Chappell Roan has created an all-new identity crisis for the country charts

Technically, “The Giver”, Chappell Roan’s latest single, is a surprise release, but the anticipation for it has been building for months. The song was performed on Saturday Night Live in early November, at what will surely remain the highest rated episode of the show’s 50^th season (notably, this was the episode which included a cameo from Kamala Harris three days before the 2024 presidential election), and its stark contrast with the majority of the Chappell Roan catalogue made it a subject of fascination among the many fans she had picked up over the preceding months.

The four-and-a-half months which have passed since Roan’s SNL debut have felt like years, and therefore the time since she became a legitimate pop star has felt like centuries. But it was less than a year ago, when Chappell Roan released her previous single “Good Luck, Babe!”, that in an era of songs by established artists debuting at #1 with relative ease, a song that eventually was streamed over 1.3 billion times didn’t even chart in its first week, and when it did, it only debuted at #77. And yet this marked her biggest chart triumph ever; although her debut album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess was critically acclaimed, it did not become a bona fide pop culture sensation until the summer of 2024. She has since charted a top five song (the aforementioned “Good Luck, Babe!”), a top ten song (“Pink Pony Club”), and the #15 “Hot to Go!”, in addition to several other songs that charted often after years of buildup. But “The Giver” is the first single to be released by Chappell Roan since she became a genuine pop culture force, somebody whose cultural cachet arguably exceeds her strong chart positions. It’s not that “The Giver” is her best single or her single most written with commercial ambitions at the forefront (I would argue it’s neither, even if this is more of a compliment to her previous work than a critique of “The Giver”). It’s that an established pedigree as a pop star plays a big role in whether a song becomes a hit. I fully expect “The Giver” to be Chappell Roan’s first American number one single.

Whether they reached the peaks one believes they deserved is subjective, but songs like “Hot to Go!” and “Good Luck, Babe!” are clearly pop radio songs in the technical sense. There really isn’t a credible argument for playing either on an R&B station, or a rock station, or any other genre-based playlist. But “The Giver” is different. “The Giver” is, by any clinical definition, a country song.

How “country” any given country artist is has been a time-honored tradition among country music purists—there were plenty of people who thought prime Dolly Parton was too pop, not to mention plenty of people who felt the same way about Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, Kenny Chesney, or Luke Bryan. But by the standard of country-ness that defines modern country radio, “The Giver” fits most if not all of the criteria sonically. With its neo-traditional country instrumentation, including an honest-to-God fiddle solo, one could argue it’s more country than most “country” that plays on the radio.

Will “The Giver” receive country radio airplay? I suspect it probably will not: partially because Chappell Roan, prior to this, was by no means a country music artist; partially because the LGBT-themed lyrics are quite on the nose for a format that has grown more tolerant over the years but is still certainly right-of-center on cultural issues; partially because the song almost reads as an attack on traditional pop-country lyrical themes (though this didn’t stop, say, Maddie & Tae from having a massive country hit was the bro-country takedown “Girl in a Country Song”). But that doesn’t mean that it cannot make an impact on the country charts—there is precedent for this.

Before Lil Nas X’s breakthrough “Old Town Road” became arguably the Song of the Summer of 2019, it was effectively a cause because of its relationship to country music. In March 2019, the song charted simultaneously on the Billboard country and R&B/hip-hop charts; when it was unceremoniously dropped from the country chart for supposedly lacking sufficient elements of country music. When it came to Lil Nas X, a young African-American man from the South, there was a very obvious elephant in the room—his race in an overwhelmingly white musical genre. But in the defense of the country establishment, which had elevated the likes of Darius Rucker and Kane Brown in recent years, “Old Town Road” was marginally country-influenced at most. I don’t have a strong opinion on whether it should have been on the country charts either way, but it featured a strong trap beat built around a Nine Inch Nails sample—even when Billy Ray Cyrus was invited for a verse on the remix, this was still very much a hip-hop-forward song at its core.

Last year, in contrast to the newcomer Lil Nas X, one of the biggest pop stars in the world, released her first true forays into country music, with Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter. And while the album as a whole was somewhat varied by genre, with heavy R&B and traditional blues elements very much present, debut single “Texas Hold ‘Em” was a reasonably straightforward country song. There was initial controversy when country radio stations would not play the song, but it’s not unreasonable that those who had not yet actually heard the song would dismiss it, not because of an assumption of lack of quality nor because of an assumption of Beyonce’s inability to make country, but because of tons of precedent suggests that Beyonce is not a country artist. “Texas Hold ‘Em”, a country song, was a #1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 and on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, but it peaked at only #33 on the Billboard Country Airplay chart, the same spot as it peaked on the Adult Alternative Songs chart.

