Stop Asking Chappell When "The Subway" Is Coming Out!
Every time someone asks, the release date gets pushed back even more infinitely. Why do we feel and act so entitled to everything?
You bitches are never getting “The Subway.”
I’ve lost track of the number of questions, complaints, and outright demands from fans of new breakthrough superstar Chappell Roan that the singer, whose latest career highlights include the 2025 Grammys Best New Artist and 2025 Brits Best International Song and Artist, release a studio recording of her song, “The Subway.”
The unreleased song has only ever been heard at Chappell’s live shows after she premiered it at the Governor’s Ball on June 9, 2024. The Genius Annotation page for the song notes that Chappell briefly teased the song’s existence the day before its debut by changing her Instagram profile picture to the Subway logo. She also sang it a few days later at Bonnaroo on June 16, where she said, “I’m not sure if or when it’s coming out, but I just think it’s fun to sing. To me it kind of feels like ‘Casual’’s cousin.”
The day that she debuted “The Subway” was the same day she boldly refused The White House’s invitation for her to perform for a Pride month event. She also dedicated her performance of “My Kink Is Karma” to the Biden Administration, saying, “we want liberty, justice, and freedom for all. When you do that, that’s when I’ll come.” Oh, and she was dressed (and painted green) as the Statue of Liberty wearing assless chaps and smoking a giant blunt while emerging from a bitten-into “Big Apple.”
Later on in the same show, the singer explained the inspiration and significance behind her Drag Queen Statue of Liberty:
“I am in drag of the biggest queen of all. But in case you had forgotten what’s etched on my pretty little toes, ‘Give me your tired, your poor; your huddled masses yearning to breath free,’” she said, referring to the 1903 bronze plaque on the Statue of Liberty pedestal. “That means freedom and trans rights, that means freedom and women’s rights, and it especially means freedom for all people in oppressed, [pausing overwhelmed by emotion] for all oppressed people in occupied territories.”
Source: Rolling Stone
Looking back now, it’s very fitting that Chappell debuted what now might be her most infamous song to date, if only purely for the fact that the fans’ fervent wishes for it to be released on streaming have as of yet been denied, on the same day that she made it extremely clear what kind of artist she was going to be. Or rather, more accurately, that she would continue to be the artist she always had been, and stand for her values and what she knows to be right, despite her more recent fame with the general population.
After a decade hustling in the industry as a smaller artist, getting dropped by her label for being too queer and having to start over, she had suddenly blown up to mega success seemingly overnight last spring. Her debut album had already been out for half a year when she did her NPR Tiny Desk performance March 21, 2024. From February 23 through April 2 of that year, Chappell was an opener for her friend, Olivia Rodrigo, and her popularity started steadily rising as a result. But it was very shortly thereafter when she released her latest single, “Good Luck, Babe!“, and then immediately hit a long series of summer music festivals with her shining superstardom, that she started to exponentially grow in popularity.
The Gov Ball on June 9 is smack-dab in the middle of that sharp blast-off, and it’s on that day when Chappell made it clear that she would never sacrifice her values for someone else’s idea of success in her career. In her past year in the big spotlight, she’s singlehandedly caused a disproportionate amount of (usually insufferable) pop culture discourse simply by staying true to that promise.
One of the first rounds of discourse seemed to result from Chappell’s bold declaration at The Gov Ball. She made it explicitly clear that she did not want to publicly support the Biden Administration due to its public failures on multiple things, including by selling out trans people and aiding and abetting genocide and apartheid abroad. I remember the first rumblings starting then, complaints from skeptics who were almost affronted by her refusing such a massive invitation. Who is this young nobody, who thinks she can turn up her nose to the fucking White House? the voices said. She just started and she’s already making massive blunders. She won’t last long.
