins in 1996, but sometimes I feel disconnected from the zoomers. How can I fully relate to someone born in a different millennium from me?
We came out of the womb at the apex of American dominance. Seven years prior, the Soviet Union had fallen, thereby leaving the United States as the sole superpower in the world. The late 1990s brought a time of peace and financial abundance but left our country questioning what we can do next. We had done it all. We suffered from a superpower’s version of empty nest syndrome as we entered Francis Fukuyama’s end of history. My pop culture knowledge aligns more with millennials, yet I cannot remember 9/11 since I was three years old. I cannot speak for Chappell, but we might be as old as one can be without remembering September 11, 2001.
George W. Bush is likely the first president whom we remember. The housing market crashed in the beginning of our adolescence, yet we were too young to suffer the personal consequences as the millennials graduating college in 2009 did. We remember Barack Obama’s inauguration, and the first election in which we could vote was the historic 2016 election. I do not know if Chappell voted in 2016, but I did. In the Republican presidential primary election in Florida, I cast my vote for Marco Rubio — my own senator — in an effort to thwart Donald Trump, but I changed my mind by November. My first vote in a presidential general election went to Donald Trump as did my second vote in 2020, and I plan on voting for Trump again a third time on November 5, 2024 (although I will likely vote early here in the state of Florida).
Trump Isn’t Normal: A Guide to a Zoomer’s First Election
I will get back to Chappell Roan, but I first want to contextualize the stakes for a voter born in 1998. I was about as young as I could be and still legally vote. On Election Day 2016, I was 18 years old and 10 months. I had almost completed my first semester of my freshman year of college at Duke, a school whose student body leaned much further to the left than I did. North Carolina is a very important swing state in presidential elections not only because of the presidential race but also because the Tar Heel State holds its gubernatorial elections in presidential years. Only 10 other states hold their gubernatorial elections at this time while the majority do so in midterm years.
Furthermore, North Carolina also had a crucial Senate race in 2016. Republican incumbent Richard Burr was running for re-election against Democratic challenger Deborah Ross, a former member of the North Carolina State House. Even though Hillary Clinton had a strong edge over Donald Trump in the presidential race, the Democrats only had a 50.7% chance of gaining a majority in the Senate, and they saw North Carolina as one of the ways to get there. A Hillary Clinton victory only necessitated 50 Democrats for a majority because Vice President Tim Kaine would break ties, but the Democrats had to flip 4 Republican Senate seats after the Republicans decimated Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections, in which the Republicans flipped nine Democratic seats in the Senate.
In 2016, winning the Senate held even more urgency because President Hillary Clinton would need a Democratic Senate to confirm a Democratic nominee to the Supreme Court to fill Antonin Scalia’s vacant seat, which Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell controversially refused to fill after the conservative legal firebrand’s sudden death on February 13, 2016. Consequently, advertisements descended upon North Carolina from DC, especially, in the Research Triangle. Democrats could only win North Carolina by maximizing turnout in the Triangle, bolstered by three major universities: Duke, UNC Chapel Hill, and NC State. The college-educated professionals in the Raleigh metropolitan area along with the thousands and thousands of undergraduates delivered Barack Obama a victory in North Carolina in the 2008 presidential election. Perhaps they could do so again for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Clinton even held her final campaign rally in Raleigh at NC State campus on Monday, November 7, the night before Election Day. Lady Gaga and Jon Bon Jovi performed. The Clinton campaign was clearly getting the star treatment. Beyoncé and Jay-Z had performed at a Clinton rally in Cleveland just 3 days prior. I remember fellow Duke students in my residence hall attending the rally in Raleigh. Beyoncé had just released Lemonade! She was on top of the world! Surely, Clinton was going to win. I was very much in the minority in my residence hall in my support of Trump. One boy in my freshman class at Duke branded himself as a Republican but proudly announced that he was going to vote for Clinton. He came back from the Beyoncé and Jay-Z concert and said, “It was just nice to see the future president.” He was a Republican doing the right thing.
