- Natasha Mott
- Apr 10
- 5 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Insatiable Celebrity Worship: Consumption of the Chapel of Roan
Natasha Mott
10 April 2025
Today, we have access to an all-you-can-eat buffet of empty content, but man cannot live on videos of sourdough starters alone. Although we are constantly dining, we find ourselves malcontent, malnourished, and starved for meaning. An abundance of music, visual imagery, and even semi-lucid story-telling can be generated from AI-amalgamated accounts of human history and labeled “art”, but we’re left feeling empty - which is why we demand much more from human artists now. If you want to make art as a human today, you must allow yourself to be devoured, as people are out for your blood. Sweat. Tears. Soul. And they're hungry.
Last week, Chappell Roan was all but crucified on the internet for her celebrity for her “white woman politics” - as if her audience thought the campy white paint plastered on her countenance was just part of the costume. Similarly, last year we witnessed apostates renouncing celebrity worship when an influencer made a TikTok of herself in an outrageous floral gown lip syncing the famous misattribution of Marie Antoinette. “Let them eat cake,” she said outside the Met Gala, where select guests are invited to purchase a $75,000 ticket.
TikTok has become a confusing platform where a new pseudo celebrity can collect acolytes for their outrageous spending habits and eventually be crucified for the same crime. Its users feel that they are part of some resistance, but fail to admit that the platform itself is part of the problem as it actively promotes consumerism. Meme pages across the internet aptly named the platform the new QVC. The Kardashians who rose to fame prior to TikTok have not fared well on the platform, where they're often called the living embodiment of capitalism, and their “downfall” on social media is heralded as the beginning of its decline.
The Chapel of Roan rose quickly - and is collapsing just as fast. Her ascent to fame, not attributed to striking talent as much as to well-crafted, gay iconography, was brought about through music that derides heteronormative relationships. But in a recent interview she rejected her previous political stance asking her fans, “Why are you looking to me for some political answer? You think I have the fucking answers?”. She also received a great deal of backlash for her view of motherhood when she said, “All of my friends who have kids are in hell. I actually don't know anyone [who has children and] is happy at this age”. This coupled with her recent Grammy acceptance speech demanding healthcare and livable wages for developing artists was enough to stir up a storm of commentary on her brand of “white feminism”. This is typically considered a selfish, neoliberal ideology that keeps itself in proximity to power. As one commenter put it, “After this she probably went back to her mansion”. As a Femininomenon, a “queer pop icon” who led the “lesbian pop renaissance”, her music was supposed to be a living shrine to a flavor of identity politics that sated the masses during a period of political turmoil. However, shrines can be melted down to buy food in times of war or famine.
Celebrity worship has yet to be seen for what it is: a veritable feast from which we all dine for the nourishment of our sociopolitical spirits. But the feast is just for show. Even between doses of Ozempic, one can’t survive on synth arpeggios - no matter how indulgent and coating they may feel. Roan’s music has hit like a sugar rush, quickly devoured without a lasting benefit. We hope to absolve ourselves of all of our issues by consuming the “right” kind of pop culture through a sort of transmogrification.
“When the symbolic order collapses, individuals turn to consumerism and identity politics to fill the void.”
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
Roan’s audience granted her fame and now they expect to be fed exactly what they ordered: an LGBTQ savior. But when she fails to deliver, they turn on her. This cycle of deification and destruction mirrors what Ben-Ami Scharfstein says in Of Birds, Beasts and Other Artists: An Essay on the Universality of Art: “art in the recent present has been an accentuated process of…humanizing and dehumanizing of persons or things in order to possess them by degrading them into counterparts of one’s loneliness or pain”.
Even with Roan’s voice leading Sunday services, drag brunches haven't cured the loneliness epidemic. But is it Roan’s fault for promising hope or our fault for expecting our savior from a pop artist in drag? We make martyrs of our favorite artists because we’re angry that we can’t own them, we can't be them. We can't make them do what we think they should do. As much as we may identify with a song, we can’t own art. Art, like life, is an experience, not a commodity. For an audience that claims to reject capitalism, you’d think Roan’s following would subscribe to this idea. We barely own these bodies, and even that is being slowly eroded by our own paradoxical desire for more. We allow our desires to be sublimated, commodified, packaged and sold back to us on TikTok shop because we want more beauty, better things, and a longer life. We worship all that we can consume, so when we commune at the Pink Pony Club, Mother Roan offers herself to us at the altar. But the salvation we’re seeking isn’t to be found in this sacrament.
Sadly, the burning of the Pink Pony Club doesn’t send a message to Chappell Roan or white women as much as it does the purveyors of the pop culture industry. What Roan’s critics hope to tell those who shape the culture industry is that we will reject false prophets. But as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer pointed out in The Dialectic of Enlightenment the culture industry thrives on consumption, disposability and spectacle. What we signal with an empty critique of Roan for giving us “white woman politics” is that we will eat through whatever is put before us because we are insatiable. We’re starved for meaning, and we will continue to consume the slop we are fed. Even if it is not fit for human consumption. The burning of Roan tells our earthly hosts not to worry about putting nutritional facts on the Eucharist. We won’t read them because we’re starved - just send in the next Messiah.
Natasha Mott, Ph.D., holds a doctorate in Cell Biology, Neurobiology, and Anatomy from Loyola University Chicago. She produces multimedia commentary at the intersection of science, culture, and philosophy, and serves as a scientific liaison in the biotech industry.