Over and over again last summer and fall, as Chappell continued to assert her boundaries firmly and pave her own way in this ruthless industry, this was the recurring theme to which the conversation always returned. She won’t last long; it really is the Rise and FALL of a Midwest Princess, huh… Vultures were circling in the wings, almost praying on her downfall. It felt like some group hazing ritual, like everyone had decided she was undeserving of her newfound success simply because she demanded to be seen as an individual person, and not just another part of the machine. The late Dr Donna Rockwell, a clinical psychologist leading expert on fame and celebrity, has described fame as “almost like an excommunication because now you are an object. People are watching you.” In Chappell’s swift rise to popularity, she experienced this dehumanization for herself as we watched in grotesque fascination.
This is the cruelty we’ve come to not only accept, but insist on as normal; the industry-wide abuse that we as consumers fight to uphold because it means that we get to happily and mindlessly consume our entertainment content without having to think too hard or worry ourselves over the ethics of situations and circumstances that sit just outside of our individualized sphere of perceived reality. Blame it on whatever you will — the death rattle of late-stage capitalism, the smart technology addiction that conditions us to constantly crave more newness, the erosion of collective empathy as the result of both of these things. All of the above.
I personally tend to favor an explanation that doesn’t shy away from centering the impact of the smartphone on the world’s trajectory. Without getting too deep into a disgruntled, Boomer-esque side-tangent about how modern technology is dooming us all, it’s undeniable that the advancements of the last several decades have radically altered the way that society functions. I often recall learning about the printing press in my seventh-grade social studies class for the first time — and how it permanently altered society by ushering in an unprecedented era of mass communication. As someone who has always paid attention to and been fascinated by communication in all its forms, this fact stuck with me, unlike so many others that have slipped through the giant Swiss cheese holes of my memory. From the 19th to 20th century, all new forms of media — radio, then moving pictures, then film — surely had enormous impacts on the patterns of mass communication each in their own right. But none in quite an explosive or unbridled manner as the trajectory from father of theoretical computer science Alan Turing’s cryptanalysis of the Enigma ciphering system to Apple co-founders Steve(s) Jobs and Wozniak pioneering the path for billions of human beings to have a tiny portable computer in their hands at all times.
Now we are at a precipice where we have perhaps surpassed the point of over-saturation of information, and instead of clarifying truths and illuminating new paths for society, our technology is muddying facts and reality, forcing us recursively to simulate newer-and-different-but-still-the-same versions of everything. In her 2011 book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, Sherry Turkle wrote as one of many canaries in the coal mine warning about technology’s increasingly concerning impacts on our society: “We have many new encounters but may come to experience them as tentative, to be put ‘on hold’ if better ones come along. Indeed, new encounters need not be better to get our attention. We are wired to respond positively to their simply being new.” (Alone Together, 280).
We have pushed hyper-consumerism to grotesque and obscene levels, and it has conditioned our brains to see everything around us as inherently less valuable; more dispensable; easy to replace. We consume so much, all the time, as if it’s a salve to any anxiety or fear or discomfort we feel about the things that make life difficult to bear — but aren’t these things a necessary part of the human experience? Is not feeling deeply, whether those feelings are painful or exuberant, what it means to be human, to be alive? And yet our technology addictions work to condition away these aspects of our humanity, to numb them and distance us from them, replacing them with cheap and hollow facsimiles of the original thing.
“In a design seminar, master architect Louis Kahn once asked, ‘What does a brick want?’ In that spirit, if we ask, ‘What does simulation want?’ we know what it wants. It wants—it demands—immersion. But immersed in simulation, it can be hard to remember all that lies beyond it or even to acknowledge that everything is not captured by it. For simulation not only demands immersion but creates a self that prefers simulation. Simulation offers relationships simpler than real life can provide. We become accustomed to the reductions and betrayals that prepare us for life with the robotic.”
(Alone Together 285)
We’ve grown so accustomed to a world that provides instant access to almost anything we could want, and our attention spans are only shortening while our entitlement seems to rise and rise and rise. I’m so happy for the fans who are loving The Giver, but i just got dumped and really need The Subway right now one user posts online. She better hurry up with her next album if she wants to keep all the fans she gained at the height of her fame, another one comments on a livestream. But I wonder — why do you need an extremely specific song for your breakup, and what makes you feel comfortable to demand that from a stranger online? What if Chappell doesn’t care about “the height of her fame” and is taking her time to produce her next album because she wants to prioritize the quality of her art over its quantity? Is this a concept that has finally become obsolete? If that’s the case, then I think we should start to wave goodbye to all art as we know it. (And don’t even get me started on generative AI).
