Ann Friedman - The joyfully displaced Midwesterner

I have been thrilled by the rise of Chappell Roan. It’s not just the music (though she does have some very fun pop songs) or the lesbian visibility (though I love seeing a chart-topping pop act fronted by an openly queer woman). It’s the particular way she claims the Midwest. She projects a true and deep love for the region without living there. Finally! Someone who capably represents me and the majority of Midwesterners I know who have made our lives elsewhere. The "love it and leave it" crowd.

For those not steeped in the lore, the Chappell Roan story goes like this: She got a record deal in 2015 based on a song she posted to YouTube from her teenage bedroom in rural Willard, MO. She went on tour with other pop acts, then moved to Los Angeles, where she recorded a whole album. It was released in that first terrible spring of the pandemic and was not an instant megahit. Her label, being in the “instant megahits only” business, dropped her. So she moved back home to southwest Missouri to sling coffee and keep writing. She did more touring. She got picked up by a new label. And then “Pink Pony Club,” an old song written during her stint in LA, became the kind of sleeper hit that seems so rare these days.

Pause here for “Pink Pony Club.” It’s a dance-floor bop with a veneer of musical-theater drama, all about getting away from the prying eyes of people who don’t quite get you and finding refuge in a new space that feels more like home. About refusing to modulate your behavior or your queerness or your art for the sake of your family’s professed values. About putting yourself in a new context to figure out who you really are. Roan’s new label re-released it in early 2023, and by the end of the year it was a hit in the gays-and-girlies corner of the internet. By 2024, she was everywhere. 

Everywhere, in her case, proudly and gladly includes the greater Midwest. There is not a whiff of “good riddance” about Chappell Roan. She plays Council Bluffs, Iowa and Rogers, Arkansas. She shoots videos in Springfield, Missouri. She enlists local drag queens to open her shows. She knows how to make her own costumes (craftiness is a core tenet of the Midwest-femme ethos). She’s true to the place that’s name-checked in her album title. “It influences the music, my fashion, my lyrics, the energy around it. It’s important for me to capture the Midwestern aspect,” she has said. “I don’t want to lose that part of me. I thought I really did when I was younger, but now I don’t anymore.”

Same, girl. Same. It’s true that a lot of Midwesterner-in-exile stories start with a desire to escape to somewhere “better.” A place with more visible queer culture, or more unabashed art weirdos, or less dominant Christianity. Or maybe just far from your particular family and its particular baggage. But if you love yourself and your people, and if you can resist the anti-Midwest snobbishness embedded in popular culture, you eventually come around. You figure out your own way to live far from a place and still be part of it, and have it be a prominent part of you. You learn how many ears of sweetcorn you can fit in your carry-on bag.

Throw away the JD Vance model of poverty-pity plays for coastal attention and egocentric pledges to move back home and “fix things.” No, the “love it and leave it” identity is actually quite joyful and generative. My friend J Ryan Stradal, who lives in Los Angeles and whose novels are set in the Midwest, has always said that moving away is what allowed him to really appreciate it and want to center it in his work. But he doesn't keep his distance—this year he's done events in Willmar, Minnesota and Appleton, Wisconsin. See also: Bridget Everett’s Somebody Somewhere, an absolute banger of a show set in a small Kansas town not unlike the one she grew up in, featuring lots of queer people and their friends and families just living their complex lives in the middle of the country—even though Everett lives hers in Manhattan. She films it in rural Illinois.

This is a special combo of distance without divestment, and it's what allows Chappell Roan, who is living in Los Angeles when she’s not on the road these days, to be her full Midwest princess self. There's a confidence in not hating or pitying the region that birthed you, a joy in maintaining the strong ties you choose, and a peace in not hierarchically ranking the cultures that compose your identity. It’s possible to love a place from afar and never really leave it.
 

"When you hear pundits and writers and bloggers tell you that rural folks vote against their self-interest, I hope you remember this post" by Jess Piper. [The View From Rural Missouri]

Exploring the correspondence of June Jordan and Audre Lorde, Marina Magloire assembled an archive of a Black feminist falling-out over Zionism. [LA Review of Books]

Leif Weatherby and Ben Recht on Nate Silver and the addiction to prediction: "Silver insists that viewing all decisions through this lens of gambling is the underappreciated characteristic of Very Successful People," they write. "But what Silver willfully ignores is that the successful players in this world aren’t the bettors. They are the bookies and casino owners—the house that never loses." [The Point]

"Planktonic confetti" is a thing! Wander, drift, wade with Ferris Jabr into the wonderous, wet, and invisible world of plankton. I find science journalism like this so relaxing. [The Guardian]

Something fundamental has changed about the function of college. Is it about learning how to think? Or preparing to participate in the economy? Or....? Erik Baker tries to unpack it. [Harper's]

I try not to link to anything behind a paywall, but I have to recommend you read Caitlin Dickerson's dispatch (and see Lynsey Addario's photos) from three different horrifying treks through the Darién Gap if you can. [The Atlantic, paywalled]

"It was at this bathhouse where men finally made sense." Former writing fellow Vera Blossom is going to keep on crusing at the men's only club. [Autostraddle] You can also pre-order her book now!

I was a guest on a special friendship episode of Myisha Battle's excellent sex-advice podcast, answering a few thorny questions about platonic love. 

"Juggling While Eating 3 Sweet Corn in a Corn Field." Poetry in motion.

Thanks for your patience with pre-programmed newsletters while I was away during August. You especially liked the first and last lists we collectively made, about finding hope and little ways to care for yourself. Of the hope list, Amanda Yates Garcia replied, "This was so moving, it totally made me cry!"