Of course, we know that 24 hours after Lady Gaga performed for Clinton in Raleigh, Trump would win both North Carolina and the presidency as a whole. Senator Burr also won re-election, and the Republicans maintained a majority in the Senate. I had voted by mail in my home state of Florida. Trump flipped Florida. Rubio won re-election in his Senate race, but my bubble at Duke was not representative of the rest of the country. It wasn’t even representative of North Carolina … not one bit. Former Duke president Terry Sanford — former Democratic governor and senator of North Carolina — apocryphally said that he lived his whole life in North Carolina except for his time at Duke.
I was going to school in the most Democratic county in North Carolina and one of the most Democratic in the country. Clinton won Durham County, the home of Duke, by 59.5 percentage points. She won Orange County — the home of UNC Chapel Hill — by 50.3 percentage points and Wake County — the home of NC State, Research Triangle Park, and the state capital of Raleigh — by 20.2 percentage points even though Trump still won the entire state. I was clearly in a bubble, and Trump obviously suffered with my age cohort at Duke. In North Carolina, he lost the 18-24 age demographic by 22 percentage points.
Moreover, we at Duke were perfect targets for the girl-boss Clinton campaign of 2016. Feminism could finally end, and we could break the glass ceiling. As a male student, I had the power to be an ally. I was man enough to vote for a woman, especially, for my first vote in a presidential election ever — but one message pervaded the consciousness of the university campus more than anything else. Trump wasn’t normal.
As an 18-year-old in 2016, I went through most of my adolescence during the Obama presidency. I was 10 years old when he won in 2008. He was the ideal president. The only thing that he had ever done wrong was wearing a tan suit at a press conference! He listened to Kendrick Lamar. He played basketball. He brought Common to the White House. He smoked cigarettes. He went to Harvard Law School.
Trump? He was none of that. Trump was throwing the norms in the garbage can! Okay, Bush wasn’t too great. Okay, maybe he killed thousands of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but … at least he was decent. And that’s what really matters. Trump was indecent. Access Hollywood. Bad hombres. Mocking disabled reporters.
During this time, Clinton’s “Role Models” ad encapsulated all of this for me. The ad plays some of Trump’s “controversial” statements while it shows children watching him on television. Hillary even has a Latina girl watching Trump talking about Mexicans! Trump has no shot now! It’s this ad that always makes me question when people say Trump is done. Are the Springfield comments from 2024 much different from the rapist comments from 2015? Who knows. Is any of it worse than Access Hollywood? But maybe … just maybe … this time is different.
No, Trump wasn’t normal to me or my peers born in the late 1990s. He wasn’t normal to Chappell Roan. I don’t know where she was, but she was experiencing the same messaging after recently graduating from high school just as I had. Obama was normal. As a result, this messaging did work on us, and my cohort voted for Clinton massively although Trump still won the entire election.
When I rewatch the “Role Models” ad, I look at those child actors and wonder where they are now. I would say each of them is between 5 years old and 10 years old, so the oldest of them were likely born in 2006. Therefore, they are 18 years old and can vote in the 2024 election. Just as I did eight years ago, they have the choice between Donald Trump and breaking the glass ceiling, but what is different about them? Does Trump shock them as much as he shocked my fellow peers born in 1998? I do not think that he does.
The argument of “Trump is not normal” doesn’t work for them because Trump is the norm. They might vaguely remember Barack Obama, but Donald Trump was the first president that they fully remember and, then, Joe Biden. Trump set the precedent for what they view as a president, and he is now running again. They couldn’t vote for him in his re-election effort in 2020, but they can now. They can also choose to break the glass ceiling and listen to Chappell Roan, whom we can now discuss in this article.
