Chappell Roan, lesbian icon and pop’s newest darling, said in a recent The Jimmy Fallon show appearance that the inspiration behind her debut album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (coincidentally the inspiration of our cover) was that “I just wanted to make something I could party to, and other people could party to [...] It was so boring performing sad songs.” Her answer perfectly encapsulates a recent shift of a tectonic scale in the music scene towards fun, upbeat, queer pop. For generations of queer women wanting to have their experiences celebrated, rather than lamented, this change has been a long time coming.
The landscape of sapphic music did not always look this bright. Just a decade ago, coming to terms with your sexuality through music often meant actively seeking out standalone “gay” songs in a playlist compilation made by a fellow chronically online queer – if you were lucky. The few explicitly gay artists that did exist, such as the lavishly titled ‘Lesbian Jesus’ Hayley Kiyoko, struggled to break into the mainstream, maintaining devoted, yet small, online fan bases. I still live in hope that Kiyoko makes it to New Zealand one day.
The messages of the songs, too, looked quite different from what they do now. Sapphic tunes of the noughties and 2010s commonly had themes of yearning, unrequited love on a straight best friend, and struggling with self-acceptance. Think ‘Boyfriend’ by Tegan and Sara, ‘Sleepover’ by Kiyoko, ‘Talia’ by King Princess. To young, emotionally vulnerable, queer and questioning women, whilst these ballads could provide a sense of community, they also implicitly reinforced a narrative of what it meant to be sapphic; an existence filled with loneliness, singledom, and, yes, more yearning. We don’t just want to hear sad stories, you know.
Alongside these sombre ballads were their “party” counterparts; songs treating sapphic connection as something frivolous, for male attention, or only acceptable when drunk. The chorus of ‘I Kissed a Girl’ may be fun to sing along to, but its male-centric message is hardly one to celebrate. That’s why the rise of fun, queer pop this past year – made by women, for women – has been celebrated so joyously. When Chappell Roan belts and dances out her queer desires on ‘Hot to Go!’ and Renee Rapp requests an amen for “gay girls” in ‘Not My Fault,’ they contribute to a new narrative of what it means to be queer – in charge of your sexuality, fulfilled, and unapologetically visible on the stage in your heels.
The explicitness of these lyrics is an explosive change to the queer pop landscape. Past descriptions of sapphic love tended to be shrouded in allusions of softness; a coy reference to a “sleepover” here, a cherry metaphor there. While these lyrics undeniably have their place within queer music, they can suggest that sapphic love (particularly desire) is something vague, best left behind closed doors, and not to be discussed loudly.
It’s refreshing in this new wave of music to hear the quiet part said out loud. Chappell wooing a lover back to her bed with promises of a rabbit vibrator and Hitachi wand in ‘Red Wine Supernova’ are things that lesbian music ten years ago could only dream of. Shit, for a while Amy Winehouse’s cover of ‘Valerie’ was one of the top ‘lesbian’ (or near enough) songs. Billie Eilish requesting a woman to sit on her face in the criminally infectious ‘Lunch’ speaks to a lot of us. That shit is addicting and deserves to be sung out loud.
Similarly, queer concepts are finally getting their moment in the sun. In the same Fallon appearance where Chappell explained her album, she performed ‘Good Luck Babe!’ – a song that unapologetically discusses the concept of compulsory heterosexuality (CompHet for short.) For the allies in the audience, CompHet is broadly the idea that queer women are often forced by a patriarchal society into heterosexual relationships or mindsets in lieu of their truer, queer identities. Basically, there’s a cultural expectation to be straight: “You can kiss a hundred boys in bars.”
While CompHet is a well-known term within online, queer circles (and something that most sapphics have probably grappled with at one point) Chappell introducing it to the mainstream is groundbreaking: “When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night, with your head in your hands, you’re nothing more than his wife.” Despite being out of the closet for eight years now, for the first time I managed to have a conversation about CompHet with my parents, spurred on after showing them Chappell’s song.
What it means to be a woman in music has shifted alongside the rise of gay pop. Comparisons to other women and ‘catfights’ have historically peppered nearly every pop girls’ career. Think Katy Perry vs. Taylor Swift; Lady Gaga vs. Madonna; Charli xcx vs. Lorde. If this wave of pop is anything to go by, that narrative is changing. Sabrina Carpenter, whose rise to pop stardom has been running tangentially with Chappell Roan’s, has been suggested as a tentative candidate of the next pop girl feud. Her soulful cover of ‘Good Luck Babe!’ on BBC Radio 1 put this sentiment to bed immediately.
Optimistic fans speculate this might mean a collab between the two on Sabrina’s upcoming album Short n’ Sweet. At the very least, her cover is a loud display of allyship, support, and respect between the two stars. Chappell’s own commitment to featuring drag queens and motifs within her shows – and honouring the drag art form as a whole – is another example of this community building across intersections of identity. But perhaps the most striking example of laying pop feuds to rest has been Lorde’s emergence from a gap in her music to feature on Charli xcx’s track ‘girl, so confusing’ off the critically acclaimed brat. Yes, I’m going to talk about that green album. It’s widespread, it’s everywhere, it’s so Julia.
Charli (long-time favourite of the girls and the gays) has maintained a steady place in the background of pop music for the past decade or so. Her experimental, industrial style has always been ahead of the game. Though straights may only know her from ‘Boom Clap’ and the bridge of ‘Fancy’, Charli xcx finally getting her flowers with brat (Metacritic’s highest rated album of 2024) is yet more evidence of the shift in pop towards music by and for queer people.
Still, Charli’s place within the pop background has invited comparison to other “alternative” pop girls – particularly New Zealand’s own Lorde. The two artists have long been pitted against each other based on shallow similarities, such as the “same hair” that ‘girl, so confusing’ touches on, or the long-running gag to ask Charli about her hit song ‘Royals’. These jokes might seem light-hearted, but the Lorde feature unapologetically discusses how these comparisons negatively affect each woman. Envy blinded them to the reality of each being girls in the pop game: “Forgot that inside that icon, there’s still a young girl from Essex.” It is the audio equivalent of two women clearing the air over text (this is also literally how Lorde sent the lyrics of her verse to Charli). The climax of ‘girl, so confusing’ includes the line, “It’s you and me on the coin the industry loves to spend, and when we put this to bed the internet will go crazy” – which indeed it did.
The remix is a watershed moment for pop music. It suggests that the days of girl vs. girl pop feuds may be on the way out. Women are reclaiming their narratives within the music industry and loudly proclaiming support for other women. If 2024 is anything to go by, the future of pop music looks bright. The revitalisation of the genre tells us that being a woman can mean being messy, being sexual, and being brash. Charli xcx’s brat girl summer champions being unapologetically yourself; complex, confused, yet hot. It also means being for the girls.
This pop environment is even more exciting for queer women. Being born in this generation has its blessings, despite what the common sentiment of pining after earlier decades suggests. This past June has been one of the best Pride months ever for many sapphics, based on the inundation of bold, optimistic, queer music – and Billie Eilish’s ‘Guess’ feature line “Charli likes boys, but she knows I’d hit it,” which is the kind of sapphic confidence I aspire to carry with me everyday. Songs about sapphic love are no longer fixtures of the background, shut out of the mainstream. Being an out-and-proud lesbian musician pays off (Chappell’s “overnight” success is actually a result of almost ten years of work in the music industry). Gay artists and their art can fill stadiums and get everyone dancing along. It is fun, freeing, and in your face. And we’re all ready to dive in.