The latest fan entitlement has been surrounding Chappell’s newest single release, “The Giver”, which she first premiered as a live performance on Saturday Night Live in November 2024. During the debut performance, she included an iconic spoken-bridge that became an instant classic: "All you country boys saying you know how to treat a woman right. Well, only a woman knows how to treat a woman right!" But to many of her fans’ great chagrin, when the official studio recorded version was released, it was without the bridge included. There were swarms of hit tweets about how the fans “were robbed,” again using language of entitlement to talk about someone else’s art, someone’s creation that they shared with the world out of love and connection. Never mind that Chappell said she would be using the bridge as an opportunity to do something fun and spontaneous at her live shows — if it’s not mass produced and instantly replicable, then the fans don’t want it!
But if she’s shown us anything so far, it’s that she’s not going to let pure consumer demand dictate how and why she releases something new. It’s for this exact reason that I think Chappell Roan could not have come along at a more crucial time for the culture. There are some — many — who are too far gone down the vortex of cheap imitation and mindless consumption to save, but many more still who haven’t been completely reprogrammed in the image of artifice, who look around them at mass media of increasingly hollow and reductive recycled narratives and ideas, where there is well and truly nothing new under the sun, and feel remorse, and loss, and these people can still be reached. Maybe. If we try hard.
Artists like Chappell can reach them — with the unscripted and candid moments she has just for her more intimate audiences; with her dedication to maintaining her authenticity and refusal to be turned into an overly-curated brand that is pleasing to the palette; and most importantly, with her fearless demand to be seen and respected as, before all else, a human being, and not a product to be consumed. Not anyone’s property.
This makes me think of the song You Don’t Own Me by Lesley Gore, which I’m familiar with as the second-to-last song on Taylor Swift’s Pre-Eras Tour playlist before the show begins. As a message to send fans who are about to watch her perform for them, it’s always seemed like a gut-punch to me. But I have to remember that most of her fans don’t pay a single shred of attention to the actual content of what she chooses to share with them. They do what they’re conditioned to do: mindlessly consume.
You don't own me
I'm not just one of your many toys
You don't own me
Don't say I can't go with other boys
[Chorus]
And don't tell me what to do
Don't tell me what to say
And please, when I go out with you
Don't put me on display 'cause
[Verse 2]
You don't own me
Don't try to change me in any way
You don't own me
Don't tie me down 'cause I'd never stay
But then Taylor does what she always does, and ends the pre-show playlist with the flip side of Gore’s proclamation: “Applause” by Lady Gaga, a song about living to feel the exhilaration and rush of a crowd screaming and cheering just for you. The message then becomes, “you don’t own me, but I still live for your applause.”
Again this connects back to something Chappell has recently spoken candidly about: the addictive nature of fame, which is something she said she wasn’t anticipating to scare her as much as it does. "A lot of people think fame is the pinnacle of success, because what more could you possibly want than adoration?" she said in a January BBC article. For her, it’s not necessarily the pinnacle, but that doesn’t mean its allure doesn’t still tempt her, regardless of what she wants. "It's so scary to think that one day people will not care about you the same way as they do right now - and I think [that idea] lives in women's brains a lot different than men's," she said. "Like, I understand why I'm so scared to lose this feeling.”
It’s her candidness, her unapologetic commitment to anything less than the brutal truth, that we must latch onto in this moment; and we must use it to inspire us, to propel us forward to the industry standards that we want to see reflected around us. Lift each other up, and help maintain a world where it’s possible for Chappell to have her one true wish as a mainstream artist:
"If I can look back and say, 'I did not crumble under the weight of expectation, and I did not stand for being abused or blackmailed', [then] at least I stayed true to my heart."
How could anything matter more?
Once again, you write with clarity of purpose and topical relevance! Well Done!