The Singles Jukebox

Next up, submitted by Joshua Lu, some good ol’ capital-P Pop!

[Video]
[6.78]

Joshua Lu: There’s two sides to “Red Wine Supernova”: a tender paean to a potential lover, and a hoedown about roping someone by promising the raunchiest fuck of her life. Chappell Roan understands how these two ideals can intertwine in your brain, and it’s to the song’s benefit that it doesn’t just flitter between them but instead forces them to coexist. From the sweeping cry of how she doesn’t care if she’s a stoner, or how her ad libs reveal how she’s just as into her boobs as much as her hair, there’s a rawness to this love song that makes its grandiosity feel even stronger. And then there’s the double entendres — her being “choked up, face down, burnt out,” and of course the wand and the rabbit. This is one of those rare pop song that’s immediately thrilling on first listen but gets even juicier when you start peeling away the layers.
[10]

Katherine St Asaph: Chappell Roan is perhaps the best pop-for-pop’s-sake songwriter working right now; you can tell she’s absolutely in love with the form. “Red Wine Supernova” does cheer chants and light yeehawing over the hook from “What’s Up” — just one of the details she gets right: going “supernova” as the melody soars — with giggly, nervous, immensely likable charm. Kinda over using red wine as a cheap ambiguous metonym, though, and the wand-and-rabbit line is terrible (sorry!)
[7]

Rose Stuart: For better or worse, songs about a first gay experience tend to be cutesy and innocent, most often about a first kiss and maybe a quick glance. Roan doesn’t beat around the bush, instead balancing a youthful exuberance with mature lyrics. Her backup singers well maintain young adulthood, all but acting like cheerleaders with each call and response. It’s an incredibly joyful song, only increased by such wonderful lyrics like “I heard you like magic, I’ve got a wand and a rabbit” and having to amend your promise of a large bed to “a twin bed and some roommates”. “Red Wine Supernova” is the perfect song for being young and in love, ready to be the ending credit song to the next queer coming-of-age movie. 
[7]

Alex Clifton: The only sex scene I can remember in the Discworld series notes that the bed springs go “glink.” It’s doofy and unserious and maybe the most wholesome sex scene I can remember. Chappell Roan is far less subtle than Sir Terry here as she yelps “let’s get freaky, get kinky!” but she’s got the same sense of fun. Moreover it’s infectious — I can’t help but listen with a big, dumb grin, caught up in how much she’s enjoying herself. There’s a time and a place for purely seductive/erotic stuff, but the glinks are important, too.
[8]

Hannah Jocelyn: Chappell Roan is the gay cheer captain; normally, I’m on the bleachers (why are you singing about Mulholland Drive in Manhattan?? what do you MEAN your kink is karma??) but when this doesn’t put me off, it makes me smile. Roan’s borrowing the right things from Gaga and especially Marina Diamandis — there’s a theatricality and mischief that’s immediately endearing to anyone who grew up on pop music actually being poppy. Dan Nigro knows what he has, with acoustic guitar breakdowns and gang vocals straight out of a summer camp’s 2009 iPod. The part of the bridge that gets me isn’t “I heard you like magic…” but the roommates shouting “Don’t worry, we’re cool!” The first bit is calculated for SLAY QUEEN TikTok comments, the second part is genuinely relatable and funny. There’s a more outrageous version of “Supernova” that’s like a sapphic “Darling Nikki” (“she did it right there on the deck!”), but I don’t need this to be anything more than it is.
[6]

Will Adams: Upon first listen, I had detected a similarity to Olivia Rodrigo. While the most obvious link is Dan Nigro, who co-writes and produces with both, there’s also the ~theatre~ energy both Rodrigo and Chappell Roan exude, the idea of hitting every mark right in the name of pop. “Red Wine Supernova” does just that — it’s big and brilliant — though there are better mission statements from the album.
[6]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Not as devastating as “Casual,” not as funny as “My Kink is Karma,” not as c*** as “Feminomenon,” not as anthemic as “Pink Pony Club,” but probably the most karaoke-able Chappell Roan track. It feels good to have Midwestern queer representation. 
[7]

Alex Ostroff: The premise of Amnesty 2K23 makes it feel deeply unfair that most of the best singles off of The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess came out in 2022. I desperately want to rave about her aching situationship song “Casual” or her sugar-rush chronicling of nascent gay college crushes and those tentative moments before you’re bold enough to make the leap on “Naked in Manhattan“. Or, hell, “Pink Pony Club“, the 2020 anthem that got her dropped from her initial record label and simultaneously sent her off in musical and aesthetic directions far more compelling than any of the mopey acoustic material that came before. The remaining singles that immediately preceded Midwest Princess’ release tend to be full of call-and-response audience interaction, cheerleader chants (which I wish she relied on less, given how good her ear is for actual sung melodic hooks) and campy weird sonic details — but less depth and self-interrogation than the audacious initial run that caught my attention. “Red Wine Supernova” peaks in the first verse with “She did it right there out on the deck / Put her canine teeth in the side of my neck”, and nothing that follows recaptures that sense of possibility/mystery/danger/lust. The chorus is still incredibly catchy, though, and the sweetly sung “I don’t care that you’re a stoner” is a delight, and I can guarantee that I’m still going to be randomly absent-mindedly humming it when spring comes around.
[8]

