As Chappelle Rowan styled her grinder and applied red nail polish to her nails during her latest cover interview, she opened up about a range of topics that not only provide a window into her particularly crazy year, but also her voracious list of interests and observations. From double standards in the industry to her Letterboxd account, here are some of the things we learned that we couldn’t fit into the magazine’s cover.
Don't expect a “Good Luck, Baby!” video anytime soon…
Rowan revealed that she spent much of her summer turning down her label's request to shoot a music video for her hit single, because she didn't have time to make a good one. “I'm so tired,” she said, between festival dates across the country and recording sessions for the next batch of music. “Do you know how hard it is to shoot a music video when you're exhausted and burned out?”
As with everything else in her career, Rowan let her instincts be her guide. “It’s a hit song without a video,” she said, echoing what she told her team. “My song is a top 10 song with a video.”
She continues to point out that success is never linear. What worked for past successes won’t always work for future successes. “Isn’t it crazy that you don’t need everything you thought you needed to have millions of TikTok and Instagram users? I didn’t have that when everything first started going viral, I didn’t have videos. I didn’t have direction. I stood my ground and said I’m not going to take every social opportunity. I’m not going to take every brand deal. I’m not going to take every suggestion, because at the end of the day, I’m just doing the manual labor that everyone thinks I should be doing.”
I have become fully aware of the double standards of the music industry.
Roanne embodies the sexy woman of pop stardom. That means she sees a big difference between who she is on stage and who she is off it. Her big year has made it clear to her that being an artist comes with caveats that men in her field don’t. “The thing that makes me so angry that they don’t do that with boys is that they always have to say my name,” she says, referring to impersonal articles and reviews. “Chapelle Roanne, in parentheses, Kylie Rose Amstutz. I was in the same article with Shapozi, and they didn’t say Shapozi’s real name. I noticed it every time. They always say the girl’s name, her real name, because it’s like God can’t be a full-fledged artist.”
She’s already thinking about what she’ll look like as she gets older in the industry. “I don’t remember who said it, I think it was a comedian who said, ‘You’ve been dumped because you’re deemed unsexable.’ It’s a crazy double standard that I’ve realized more and more as I’ve gotten older and more successful. People just care about whether you’re really attractive. That’s it. There can’t be anything more interesting about you than whether you’re gorgeous, which is why I feel so comfortable wearing really scary or really disturbing clothes sometimes.”
Her concert themes may not last forever.
Since launching her first headlining tour in early 2023, Rowan has built specific themes around each show, all based on her songs or lyrics. She encourages the audience to dress appropriately. For example, at a show called “My Kink Is Karma,” the audience wore striking red outfits with some people going out of their way to recreate her look in the music video or simply wearing red cowboy hats or devil horns.
“I shot myself in the foot hard with that decision because now I feel like I don’t know what the themes are,” she said, referring to fans who asked her how they should dress once tickets went on sale for her live shows this year. “People love it so I do it for people at this point because it really means a lot to them, and it means a lot to me. But now I’m stuck with all these damn themes.”
However, she will always have local drag queens open for her shows. “Look, I love Drag racing Girls, but sometimes they hold all the positions in the cities because they are in Drag racing“And sometimes little queens don’t have a big platform. It’s important for people to know, ‘Oh my God, there are queens in my city.’ I had no idea.”
Festivals have allowed her to explore the potential of her character.
Before her career took off, Rowan used to design her own video and stage costumes from scratch. Now, she and her team spend months putting together expensive stage costumes. Many of these looks have been in the works since before she saw her numbers explode. “Everything has to be planned months and months and months in advance because everything is custom now, which is so cool,” she explains. “No brand is going to make me a shiny pink latex wrestling suit. Everything has to be custom and it takes a long time. For Lola, we planned it when I was on Olivia’s tour, so in February and March.”
She enjoyed the way people were looking forward to her look with each show. “I think we’re eventually going to run out of themes, so I’m scared of that, but I like to keep it weird and fresh because it’s exciting for the fans to be like, ‘Oh my God, what are you going to come up with?’ You’re always excited to see what a drag queen is wearing. It’s like, ‘What are you going to wear tonight?’ It could be anything. Why would you do that if you’re going to take it so seriously?”
Keeping the band together is not easy.
“Man, it’s hard in the fucking music industry to find women,” Rowan admitted. She’s been trying to keep a steady band of girls to back her up at her shows, but many of them are in demand, have other projects or are just hard to find. “It’s hard to find a band. It’s just hard to find girls, great musician girls, great musician girls who don’t mind wearing latex in 100-degree heat.”
She comes back to summer camp every year.
Rowan attributes much of her growth as a person and artist to attending summer camp. She has attended a few camps, but there is one camp in the Pacific Northwest that she returns to either spend time with or mentor. She attended this summer’s camp to give a talk and Q&A with aspiring artists who attend to offer insights into the industry and her experiences.
“Summer camp makes me feel like it’s not about me, and that’s what I really struggle with, feeling like everything is about me,” she explained. “My whole life is about ‘me, me, me,’ and it makes me feel selfish and delusional. I understand why a lot of people become idiots because you feel like everything has to be about you all the time.”
Although her career is still in full swing, she hopes to find time to return every year. “I love giving back to the community. It makes me feel like a good person, and it makes me happy to be around kids like me when I was 16. Giving back to kids who want to do this job is something special that the music industry can’t do.”
Sasha Colby has named Rowan an official member of the Colby family.
Rowan did not hide how much she admired him. Propool Drag Race The winner is Sasha Colby, the drag legend whose catchphrase “your favorite drag queen’s favorite drag queen” inspired one of Rowan’s first major viral moments. Colby and Rowan finally met in July when the drag queen joined the pop star on stage at the Capitol Hill Block Party.
“She officially named me Colby,” Rowan said. “She was the best. She looked amazing. It was like meeting people I respect so much through this job. It made me feel really important and good about myself.”
She has a list of horror movies on Letterboxd.
Rowan is a huge fan of horror movies and had tickets to see it. long legs A few days after our first meeting in Los Angeles, she excitedly pulled out her phone to show me the list of horror movies she keeps on her Letterboxd account, most of them really “scary” horror movies from Japan, Taiwan, and other Asian markets. Some recent horror movies I’ve enjoyed have been talk to me (“I thought that was pretty special for a horror movie to make me cry.”) barbaric.
