Chappell Roan Threw a Ren Faire for Roanies at the Rose Bowl

Chappell Roan, the pop star who made me believe in pop music again, is onstage at her largest headlining show ever. She does not coo into a headset mic, nor does she dance in the middle of a battalion of backup dancers. Rather, she sits and cradles a rubbery creature the size of a newborn baby, a leathery reptilian thing that looks like a cross between Yoda and Gizmo the Gremlin after you spill water on him. This is Shigella, a concept/pet introduced at the beginning of Roan’s current tour, described by an attendee as “a dragon baby that's 10 million years old.” Shigella enjoys the wistful ballad “Coffee” from Roan’s lap, eyes closed, and the audience follows suit, swaying. In this moment, we are all Shigella.

2024 was a banner year for pop, with newly minted stars Sabrina Carpenter and Tate McRae breaking big, Charli XCX clawing her way out of pop’s middle class, and millennial monoliths Beyoncé and Taylor Swift cementing their legend status with ponderous, fan-pleasing albums. But no one had a better year than Chappell Roan, who parlayed the one-two punch of a buzzy Tiny Desk Concert and a star-making Coachella set into an insane fame speedrun that felt so zero-to-100 it reminded me of the plot of 2001’s Josie and the Pussycats, where the titular band’s instant popularity comes from subliminal messaging hidden in their recordings. Roan’s story was a classic industry-meat-grinder yarn—get signed young, get dropped by label, get mad, get even—reminiscent of the trajectories of Katy Perry and Lady Gaga, and her debut album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is jam-packed with audacious pure pop tracks that I’d put on par with almost anything on Born This Way or One of the Boys. Work hard, don’t give up, and record an album of undeniable bangers…maybe attaining pop stardom is just that simple after all.

Fall 2025 is proving to be a tricky time for touring artists. Some are vastly overplaying their hands and canceling undersold gigs, and others are limiting their scopes, creating brutal battles for tickets. (Lara Raj from KATSEYE recently lamented her failure to secure a berth to the upcoming Ariana Grande tour: “I was too late for eternal sunshine tickets. I was right there with yall in that queue.”) Roan, who blew up so quickly last summer that she was scheduled to play 1600-cap venues in Europe a month after she performed for an estimated 110,000 people at Lollapalooza (two of those Euro dates ended up cancelled, creating great controversy) has mostly played festivals so far. Even with no new album on the horizon, a nation of devoted fans has been chomping at the bit (pink pony pun intended) to see her. The solution for American tour dates this year: Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things, a series of “pop-up shows” in New York, Los Angeles, and Kansas City.

A shockingly civilized sales system—something called Fair AXS, which used pre-registration to boot scalpers and bots from the pool—blessed me with tickets to night one of L.A. Technically the show was in Pasadena, on the golf course adjacent to the Rose Bowl. I’d last been to this ‘venue’ on a scorching day in May to attend Just Like Heaven, the Goldenvoice festival for aging millennials who can’t shut up about how much they miss their fourth-generation iPod. Rolling up to the Chappell show amid a sea of people bedecked in pink cowboy hats and camouflage, I clocked the true scale of her popularity. It took twentyish artists to fill the grounds for Just Like Heaven, but Chappell was doing it by herself. This truly was Chappellpalooza.

There were a few openers on the bill, mostly in the form of DJ sets: I missed local queer dance party A Club Called Rhonda kicking things off but got there in time to see Trixie Mattel on the decks. Go-go dancers slunk around the stage wearing enormous, Powerpuff Girls-esque headpieces in Trixie’s likeness as she spun a house remix of Taylor Swift’s new single “The Fate of Ophelia,” then drag performers Kyra Jeté and Calypso Jeté Balmain dipped and twirled to Cassie’s “Me and U” and Doechii and JT’s “Alter Ego,” and Hemlocke Springs charmingly yelped through a handful of her indie pop tunes, including her new wave-y viral hit “Girlfriend.”

