The Singles Jukebox

Good Song, Babe!

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[7.76]

Alfred Soto: Hey, y’all, Spotify played “Good Luck, Babe!” after ILLIT’s “Magnetic” — are the streaming gods Jukebox-friendly? Maybe a synth line patterned after Wham!’s “Last Christmas” and a vocal that commands attention despite singing a line like “sexually explicit kinda love affair.” Then again, that’s how people talk.
[8]

Jeffrey Brister: What if the narrator of “I Kissed A Girl” was a fucking liar whose inability to admit her attraction and healthily process and metabolize her emotions made her so transparently readable her spurned girlfriend shot a bullet made of yearning, resentment, and justifiably venomous smugness directly between her eyes?
[9]

Taylor Alatorre: I have a soft spot for music that performs a kind of empowerment driven by romantic spite, while at the same time being precision-engineered to make the singer look small-minded and weak to the sober bystander; this is why I can never forswear Drive-Thru Records or pre-2016 Drake. In that vein, “Good Luck, Babe!” can be heard as a more ideologically palatable version of “Hotline Bling,” right down to the self-degrading tinniness of the initial backing synths. Both songs construct a character whose presumptuous sense of entitlement becomes more apparent with time, and both ask us to sympathize with that character, not in spite of that entitlement, but because of it. Because relatability, and because we’re hard-wired to believe almost any convenient lie if it’s made to sound pretty enough. Chappell Roan’s relative vocal restraint here represents her attempt to come off as the reliable narrator, to prevent too many of her unnervingly real feelings from spilling over. It’s an effort that comes undone as soon as she gets to the bridge, when she drops the blasé affect, claims the power of omniscience, and uses it to peer into her rival suitor’s future bedroom. “You’re nothing more than his wife” — sure, whatever you need to tell yourself. What, too cynical, you say? Whichever reading the listener goes with, they’re choosing cynicism, either the listener’s toward Chappell or Chappell’s toward the other girl, who at the end of the day may just be a garden-variety bisexual; we’re not allowed to know. Love is still a battlefield in the 2020s, queer love not excepted, and “Good Luck, Babe!” isn’t afraid to show off the sometimes gory aftermath of those battles, caked in just enough gloss to give us the option of seeing something different in it. A potent cocktail of unraveling passions and high-grade copium, it arrives just in time to be used in AMVs of the final season of Sound! Euphonium, otherwise known as the official anime of yuri-baiting. Good luck, Kumiko!
[8]

Will Adams: A breakup song directed at a queer person who was clearly uncertain, self-conscious and anxious about their identity leading them to push a great thing away? Oof. I’m the problem, it’s me! But any discomfort I have with seeing myself in “Good Luck, Babe” is assuaged by its giant hooks, a bridge that mounts the tension (sadly, a rarity for pop at this point), and Dan Nigro’s production, which draws from the same pillow-soft ’80s synthpop of “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings.” It’s the sugar to help the medicine go down.
[8]

Leah Isobel: I’m convinced that Taylor caused a lesbian pop revolution. Not on purpose, obviously, but perhaps inevitably; of course her simultaneous insistence on both the femininity and the import of her perspective would inspire a generation of gay girls young enough to look for validation from pop culture and old enough to perform deep reads on the line “she’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers.” Some of those artists have even made minor commercial breakthroughs, though nothing has heralded the arrival of a real-deal pop star the way that “Good Luck, Babe!” has. On a musical level, I don’t know if I see it. It’s catchy, sure, but its chorus isn’t quite as singalongable as “Red Wine Supernova,” and it doesn’t sell Chappell as a persona the way “Pink Pony Club” does. Its production and vocal delivery are so arch that all I can see are the references: a little Wham! synth here, a little Marina & The Diamonds-circa-The Family Jewels whoop there, a “Bags” melodic bite for good measure. (Sidebar: I’m compiling this for an eventual piece about how Immunity is the most influential pop album of the last decade no one steal this from me thank you!) But maybe that’s it. A pop star is voracious, ambitious, all-consuming; she cannibalizes. What “Good Luck, Babe!” offers isn’t mushy sincerity, but steely-eyed purpose. I don’t love it, but I do respect it.
[7]

Hannah Jocelyn: I’ve written so much about about the power of “Good Luck, Babe” but I don’t think it’s perfect. Among my nitpicks; the “sexually explicit kinda love affair” line doesn’t land, the ending nearly kills the momentum, and I’ve always heard some weird aliasing artifacts on the hi-hats, even in the 24/48 flac download (which might be the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written on TSJ). But there’s a reason I’ve been obsessed with this song, and it’s not just because I’ve wound up The Other Woman in emotional affairs with queer/questioning women before. I wasn’t as on board with Roan at first, then this song made me go back and get acquainted with the Femininomenon. Unlike most of Midwest Princess, this is not OMG I’m a girl??? and I like GIRLS??? music, and unlike several similar songs about loving women in denial, it’s not self-pitying. This feels more real, with palpably complex emotions underneath the showy vocals, and it feels messy in a way that queer pop stars were once supposed to avoid. I could go on and on, and I have, but I’ll say this: I genuinely think this song will change lives and cause people to reconsider their identities. At least one of my friends has already mentioned crying to this song. I recently spoke with a music writer that claimed music wasn’t necessary, but for the right person, some songs are.
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Alex Clifton: I don’t know what I can say about this song that Hannah didn’t already say in her excellent Billboard article, but I’ll try. Up until now Chappell Roan has been my good-time music, with tracks like “Pink Pony Club” and “Red Wine Supernova” regularly stuck in my head.  She’s a girl from small-town Missouri in full drag regalia aiming to give everyone a great time, and she constantly delivers on that front. “Good Luck, Babe!” sounds happy but is one of the more lyrically devastating songs I’ve heard this year, and Roan’s performance is incredible. The way she screams “I TOLD YOU SO” at the end of the bridge rips at something in my heart. It’s angry as all hell but also has a level of concern; Roan doesn’t want the subject to end up in a dead-end relationship and just wishes she’d get her shit together. It’s a delicate line to thread but goes to show that Chappell Roan isn’t just a novelty pop writer. It’s exhilarating watching someone’s star rise, and to watch this song specifically become the catalyst for additional recognition is unlike anything I’ve seen before. 
[10]