Genre divides are not nearly as strong as they once were. It is reasonable to have genre-based radio stations, but vanishingly rare is the country radio listener who listens to absolutely nothing but what is being fed to them on country radio. I think a lot about the diversity of charts on which Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” appeared in 2011—in addition to being an omnipresent #1 hit, it charted in the top sixteen on the charts for Dance Club Songs, Rock Airplay, Hot Rock & Alternative Songs, and Latin Pop Airplay. On one hand, this is confusing on the basis of genre (for those who somehow have not heard this song, it treads closer to soul than any of these genres), but on the other hand, it makes intuitive sense if you work under the correct assumption that the song’s popularity largely transcended race, gender, age, or any other demographic. A white woman from London didn’t chart on the Latin Pop Airplay because she steered into Latin Pop culture so much as she made an undeniable banger.

Chappell Roan is a white woman from Missouri (as a Missourian, I was legally obligated to mention this within the first 1200 words or face criminal punishment), so in terms of pure demographic destiny, her as a country star isn’t unusual. As an open lesbian whose stage show is littered with LGBT influences, however, she is arguably more at odds with conservative country culture than Beyonce, who is famously in a monogamous heterosexual marriage. I have no doubts that plenty of country music enjoyers will enjoy this song—plenty were enjoying her decidedly non-country music anyway. But exactly what the country establishment makes of Chappell Roan should be genuinely fascinating.

The How I Met Your Mother finale isn’t good. It’s great.

Two important notes before I start. One, yes, I realize that I am discussing a random show I watched for the first time eleven years after it ended. Two, many spoilers ahead.

Even if you have never seen How I Met Your Mother, which I will henceforth be abbreviating as HIMYM for simplicity, you can probably guess that a show which lasted nine seasons isn’t really the story of two people meeting. HIMYM is the story of a man living his mid-twenties to mid-thirties in New York City. It’s about his friends and his girlfriends, and while Ted Mosby claims that all of the more episodic tales are all part of the bigger picture, the story could’ve been resolved with a decent amount of detail in, like, one episode.

I knew many of the basic details of HIMYM’s final episode before I started to watch the show, so I do have some unfair advantages. I knew Barney and Robin, around whose wedding the ninth season is centered, would get divorced. I knew Ted’s eventual wife, by the time the story was being told, was deceased. But to be fair, some of the most critical information of the series is learned on the very first episode. We know that Ted eventually has a daughter and a son. We know that Robin, the woman with whom Ted was immediately smitten in the first episode, would eventually become “Aunt Robin”, not the mother of the children. We know that Barney, Lily, Marshall, and Robin remain at least enough in Ted’s life that he can reference them as aunts and uncles and his children would understand it.

There is no mystery to the fact that eventually Ted would find a woman with whom to have children, but the reveal of who she is and what she would be like remains intact essentially until the waning moments of Season 8, when we see The Mother, revealed in the series finale to be named Tracy McConnell, purchasing a train ticket. Tracy is portrayed by Cristin Milioti, a relatively unknown actress who was probably best known for her Broadway work and a three-episode stint on The Sopranos but has since gone on to one of the more notable post-HIMYM careers among the cast (she portrayed Jordan Belfort’s first wife in The Wolf of Wall Street, a $400 million Martin Scorsese movie, during the final season; perhaps this was inevitable).

Tracy became an instantly beloved character; she was funny, charming, beautiful, and compassionate. Although Ted had a few seasons worth of questionable behavior, the audience still ultimately wanted him to be happy, and suddenly the absolute perfect woman for him was seemingly dropped from the sky.

The meet-cute between Ted and Tracy—the close call of Ted accidentally beginning his first class as a professor in an economics lecture hall in which Tracy was sitting, Ted briefly dating Tracy’s roommate and nearly meeting her, Ted’s closest friends being helped in a moment of existential crisis by Tracy before the two ever conversed—is objectively corny and improbable. But the defining episode, I would argue of the series but certainly of HIMYM’s final season, grounds Tracy. It turns her from Ted’s manic pixie dream girl into a three-dimensional character. 

Season nine is, to be clear, not a perfect season of television—the episode Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment in Slapmarra is an astonishingly bad taste and not even particularly funny beyond its use of white actors to deploy Asian stereotypes, most notably. But it does have How Your Mother Met Me.