I explored the grounds before Chappell took the stage. The golf course had been transformed into a femme fairytale setting, with pink bows tied on light poles and icicle twinkle lights draped across tree branches. Photo opps abounded: one could pose upright in front of a Pink Pony Club flag, supine alongside a generous length of crimson wig, or in front of a large sculpture of a glamorous horse. The encouragement of so much photo-taking might have sent me off on a cranky, elderly spiral on any other night—gawd, shouldn’t we be off our phones, living in the moment?? [my voice fades into muted wah wahs, a la Charlie Brown’s teacher]—but the exuberance with which the crowd engaged with the photo setups warmed my heart. All around me, groups of friends cheesed with abandon. Everyone was having the time of their lives and documenting it with their phones. Was that really so bad?

Then it was Chappell time. After a dramatic fanfare, the stage lit up to reveal an ornate castle. Roan, who has been favoring elaborate and slightly haunted-looking storybook costumes for these shows, took the stage in a glittering seaweed-green gown (the theme of the night was Mermaid) and holographic eye shadow; as the night progressed, she removed several layers of garments, going from Princess Buttercup to Lita Ford over the course of her set. Her band absolutely ripped, and the Midwest Princess songs sounded excellent with their most aggressive elements amplified, especially by guitarists Emily Rosenfield and Andrea Ferrero. Opener “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl” was a blast of pure energy that knocked the usual phone-hoisting zombies out of their reveries and into Dance Mode, and “My Kink Is Karma” became a cathartic heavy metal headbanger, because Roan’s not-so-secret weapon is that she’s just as much of a rock star as a pop star.

There were so many hits to get through that Roan didn’t engage in much between-song chatter until “Coffee,” when she was dandling Shigella on her knee. She professed her love for L.A. in the aftermath of the Palisades and Eaton Canyon fires (“The city has taken care of me and it’s my duty to take care of it”), and, visibly overwhelmed with anger, called out its ongoing terrorization by government goons: “Fuck ICE, forever.” And near the end of the show, she expressed her ongoing commitment to creating an environment where people could dress how they wanted to dress, and “feel free.” (Well, free to do everything but yawn—apparently witnessing someone in the crowd feeling a bit drowsy during closer “Pink Pony Club,” she issued the command “Bitch, don’t yawn!” between power chord slams. Hey, first rule of the club is no sleeping in the club.)

Free expression was certainly the primary goal of the Pasadena crowd, and the people-watching was worth the price of admission. I saw kids in iridescent sequins, elders in riding boots, and at least one guy dressed like the Big Bad Wolf in grandma’s nightgown; I didn’t catch it, but my friend told me she witnessed a group of young women weaving through the crowd, all wearing t-shirts that said I EAT PUSSY. The mermaid theme was popular, with many starfish hair clips, swampy wigs—a dual nod to the mystery green-haired girl of “The Subway,” a song that got one of the biggest cheers of the night—and sexy pirates observed. At one point during the show, I cracked up as an increasing number of pantsless women in tricorn hats with enormous feathers drifted idly into my line of sight, as if lost at sea. And shout out to the person with a reading light and gills taped to their head—I never thought an anglerfish could look so chic.

If you’re wondering what the next concert costuming trend is now that we might be reaching Peak Pink Cowboy Hat, I have your answer: it’s clown. Clowning really is the way of the future, based on how many people I saw in mime face paint and silly bloomers, or outfits that answered the question “What if the Gathering of the Juggalos was also a Renaissance fair?” (Though technically the Gathering of the Juggalo might already be a Renaissance fair.) I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a concert crowd have more fun with their outfits, and that’s all thanks to the baked-in theatrical extravagance of the Chappell Roan experience. After all, this is a woman whose creative director listed “creature design” and “creature fabrication” in their show credits. Creating a space in which people actively aspire to get kinda weird with it is just as impressive as creating a perfect pop album, and the Pink Pony Club has a generous door policy—as long as you’re cool with partying with a 10 million-year-old dragon baby.