Chappell Roan Doesn’t Believe in Our Feminomenon
During the leg of her current tour in the United Kingdom, Chappell Roan did an interview with the British publication The Guardian on Friday, September 20. In this profile by Kate Solomon, Chappell Roan affirms that she is not endorsing Kamala Harris for president, or she at least has not gotten to that point yet. I don’t think Roan categorically eliminated the possibility, but Roan’s statement signals massive apathy Roan’s part. The article states:
…even though Kamala Harris used her deliriously goofy “Femininomenon” in a campaign video (“What we really need is a femininomenon!”) and seemingly copied the design of an official Roan baseball cap, Roan hasn’t endorsed her. And, in June, while dressed as Lady Liberty, Roan told the crowd at Governor’s Ball festival in New York that she had declined an invitation to perform at a White House Pride event: “We want liberty, justice and freedom for all. When you do that, that’s when I’ll come.”
“I have so many issues with our government in every way,” she says. “There are so many things that I would want to change. So I don’t feel pressured to endorse someone. There’s problems on both sides. I encourage people to use your critical thinking skills, use your vote – vote small, vote for what’s going on in your city.” The change she wants to see in the US in this election year, she says instantly, is “trans rights. They cannot have cis people making decisions for trans people, period.”
Bad dog! Chappell is not falling in line!
What Are the Other Female Pop Songstresses Doing?
This statement comes after many prominent endorsements of Harris by some of Chappell’s pop music peers: Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, and most prominently — Taylor Swift.
Some singers have been voluntarily allowing the Harris campaign to use their songs in advertisements and campaign events as countless bands and musicians publicly come out against Trump for him using their songs at rallies. A Harris advertisement released on September 18 centers on a Kentucky girl named Hadley Duvall, a rape victim — at age 12 — impregnated by her abuser before the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022. The advertisement implies that Duvall had the ability to have a legal abortion but would not have had that ability if her rape had occurred after the 2022 Supreme Court decision Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Billie Eilish allowed the campaign to use her song “When the Party’s Over” from her 2019 debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?. Furthermore, Beyoncé allows Kamala to use her song “Freedom” from her 2016 album Lemonade. That song has become the “anthem” of the Kamala Harris campaign in the same way that “Fight Song” by Rachel Platten became the anthem of the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.
Appropriation of Chappell Roan
Meanwhile, supporters of Kamala Harris have peripherally used and appropriated Chappell Roan’s song “Feminomenon” from her 2023 debut album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess without any explicit approval from Roan. Countless edits of Harris have proliferated on TikTok using the song since Harris’s entrance in the race on July 21. Of course, the song encapsulates everything about the Harris campaign. We are going to be girl bosses and beat Donald Trump for good! It’s a feminomenon that can’t be stopped! Incidentally, Roan became an avatar of the Harris campaign. She was openly queer. She implemented influences from drag in her shows. She had a fanbase of largely young women.
The Harris-Walz campaign even released a camo hat that looks eerily similar to a camo hat that Roan has sold on her website.
The Harris-Walz campaign was clearly appropriating Roan’s “Midwest Princess” aesthetic, bolstered by a campy appreciation for camo fashion popular in the Midwest. Roan has adopted this aesthetic because of her childhood and adolescent roots in Missouri just as Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz is exaggerating his Midwestern persona from Minnesota, where he serves as governor. I have already critiqued Walz on this front in my August 7 article “Tim Walz’s Minstrel Show”, in which I compare Walz’s projected persona to essentially a minstrel version of a white man from the Midwest.
Meanwhile, Roan takes inspiration from a different performative art form in which people dress up. I am not trying to put drag on the same plane as minstrel, but I could also compare Walz to a reverse drag show cross-dressing as a Democratic consultant’s vision of a white man from Middle America. I see the Harris-Walz campaign’s blatant plagiarism of Roan’s camo hat as sinister. It demonstrates their view of the Midwestern white voter as a caricature not much different from Elmer Fudd.
Do I have the same view of Roan’s use of this camo Midwestern aesthetic? I absolutely do not. Roan is explicitly a performing artist. Her performance clearly has influences from drag and camp.
