Chappell Roan, ‘The Subway’, and the high-speed music machine of social media
On June 9th, 2024, Chappell Roan stepped onto the stage of the Governor’s Ball in New York and performed a new song. The second she started flipping between the lyrics “she’s got a way” and “she’s got away” in a track about lost love, online fans were hooked. The calls came instantly, crying, “Release it now!”
Anyone who spends a few minutes on TikTok scrolling through the brief clips of new artists sharing snippets of their demos will see that call a lot. The comments are usually along the lines of “I need this now” or even “I need this yesterday”.
If you return in a few weeks, the tone will have changed. “Honestly, you’re dragging this out a bit much now”, the jury will likely moan, “you need to release it ASAP or everyone will get bored”. The gallery has begun to demand that artists play to their whims, rather than the other way around. And there we have the issue.
TikTok has markedly impacted our attention spans, and social media is turning us all into impatient babies. But within the world of music, it’s fascinating and frustrating to witness how the loud choirs of online fans are essentially turning the release of music into a fast-fashion machine. Any hooking chorus is merely a trend, and unless the artist themselves jumps on it quickly, they’ll be out of vogue before they even release the track.
Chappell Roan’s new song ‘The Subway’ is the latest and clearest example. She began to play the new track during her live sets last summer, and it was as though everyone had forgotten that this is a pattern artists often follow. It is a long, time-honoured tradition for musicians to essentially test drive new material, putting it in front of a crowd to see both how the audience reacts and how it feels to perform. Clearly, Roan was taking this route across the song’s live performances; there would be minor changes, a different note here and there, a different number of repeats in a final refrain, and new details in the backing track.
But as people immediately liked the song, which should have been a positive thing, it transpired to be less of a green tick next to an in-the-works demo, and it must have felt like a sudden burden on Roan’s shoulders. Her fans liked her new song, but now they wanted it instantly.
They wanted it so bad that they were busy ripping live performances from YouTube and uploading them to Spotify as podcasts, meaning that for almost a year before the song’s actual release this week, people have been listening to an old, live and unofficial version on repeat. It means that, naturally, when the studio version has dropped, there’s a secondary exhausting choir now annoyed that it sounds slightly different with zero awareness that they caused that problem themselves by rushing ahead and refusing to wait to walk in time with an artist they claim to admire.
“I first played it at Gov Ball when I was painted green as Lady Liberty, and in the past have played new songs live to feel them out,” Chappell Roan wrote in her release announcement post as the song dropped. Hinting at these frustrations, she added, “Obviously, not knowing this really chaotic year would follow the performance, it didn’t really leave me the time to build the world the song deserved. But finally, we are here.”
Roan gave herself the time and ignored the mass, ever-growing shouts for an instantaneous release of the track, stating, “Thank you for sticking it out for a whole year. It was worth it to make sure everything was absolutely right.” But realistically, that’s a privilege. Roan has the enduring hype that can allow her to refuse the call; not everyone has that option.
It reminds me of Katie Gregson-MacLeod and her track ‘Complex’. After posting a tiny clip of her playing a brand new song on TikTok, it blew up as one of the first true moments of the app finding a complete unknown and making her a star. Suddenly, those same calls came to her door asking for the track, which she hadn’t even finished writing, to be recorded, produced, packaged and released right now.
It led to panicked moves like signing to a major label that also wanted to cash in on those calls. By now, the artist has spoken plenty about the mistakes in it all, about the intensity of the pace leading to her feeling out of control of her music, but also to the emotional weight of essentially being forced to reveal art to a mass audience when she wasn’t even really done processing it.
We’re also seeing it right now with Samia. Despite her song ‘Pool’ having been out for years, released back in 2020 as the opening to her debut album, and despite her Tiny Desk Concert, where she played an acoustic version of the song, also being out since 2023, TikTok has just found it, and it has demands.
Calling for the release of that version, insisting that Samia go and rerecord her old track to suit their new obsession, this case isn’t just a story of speed but a story of artists panicking and bowing to online pressures because in today’s tough industry where all creatives are struggling, why wouldn’t you move fast and do anything to try and make something work when there’s a hungry audience waiting?
It makes sense, but it’s sad either way. Art is supposed to be eternal. It’s the one immortal thing a mortal can make, and so why should the creator have to rush something that will go so far beyond them and exist for even longer as a legacy? The process should be allowed to take as long as it takes, with the comfort that if even a hint of it has already moved or excited people, then clearly they’re onto a winner and that excitement will be waiting whenever it’s ready.
Eternal art isn’t a fashion trend to buy into fast and throw out quickly. We need to be more patient.
