<\/p>\n
T<\/span>ime feels evermore like a ludicrous concept in 2025, but it especially collapses when considering the career of Chappell Roan<\/a>. The Missouri-born pop artist languished in up-and-coming mode for years \u2013 I first learned of her prismatic gay club anthem Pink Pony Club via a friend\u2019s recommendation in 2020 \u2013 only to experience one of the swiftest ascents into the mainstream<\/a> I\u2019ve ever witnessed. Just 18 months ago, she was still playing 2,000-cap amphitheaters in mid-sized cities; by summer\u2019s end, she drew the largest crowd (more than 100,000) that Chicago\u2019s Lollapalooza festival has ever seen. Her rise was so vertiginous<\/a> \u2013 viral Tiny Desk<\/a>, Grammys best new artist<\/a>, festival undercard to headliner, international chart takeover \u2013 that she feels lifetimes away from the artist I saw, stunned by her own zeitgeist earthquake at New York\u2019s Governors Ball<\/a> in June of last year.<\/p>\n Her return to New York at Forest Hills stadium this weekend, her first live shows in the US in a year, thus represents a homecoming of sorts, and a victory lap for the occasionally rocky journey into the stratosphere. Her eight \u201cpop-up\u201d shows this fall, billed as the Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things tour, span the geographical linchpins of her music: four shows in New York, site of sexual awakenings (Naked in Manhattan) and devastating breakups (new single The Subway, the night\u2019s pre-eminent vehicle for Roan\u2019s torrential belt); two in Kansas City, Missouri, a few hours from her hometown of Willard; and two in Los Angeles, where Roan forged the joyously queer and infectiously cheeky pop of her debut and still only studio album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a testament to the potency of Roan\u2019s maximalist sound, chock-full of sexually frank asides, baroque feelings and lavish camp, that a 93-minute set containing almost every song she\u2019s recorded had the feeling of a greatest hits show. Roan was allegedly not \u201cfeeling 100\u201d on Sunday night \u2013 \u201cI have a migraine, so I can\u2019t bang my head super hard, but that\u2019s kinda my thing, so pretend I bang my head a lot tonight,\u201d she said before nominally teaching the YMCA-style Hot To Go! dance to 13,000 devotees, ranging from young girls to queer twentysomethings to a middle-aged man in front of me texting his mom \u201cI love her!!!!\u201d mid-show. But whatever felt off to her did not translate in a show that felt as triumphant as it did laidback \u2013 an artist gone through the wringer, finally relaxing into superstardom. You know from the second she appears in a whimsically gothic castle, styled as both musketeer and princess and bemoaning a boring man\u2019s \u201cfugly jeans\u201d, that Roan has finally hit her big-tent stride.<\/p>\n