This episode is the one in the series in which Tracy is the main character. It essentially catches us up from the beginning of HIMYM to the weekend of the wedding, and we learn that on the night that Ted met Robin, Tracy experienced a life-altering tragedy—the death of her boyfriend Max. Without question, this is the defining moment of her life from 2005 through 2013, and she takes a subsequent hiatus from dating for several years. But even when she starts dating Louis, a decent guy but one who isn’t seemingly an amazing fit for her, it is clear that Tracy is still haunted by Max. When Louis proposes to her, she needs a moment to step outside and ask to the Heavens if she had permission to move on with her life.

Much of HIMYM is framed around Ted’s insistence on finding The One, a hypothetical perfect match. But as Tracy mentions in the series, she believes that she found and lost her The One by the end of her twenty-first birthday. That she was even willing to entertain the possibility of dating Ted required several strokes of luck, as she still had her doubts about dating even after her long-term relationship with Louis.

This sounds painfully obvious but it’s worth a reminder—Tracy McConnell is a fictional character portrayed by a real person, Cristin Milioti, who is still alive. While Tracy was “killed off” in the series finale at an age of no older than forty, this didn’t really happen.

I would not wish for a seemingly good person like Tracy to die young, but that is a thing that happens sometimes. HIMYM handled the subject of death better than most when it came to the passing of Marshall’s father Marvin—it hit like a lightning bolt (he died of a heart attack, whereas Tracy died of a long-term illness) and his healing process was slow. It took several episodes for Marshall to be anywhere near emotionally recovered, and in a medium—a CBS sitcom with a laugh track—where character emotions tend to reset at the beginning of every episode. Even though we never see Tracy’s college-age boyfriend Max, he still exists in the show’s universe. As with Marshall, who mourns the loss of his father and then is able to pay tribute to him by naming his first-born son after him, Tracy pays her own form of tribute to Max by remaining indebted to her memory of him but ultimately doing what is best for herself by living her best life. It is never spoken, but Tracy is not the first person to have lost a significant other who went on to date or marry somebody else, and as is essentially always the case, Tracy surely still loved Max in a way that was not lessened by, and did not diminish her love for, Ted.

A common fan complaint about Season 9 is the sense that the audience didn’t get to spend enough time with Tracy. But this was the story of how Ted met the mother of his children—not how he courted her, not how he started a family with her, and not of how he lost her.

Ted surely loved Tracy just as Tracy had loved Max. But just as Tracy’s life was improved by finding love with Ted, Ted’s would be improved by rekindling his love with Robin. Robin, in some ways the actual main character of HIMYM since her arrival into the friend group is the jumping off point, loved Ted so much that she was questioning her marriage to Barney on the day of their wedding. Ted infamously professed his love for Robin on their first date. And as idyllic as Tracy was, Robin was clearly a great match for Ted. And I have no doubt it would be Tracy approved, as she knew from firsthand experience that finding new love after the death of a partner can help to soothe a broken heart.

I knew Tracy was going to die. Contemporary audiences did not. Contemporary audiences saw a man asking another woman out five minutes after the death of his wife and the mother of his children. But for his children, who surely knew Tracy much better than they knew “Aunt Robin”, it was six years later. And they immediately encourage Ted to date Robin. It wasn’t the conclusion of Ted’s healing process, one that would surely exist on some level for the rest of his life, but rather a major step along the way.

Circumstances are a major part of romantic love. The early romance of Ted and Robin fell apart because Robin didn’t want a commitment nor children, and by the early 2010s, she is brokenhearted by news that she cannot have children and marries a man with more of an aversion to marriage than she ever had. Ted nearly met Tracy at a St. Patrick’s Day party years earlier than he did meet her, and by his own account, he was a drunken idiot and Tracy was still too emotionally vulnerable for a new relationship. Robin could never replace Tracy, for Ted but especially for Tracy’s children, but how the children speak of Robin suggests that she has the maternal instincts to be a great stepmother. In an earlier episode, Ted openly weeps at the notion from Tracy that a mother will always be available for her daughter’s wedding, presumably because he already knows that Tracy will not survive to see her daughter’s wedding. Robin is probably the next-best person to fill that role.