Ian Mathers: I was hugely impressed with “Casual,” even more so with Roan’s first record overall, but I’m lightly gobsmacked here with how quickly she’s put out something else that simultaneously feels like it could have been on The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, like it sums up what that album was doing (and how well it does it), and like she’s already moved past her work there. And it’s her most successful single so far? It very much feels like things are going to keep going up from here.
[10]

Jackie Powell: When “Good Luck, Babe!” came out last month, it wasn’t what I was expecting on my first listen. I got a tease from friends about what this song was about, but I was underwhelmed by the fact that I couldn’t clearly understand the story that Chappell Roan worked very hard on constructing. Her vocal style on other tracks like “Red Wine Supernova” or “Casual” is much more based in her chest voice and as a result is much easier to lyrically comprehend while listening. On “Good Luck, Babe!” Roan slurs a lot. She opts to implement much more mixing in her head voice during the hook which matches the sonic feel of the synths and drum machine that producer Dan Nigro has added in. The hook flutters and it flutters in a tone that’s paradoxical to the story she’s trying to tell. This is a song about rage, is it not? This is a song about compulsory heterosexuality, a phenomenon that is incredibly frustrating as it is prevalent in 2024. We don’t hear that rage until the absolutely mind blowing bridge where Roan’s upper register soars when she tells her past lover that she told her so. This story that Roan tells is one that so many queer people often face. It’s that same level of discomfort that Ben Platt and Renee Rapp have both sung about in their respective songs “Andrew” and “Pretty Girls.” This track’s importance can’t be understated. Its rise in popular culture can’t be undervalued. But I do wish that the story was illustrated more blatantly. Slurring aside, where is the music video for this? The video for “Casual” was exactly what a Roan fan would expect: a cross between the films Splash and Jennifer’s Body with a dash of heartbreak. I’m reminded of the queer women artists like Hayley Kiyoko and Zolita who have both gained a following for the honest queer stories they’ve portrayed in their music videos, which have garnered meaningful amounts of views. Meanwhile, DJ Louie XIVI recently had a Pop Pantheon episode that pondered if the music video is indeed dead. I would hate for that to be the case for Roan, an artist that thrives on theatrics, visuals and play— the fuel that her exponential and unexpected rise to stardom requires.
[7]

Isabel Cole: I feel like it was probably deliberate to set the big bursting kiss-off chorus up in the flutiest part of her range where she can’t really enunciate, but I still find it annoying to listen to. The bridge is pretty good, though.
[5]

Mark Sinker: Gorgeous control of voice over bare control of desire; fragments of the crunchily expressed across the oldest (cliched, she says it herself) story, oh i’m the “other girl”!!¡¡ and then the closing device (which you can call brechtian if you’re fancy, or lazy) undermines it a little, at least musicially. 
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Joshua Lu: The bitter, lesbian reimagining of Gwen Stefani’s “Cool” I never knew I needed.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: I am all for Chappell Roan’s meteoric rise to fame as the next local drag supporting queer, but this song feels as basic camp as the fonts used in the visuals for her Coachella performance. 
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Nortey Dowuona: If anyone is wondering why this is the Chappell Roan hit, it’s because it sounds like a synthpop song from 1986, and pop fans are still somehow locked into 1983-1988 as the best time to listen to pop music. That said, “you’re standing face to face with ‘I TOLD YOU SO'” is a FANTASTIC LYRIC.
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Katherine St. Asaph: The belted “I TOLD YOU SO” is unexpected and amazing. The part that flips the hook from “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” into a soprano trill is great — between “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl” (“Footloose”) and “Red Wine Supernova” (“What’s Up”) she’s now three for three on rewriting the Great Karaoke Songbook for 2024. The line “you have to stop the world just to stop the feeling” is so perfect it feels like it must have been written in stone centuries ago and just now unearthed. But if I’m being completely honest with myself, everything else in the track is pretty mid, and repeated listens just make the mid parts seem proportionally larger.
[5]

Andrew Karpan: An exuberant jubilant kiss-off for fans of Roan’s last version of this (“My Kink Is Karma”) but more pointed, less funny and charged with a contemplative melancholy bellied under its titanic build. The radical space of queer longing turns into an ocean that lifts all boats. “With your head in your hands, you’re nothing more than his wife.” We are lifted and listening. 
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Rachel Saywitz: I worry sometimes that I’m not wanting enough. Or I want, but the wrong things. Or I don’t want the right things enough. Chappell Roan is want, maximized and poptimized, and “Good Luck, Babe” is its earnestly sweet manifestation. Roan masters pop’s narrative drama as she coaxes her past, closeted self to breathy, sapphic jubilation with the wave of a bouncing synth wand and a Florence Welch operatic belt. Love is want, at its core, and I feel it cascading through me with each listen, urging my spirit to coalesce with my mind, for once. I want, I want, I want.
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