Parallels to Hulk Hogan
Roan exudes this gauche extravagance and flamboyance, but she is not even portraying herself. She is playing a character. Her real name is Kayleigh Amstutz, and “Chappell Roan” is just her “stage name” for her drag persona even though Chappell is not a man dressing up as a woman, the usual subject of a drag show. Roan uses all these aesthetics for dramatic and humorous effect as a drag queen does or even a WWE wrestler. We saw this similar blurring of identities when Hulk Hogan and Terry Bollea spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
He begins the first half of the speech in character as the wrestler Hulk Hogan but, later, breaks the fourth wall and introduces himself as Terry Bollea. When he rips off his outer t-shirt to expose a Trump-Vance t-shirt underneath, I see it metaphorically almost as a Hogan/Bollea shedding his skin and revealing a true persona or adopting a new persona — a fellow Trumpite — a term that he coins for “real Americans” who support Trump.
Bollea opens the speech by using his characteristic voice: “Well, let me tell you something brother.”
Then, he breaks the fourth wall in the following part of the speech:
Let Trump-a-mania run wild, brother! Let Trump-a-mania rule again. Let Trump-a-mania, make America great again.”
You know something, Trumpites? I didn’t come here as Hulk Hogan, but I just had to give you a little taste. My name is Terry Bollea, and as an entertainer… I love you too. As an entertainer, I try to stay out of politics, but after everything that’s happened to our country over the past four years and everything that happened last weekend, I can no longer stay silent. I’m here tonight because I want the world to know that Donald Trump is a real American hero, and I’m proud to support my hero as the next president of this United States.
I remarked on this night of the RNC more in my July 19 article “Trump’s RNC and the Forest and the Trees”. In that piece, I made the following observation:
Trump’s entrance evoked something of a residency show on the Las Vegas Strip. Maybe if this presidency thing doesn’t work out, he can follow U2’s footsteps in the Sphere. Bright lights blazed bright into our eyes and formed Trump’s name, the name that we have seen for decades adorning hotels and casinos and, for the past decade, on political paraphernalia. Overstimulation. That’s what I felt last night. And maybe it’s what I have felt since 2015, but — amid the takes — what can we glean from this flamboyant Liberace-esque stage production?
No, neither Hogan nor Trump is a drag queen, but the Liberace-esque Vegas flamboyance is similar. Chappell Roan is referencing the same oeuvre, but Roan and Hogan are doing it all for fun. The audience knows what is happening. Neither Roan nor Hogan is trying to trick their fans. Despite creating characters, they are authentically being themselves, but Harris and, especially, Walz are trying to deceive the public but are doing so in a demeaning way, embodied by the camo hat — directly xeroxed from the Chappell Roan merchandise website.
Zillennial Para-social Attachment to the Celebrity
When you — as a Harris supporter — hear the song “Feminomenon” ubiquitously on pro-Harris content on TikTok and Instagram, wouldn’t you just blindly assume that Chappell Roan has explicitly endorsed Kamala Harris just as Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, and Beyoncé have?
Look! Even Ella Emhoff is wearing the hat! She looks like a Chappell Roan fan! I bet they’re friends!
When the news broke that Roan is not explicitly endorsing Harris, many left-wing accounts on Twitter went into an uproar. I am not really even a huge fan of Chappell Roan, but these critiques really upset me. In the post above, the user Cam is criticizing Roan for her statement. Why did this post specifically bother me? Well, he specifically mentions the age 26. Both Chappell and I are 26 and were born in 1998 as I have previously stated.
Cam makes some sort of assumption that someone at age 26 should be more mature. Chappell should knows better. She remembers how bad Trump’s first term was. This sentiment takes me all the way back to the “Role Models” ad from Clinton, who was targeting people like me and Chappell. You should know better. Trump isn’t normal.