Ian Mathers: The #1 song I’m sad I didn’t get to blurb here is Chappell Roan’s “Casual,” an easy [10] that just absolutely blew me away when I heard it. And now her other (for me, so far) [10] is pretty fucking different! Never underestimate the power of just sounding like you’re having way more fun than anyone else. (And, sadly, of having seen some shit in the business before you start succeeding.) Also, and I mean this absolutely sincerely, I love that I have lived to see the day when a pop song can just say “you just told me you want me to fuck you/baby, I will ’cause I really want to” and it’s just not that big a deal! Like, don’t worry about it, people who want to be poetic or coy or suggestive can and will still do that, but sometimes you just wanna get in there.
[10]

Claire Biddles: Has any response to a come-on (“Want me to fuck you?”) had less rizz than “Baby I will because I really want to”
[3]

Taylor Alatorre: I think it’s meant to be clever, or camp or something, that she makes her voice get squeaky when she sprechgesangs “Let’s make this bed get squeaky.” Anything that draws more attention to a line like that is kinda the opposite of clever, though. Gen Z has the right to demand a better Kesha than this.
[1]

Oliver Maier: You can’t say it ain’t fun. Roan’s dream of a big bang is suitably extravagant, but the cheerleading and half-rapping is all a bit suffocating. I reserve the right to privately revise my score to an [8] if I hear this at a house party in a few months.
[6]

Dorian Sinclair: There’s plenty about “Red Wine Supernova” that doesn’t totally work for me: Roan struggles to pull off the talk-sung delivery of the bridge, I’m not a huge fan of call and responses, and the ending is way too abrupt. But the track is overflowing with personality and there’s a couple of monster melodies packed into the prechorus and chorus, which Roan sells far better than she does the spoken bits. There are songs that have won me over with less.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Strange: this appears to be a indie folk song then turns into a 1986 pop song instead, then turns back into the indie folk by the chorus, then goes back to 1986 pop again and ends as indie folk. I mean, it sounds good, I’m not complaining, I just want to know what happened.
[7]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: I wish it leaned more into the vampirism, but with its bar ready beat, its puffy bass, and its written to be screamed chorus and bridge, I can’t fault it for much beyond a slight lack of imagination.
[7]

David Moore: Just finished watching the rebooted She-Ra as part of my family’s Sunday evening pizza and TV ritual. It is, like most quality children’s programming these days, openly queer and much better than it needs to be. (Not sure if this is causal or if it just reflects a more interesting group of people writing the shows. Might be both.) It was a hit, natch, and everyone but me saw the OTP from a mile away, though the older kid had questions about the nature of platonic versus romantic love afterward, and only tentatively accepted the rhetorical shrug that the She-Ra reboot demands. My kids are thoughtful about this kind of stuff, but they aren’t overthinking it. Partly this comes from us, but a lot of it doesn’t: the capital-C culture really is better for their brains and bodies and souls than it used to be. They insist that anthropomorphic animal toys should really be referred to as they/them (because how would you know?); they are perplexed by the narrow-mindedness of the few kids who still insist, in sepia tones of unenlightened boorishness, that boys shouldn’t wear nail polish; I overhear fourth graders playing baseball and responding to someone taunting “you throw like a girl” with “what does gender have to do with anything?” I see the relative ease with which they navigate all of it and think, is it really possible that my ’90s childhood was more like my parents’ ’50s childhood than it was like the present? Which is all to say that I bet my kids, like me, would listen to this Chappell Roan song three times without giving a second thought as to what it’s “about.” But for them it wouldn’t just be because they were a little bored and didn’t pay attention to any of the words. We’d all agree it was a [6], but from worlds apart. 
[6]

Brad Shoup: The lyric wants to go about 10 different places; the arrangement can’t quite get into formation (the instrumental cutout on the chorus should’ve been saved for the end if, you know, we’re making pop). But the assemblage is as eager to please as the narrator, and the way she goes for it, rapping and smartass Greek chorus and magic jokes included, legit makes me tear up. 
[9]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: My one good musical deed of note was introducing my bisexual friend from Ohio to Chappell Roan. This is very fun but I truly am too Californian to have anything useful to say about it, sorry!
[8]