Modern pop and country music rising starts Chappell Roan is coming out about how Orville Peck’s early punk band helped shape hers. Who wouldn’t die to figure out what the hell it is that fans are famous for: country, punk rock, outlaw vibes?! But in this piece we dive just a little deeper into the lineage of Chappell Roan from Orville Peck’s own punk roots and how their own heritage is more relevant than ever to the emergence of both rising stars.
Orville Peck’s Early Punk Band: It established the Foundation for Artistic Expression, which is a non-profit organisation.
A few years ago, before Prince Orville Peck was known for the mask and his haunting merge of country and western, the Canadian was a punk musician—here, shown in a Prada shearling aviator jacket, seen during Prada’s Men’s Fall Winter 2016 collection on January 20, 2016 in Milan, Italy. That’s what Peck normally thought of—his eccentric, almost bizarre country music—but punk was the base for much of what he does now. Growing up, Punk told me to go against the norm musically and have D.I.Y. qualities because Punk was so raw in emotion, so raw in rebelliousness, so raw in energy. The punk ways will wind up shaping that mindset later, but today the country storyteller is finding ways to push his work in the direction of alt rock, pop, and all the usual suspects.
Chappell Roan and the Success of Punk
Explanation:
The story about Chappell Roan and the Success of Punk.
Having been drawn to rebellion in music from a string of singles since to every track on her buzzworthy debut album Mating Season, Chappell Roan always has been. It’s clear she’s shaped by punk. Her music is an indie, alt country, pop… of songs that, when her songs are explorative in her discussions on social norms, identity, love, or self-expression. It’s one of the songs where you can see this is the punk writer, Orville Peck.
But if you don’t know Peck’s work, Roan sat down with me in the DNC Media Centre recently and told me how she initially found his work… and didn’t know until she learnt he was touring with a band how deeply she felt for this blunt, brutal, merciless form of punk that is diametric to other genres nearby. Knowing that Peck had punk roots and she could go a bit further in music changed her whole life. Her artistic journey was his music and his rebellious spirit.
The punk aesthetic influences my sound. Chappell Roan is a punk R&B singer.
Explanation:
A punk R&B singer, Chappell Roan, talks about how the punk aesthetic affects her sound and her interest in posing questions.
Chappell Roan often straddles the pop and country lines, but she carries punk threads through often enough despite them. At the core, she is punk: She can put on her all-angst in order to be in only one genre; she can have the boldness, the defiance, all in one. If you’d plopped Roan down at the dawn of the punk, everybody was making their own sound, and nobody wanted to be placed in a box, he would have been great company.
One excellent example of it was in her debut single “Pink Pony Club”—a rebel spirit (of all of her hits). Roan pushed herself far from her contemporaries, biting lyrics and unorthodox production for the time. Like early punk bands, Orville Peck recognised what song was an anthem of nonconformity.
But outside of that, Chappell Roan’s live performances are just electric. I think that whatever way she’s doing it, she has this magnetic presence, and it might be that she’s even moving post-punk energy when she’s singing the pop anthem or the emotionally charged ballad. For that was always the idea from Orville Peck’s earliest musical days, and she did that for so long that she was able to harmonise genres without losing her punk roots.
The Power of Punk rebellion in Modern Music
Of course the influence of punk may not be so visible right now, but it’s still incredibly important in forming what the music scene is today. In this new environment, with openers like Orville Peck, Chappell Roan, and other punks galvanising this punk spirit into this new generation, it’s opening up to this new generation. It shouldn’t be so surprising then that in unpacking the two musicians’ musical backgrounds, they may come from completely different hailing origins in music, but it is in how they approach music that brings it together—a blend of vulnerability with defiance—that makes their sounds anti-normal and uniquely so.
This punk was raw freedom. It’s to be able to say what you want to say, however that is: You’re heard, you’re heard from your music, the lyrics, the sound, the aesthetic is how people get to know you. These kids are carrying this torch; they’re keeping this little bit of punk alive with this, and whatever it is that’s shaping up their new music genre, it’s still punk with that much change.
This Is Important for Chappell Roan’s Career
It’s not about nodding to the past for Chappell Roan, however. It’s not about wanting to be small at all, it’s more about remaining on her own terms, in the music game, as herself—as unforgiveably as she can. Roan doesn’t enjoy the constraint of an industry that tells artists to stay ahead of the curve. Perhaps she’s been influenced by Peck to realise that being authentic is more effective than being mainstream.
It’s also what Roan leans on for the band’s full fronting up of Orville Peck as a punk rock kid that seems brazen to say what he’s all about when the going gets tough. Because she’s fearless about being surprising, being unconventional, and being unexpected, her music speaks to a deeper, more elemental point of the soul in her audience. Yet going forward as an artist, this will be one of Roan’s great assets.
The Future of Music: Just a bit punk, at least a tiny shred of country, and just a little piece of pop.
That music is changing, and it is changing quickly: bars discussing matters that pop, electronic, and rock are exploring—you need only check out Amazon Music’s Hip Hop chart to see that, and to see today’s classic soul/love music show up announcing new subjects as fast as you can connect to the RFM bandwagon. Or, in other words, genre blending will become faster. Country, pop, and punk still have a blurred line, and Chappell Roan and Orville Peck are among those jumping in to show a performer doesn’t have to be a prisoner of a certain genre. The sound, in fact, is of little interest—it’s about a punk spirit, and Roan and Peck do an expert job of guiding creativity into musical landscapes.
If you’re different, you have The Promising Future of Music. Chappell Roan and Orville Peck, for defying the ‘traditional’ as they do, will in turn inject that punk ethos into those coming up.
Conclusion
It’s clear the impact Orville Peck’s early punk band had on Chappell Roan: music can change a person. That tells us how punk was fed into its raw energy, its resistance, its individuality, into its sound, and into the air that current artists breathe. Those music fans who follow the roots of punk (or even the roots of punk) will hail this defiance, because it’s the music we desperately need to go forward with if we want music to be the music that it’s supposed to be and is. Instead of being her genre, Chappell Reon instead chose to play punk inspired roots, and thus, in the same fraction, has provided us with a lesson we ought to take: do what’s right.