Lily and Marshall, the perfect couple throughout the run of the series, are the only ones with a truly happy ending by the end of the show. But the other three do receive some level of closure. Barney, who had resumed his often sociopathic womanizing ways after he and Robin divorced, was settled down by the immediate love he felt for a daughter he openly never wanted. Robin, whose primary reason for not wanting to settle down is a desire to travel the world for her career (which ultimately causes her marriage to Barney to unravel), gets the opportunity to live out her dream. And Ted has the son and daughter he always wanted; and though Ted may not have gotten the perfect girl for him for as long as he might have wanted, he did get to find love that was twenty-five years in the making from the moment he first told Robin that he loved her.

If I accidentally did a Nazi salute, I would simply apologize for accidentally doing a Nazi salute

At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory, video of me making an apparent Nazi salute has never been recorded. Does this make me a hero? I wouldn’t quite go that far, but this is simply my truth.

Elon Musk has been accused of making a Nazi salute. In addition to being accused of making a Nazi salute, he has demonstrably made a Nazi salute—twice, in fact—at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on Monday. This is not a matter of debate—it is a bland statement of what there is video evidence to demonstrate. One can debate his motivations or his intent with varying degrees of success, but the gesture was made. Let’s put it this way: it is against the rules of the television show Jeopardy! to wager $1,488 because of the number’s association with white supremacist organizations, but let’s say it weren’t. If somebody were to wager that amount, it would be worth asking what their intent was. It’s possible that one thousand, four hundred and eighty-eight dollars was the truly sensible amount to bet, or that they picked a random number, but it’s a question worth asking. It may seem naïve to give the benefit of the doubt, but it’s at least possible. It would be an outright denial of reality to claim that the contestant didn’t actually make that wager. That would be both the basic outline for an I Think You Should Leave sketch and a perfect summation of the Donald Trump era of steadfast refusal to acknowledge absolutely anything.

I have never consciously made a Nazi salute, but I’m sure that my body has gestured in a manner at some context-free moment of my life where it would look that way. Perhaps I extended my arm to swat a fly out of my face. Perhaps I was stretching. If this happened at the exact time a camera was fixed on me, that would be unfortunate timing. If it happened while I was speaking at a presidential inauguration event (well, for a president in the United States, at least), that would be even more unfortunate. But it’s possible.

This is why I would be absolutely mortified to learn that my actions were being interpreted as an endorsement of the Third Reich, as has been the case with neo-Nazi groups who have celebrated Elon Musk’s gestures from Monday. I’m not necessarily sure what all of the steps of corrective action I would take would be, but the first one—apologizing for the appearance of pro-Nazism and condemning Nazis—is an extremely easy one. There isn’t an easier political stance to take in the last century of world politics than “Nazis are bad”—even most overt racists don’t go that far.

But Elon Musk hasn’t done this. There isn’t even the slightest expectation that he would consider even a half-hearted “sorry for how you interpreted things” apology, because the Donald Trump political movement’s entire backbone is built around never apologizing for anything, no matter how small or inconsequential it might be. Instead, everything is an excuse. Disgustingly, Elon Musk’s utterly gullible defenders have tried to argue that the salute was a result of Musk’s autism, an on-its-face absurd connection that still never gets around to the fact that whether intended or not the final result of his gesture was very very clearly a Nazi salute. 

The day after Trump’s first inauguration, the White House claimed in press events to have had the largest inaugural crowds in history, a fact that was very, very easily disproven with photographs from his inauguration and the inauguration of the first non-white president in history eight years earlier. It wasn’t some huge mystery why Barack Obama, a historic president, outdrew Donald Trump, the latest in a very long line of white men to hold the office. It is not, realistically, an indictment of Trump. But the desire to soothe Trump’s ego took priority over telling what was reality. Donald Trump adheres to some version of the George Costanza rule of “it’s not a lie if you believe it”, but where he tells lies so frequently that it barely seems worth the energy to fact-check him because it is such a frequent occurrence. And we’re back, like it never went away.

It's NFL playoff season and I live in Missouri—believe me, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen collective delusion about whether an arm movement is racist from the whitest people imaginable. And I might be able to move past what happened with even the slightest bit of contrition, or at least acknowledgement of what we all could see, but Elon Musk isn’t going to do that. He likes that he, the richest man to ever exist, gets to whine about how he has been persecuted. He likes that those who agree with his gesture will gravitate towards him. And he loves that none of this is going to materially impact his extraordinary wealth or his limitless string of government contracts.

I suppose, though, it is easy for me to say that if I did something that could easily be construed as pro-Nazi, I would condemn it immediately and vociferously to anybody who would listen. But this is also coming from the perspective that Nazis are bad. Not everybody agrees with me on that one.