On Chappell Roan’s new tune “The Subway,” she captures New York Metropolis’s distinctive hardships with a damaged coronary heart.
Ryan Lee Clemens
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Ryan Lee Clemens
For those who’re somebody who calls New York Metropolis house — somebody who’s unfazed by rats, cockroaches and dangerous landlords (know your rights!), who would commerce any Casper mattress advert for Dr. Zizmor’s rainbow, who would by no means wait in line for something you noticed an influencer rave about on TikTok — then the wide-eyed means so many visiting pop stars sing concerning the metropolis at all times lands far too cute.
To the Taylor Swifts of the world, New York Metropolis is the beckoning playground of vivid lights and massive desires most mainstream rom-coms make it out to be, a way of promise and romance lurking round each Village or Williamsburg (it is at all times a kind of neighborhoods, sorry) nook. “Really feel so free, really feel so free” the Los Angeles native pop star Addison Rae sang on this 12 months’s “New York,” hopping from membership to membership after dropping her baggage off on the name-checked Bowery Resort. On Lorde’s current album Virgin, she sang of dancing within the glow of venues like Child’s All Proper and the “voices of the ancients” calling out for her within the metropolis streets.
In fact New York Metropolis is straightforward to romanticize. However the longer you are right here, the higher probability you have got of that playground changing into an emotional minefield. New York Metropolis, for all its freedom, additionally requires a way of stoicism and even coldness from its inhabitants — it is a metropolis the place you may cry brazenly on the subway with out some well-meaning however incorrect stranger attempting to console you. That is a actuality Chappell Roan will get on her newest break-up tune “The Subway,” a tune she first debuted stay at New York’s Governor’s Ball Pageant almost a 12 months in the past, about recognizing her ex on the prepare and nearly having “a breakdown.” “It isn’t over ’til I do not search for you on the staircase, or want you thought that we have been nonetheless soulmates,” she sings. “However I am nonetheless counting down the entire days, ’til you are simply one other lady on the subway.”
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It is a far cry from the final time she launched a tune concerning the metropolis, 2023’s “Bare In Manhattan” from The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. There, in a pulsing, ’80s synth-pop quantity that has change into Roan’s specialty, town was the stage for the singer’s sexual experimentation, and Manhattan’s attract a metaphor for being with one other girl. “It is just like the way in which that New York Metropolis makes me really feel,” Roan stated in an interview concerning the earlier tune. “Which is like, excited and sort of like, wanderlust, and it is the identical as a woman.” “In New York, you may attempt issues,” Roan sings on that tune, capturing town’s seemingly limitless array of pleasures and prospects for her taking.
“The Subway,” launched throughout one of many worst weeks in current reminiscence for NYC’s public transportation, as an alternative finds Chappell Roan confronted not with town’s pleasures however its distinctive severity, which is performed up for comedy within the tune’s accompanying music video. Rats crawl within the singer’s hilariously lengthy crimson curls, which later get caught in a taxi cab door and drag her by way of the road. In a single scene, she floats in Washington Sq. Park’s fountain like Millais’ Ophelia whereas a younger couple makes out a number of ft away. Partying drag queens and drained commuters pay her no thoughts whereas she’s wallowing in the course of a subway automobile. Whether or not in love or heartbroken, Roan nonetheless finds the drama and romance within the metropolis’s chaos.
However “The Subway” would not play just like the high-camp, theatrical pop bangers Roan’s been cranking out since changing into a family identify in the previous couple of years, pulling as an alternative from the ’90s jangle-pop acts like The Sundays and The Cranberries, letting her vocals wail on the tune’s finish not not like the latter’s late lead singer Dolores O’Riordan. However don’t fret, “The Subway” nonetheless retains Roan’s saltier impulses. “I made a promise, if in 4 months this sense ain’t gone,” she sings. “Properly, f*** this metropolis, I am movin’ to Saskatchewan.” In a metropolis this large, having to see your ex on the subway and fake they’re only a stranger? Feels like New York to me.