Similar ire came from umichvoter, a prominent elections Twitter account with 80 thousand followers. He is the one who posted that viral tweet of the Feminomenon edit of Kamala from TikTok. I linked it earlier in the article. In his post on Sunday, September 22, he claims that “It’s better to say nothing than say ‘there’s problems on both sides’ because that does not help with voter apathy”. He then states that you must vote for the person closest to you in ideology in the American two-party system.
His sentiment largely relies on the presupposition that every celebrity is a robot who must serve a larger purpose for the Democratic campaign. Say something nice, or don’t say anything at all! This is the Democratic equivalent of Laura Ingraham’s “shut up and dribble” request of LeBron James. Umichvoter assumes that every person sees the world through the lens of his Polisci 101 lecture in Ann Arbor. Don’t you know! We have a first-past-the-post system! It’s binary! No vote at all is a vote for Trump! Stupid Chappell!
People like umichvoter cannot comprehend the sort of apathy that Chappell feels. She’s openly queer! How dare she not support Kamala! After all we did for her! Umichvoter cannot comprehend that some people do not live in the dichotomous binary of MAGA and democracy. Normal people have contradictory beliefs because they are not thinking about their beliefs all of the time. People like umichvoter fall into convenient little pigeonholes that check every correct box.
When Roan declined to perform at the White House’s Pride event in June, she stated “I won’t be a monkey for pride”.
That language is quite provocative and shatters the mind of people like umichvoter, but I understand the cognitive dissonance. How many times has umichvoter listened to “Feminomenon” or “Red Wine Supernova”? How high will Chappell Roan appear on his Spotify Wrapped? He psychologically linked Chappell with Kamala. He can no longer decouple the two.
In his head canon, Chappell must endorse Kamala. She can’t let Trump win! It’s that sort of apathy that will lead to a second Trump term! Gosh. Taylor, Billie, and Olivia are so much more responsible with their fame. They get the assignment. They know their duty! Of course, this is a para-social attachment that arises out of the social media age. Older zoomers and younger millennials (or “zillennials”) fall into this sort of trap and expect symmetrical views from their favorite celebrities.
Taylor the Millennial vs. Chappell the Zoomer
Clearly, Taylor Swift is orders of magnitude more famous than Chappell Roan, but Swift’s endorsement of Harris and Roan’s non-endorsement really juxtapose each other for me. I identify more with Roan as she and I are only a few weeks apart in age. I was born in January 1998. She was born in February 1998. We are both older zoomers while Taylor Swift is the millennial pop star. She was born on December 13, 1989.
Swift follows the rules in a very millennial fashion, and I spoke about this phenomenon in my August 17 article “Cleavages of Choice (and a Defense of Cats)”. She comes from a generation of optimistic yet compulsive self-expression, evident in the fact that Swift branded herself as a “childless cat lady” at the signature of her text endorsement on Instagram. She is accepting the parameters of the culture war in the way that umichvoter would approve while Roan exists outside that paradigm. Swift is falling prey to the Sandbergian girl-boss rhetoric of the late-2000s to mid-2010s, which Roan did not necessarily experience. Again, I empathize so much with Roan since she was born in 1998, which is the target of some of the criticism citing that 26 is too old to not realize the evils of Trump.
Roan represents the zoomer nihilism. She can’t bring herself to vote for either candidate. Although I see it as somewhat trite and self-indulgent, I much more strongly oppose the negative reaction to Roan. Perhaps we should just see celebrities of whom we are fans as normal people and not automatons to spout certain political propaganda. Perhaps we should be able to decouple celebrities and their personal views. A Trump supporter should still be able to like Taylor Swift, and a Harris supporter should still be able to like Chappell Roan. Do not use celebrities like Roan as Freudian para-social projection screens.
Just like always, we 1998 babies are stuck in the middle. Too old for the Kamala zoomers of TikTok. Too young for the Barack millennials of Facebook.
Great piece, as always! Just fyi, I believe "Fight Song" was done by Rachel Platten, not Katy Perry.