The Giver: When Subtext Overrides Quality

Chappell Roan’s new single has an interesting concept – a country song about, of all things, lesbian sex – which makes its lacklustre execution all the more fascinating.

Historically, a musician’s appearance on ‘Saturday Night Live’ has had the potential to make or break their career. Lee Ving of punk band Fear was banned from the show after his band’s riotous 1981 performance. Lana del Rey’s career almost ended prematurely after her pitchy, nerve-ridden performance of ‘Video Games’. Ashlee Simpson’s lip-sync debacle made her the subject of tabloid headlines. The single most memorable moment in ‘SNL’ history might be Sinéad O’Connor’s protest against sexual abuse in the Irish church, after which the path of her career was irrevocably altered.

An appearance on ‘Saturday Night Live’ can also, however, cement a musician’s greatness on national television. Of recent memory, Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli xcx have all delivered stirring performances that confirmed their place in pop music’s continuing legacy. Add to that list Chappell Roan, who performed two songs on ‘SNL’ in November last year. The first was ‘Pink Pony Club’, the queer anthem that recently topped the UK charts and achieved the rare feat of getting the ‘SNL’ audience to sing along with her. It was a joyous victory lap, a celebration of hard-won success, and a confirmation that Roan was here to stay.

The second song that Roan performed on ‘SNL’ was, as of then, unreleased. Backed by vibrant theatrical production and clad in a camp, classically Roan outfit, she sang ‘The Giver’ for the first time. It was an unexpected stylistic shift for Roan, who’d gone from the moody balladry of her early work to the bombastic queer pop of her full-length debut, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. ‘The Giver’, you see, was the artist’s first foray into country, and has been released in full today.

In some ways, we should’ve seen it coming. If you’ve tuned into the Top 40 at any point over the last few years, you’ll know that the music industry has, as of recent, had a soft spot for country. Everyone from Beyoncé to Post Malone to Gwen Stefani has donned the cowboy hat in the last year, so Roan releasing a country song would’ve always been a safe bet that it would perform well. More than that, though, Roan’s Midwest upbringing (she was born and raised in Willard, Missouri) meant that she was surrounded by country music as she grew up – as she puts it, ‘that is what is around me in the grocery stores’.

Roan’s venture into country, then, is not only an acknowledgement of her Midwest roots, but acts as a subversion of the norms of country laid out by its most conservative gatekeepers. As Beyoncé can attest, anyone making a country song who isn’t a straight white man is immediately decried by the country music crowd, and Roan’s song isn’t only sung by a lesbian but is explicitly about lesbianism. (Its title refers to topping, no less.) In celebrating her gayness within a genre that historically has hated gay people, ‘The Giver’ is a glorious fuck-you to her detractors as she continues to queer mainstream music. In this way, it’s another quintessential Chappell Roan song.

But rich subtext does not a good song make. While it’s admirable that Roan is singing so openly about her queerness – as she has for years now – the intention behind the song is the most interesting thing about it. In practice, ‘The Giver’ is a pretty standard country song, whose outrageous subject matter seems at odds with the sheer normality of its production. Listening to ‘The Giver’ is akin to the experience of reading a book for your high school’s English class: appreciating its craft and the author’s intention while also knowing that you’ll probably never read it again.

This isn’t to say that ‘The Giver’ fails as a song. It’s competently arranged with live instrumentation and tasteful fiddle and banjo embellishments, and Roan’s performance is as spirited as it always is. But as country songs go, it’s astonishingly ordinary; if one heard it on the radio and paid the lyrics no mind, it would be difficult to recognise Roan’s presence. Contrast this with ‘Good Luck, Babe!’, her breakout single from last year: a song that felt in conversation with the work of Kate Bush and Cyndi Lauper, yet also in a class of its own with its build, its yelped chorus and the sheer insanity of its bridge.

Crucially, ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ had a hook. ‘You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling’ was a line perfectly melodically composed, and so intensely confrontational that it lodged inside the listener’s mind like the lost lover of whom Roan sung. Meanwhile, the strangely utilitarian hook of ‘The Giver’ – ‘I get the job done’ – seems profoundly at odds with the freewheeling pursuit of pleasure the song speaks of. Where the lofty subtext of ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ was matched by the ambition of its composition, the intriguing meaning of ‘The Giver’ is let down by its execution.

Another point of comparison might be ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’, Beyoncé’s country number-one from last year. While the ‘this ain’t Texas’ hook was strong and catchy, I had similar gripes with that song as I do with ‘The Giver’ – middling production and an unambitious structure. Beyoncé’s own subtext about reclaiming the country genre for its Black founders wasn’t matched, I felt, until she released Cowboy Carter: a behemoth dissertation of an album that fused country with other genres (yacht rock! opera!) and ended up living up to the intention that Beyoncé had for the record. ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’, it turned out, stood out on the tracklist for how conventional it was.

True, it’s not fair to compare a 27-song album to a three-minute song. But I think it’s worth mentioning because Roan’s song could’ve done so much with its sound, but it just doesn’t wish to go there – content with settling into the grooves of its forebears, who range from Dolly Parton to Orville Peck.

Roan herself has said that her next album will still be pop, and that ‘The Giver’ is simply a result of her wanting to fuse her queerness with her Midwest identity. (She’s also said, which isn’t inaccurate, that the idea of a lesbian country song is ‘funny’.) It feels harsh to be relieved by the news that ‘The Giver’ is a diversion, and not a teaser for a full country album, but it’s difficult to deny that Roan excels when she’s pushing the boundaries of pop. (Her ballads were the weakest part of her first album.) For an artist so transgressive, ‘The Giver’ feels peculiarly docile.