Do you ever have this moment – where you hear a song for the first time, and you’re not even thirty seconds in, but it’s already struck a chord in you? I’ve had a rare handful of them, because music usually endears itself to me over time and repeated listens. But this April, I heard Casual by Chappell Roan, and I could immediately tell that this song would ruin my life.
And it did.
Chappell Roan is an artist that recently entered mainstream music, but she’s not a new artist, by many means. She has been steadily gathering listeners for almost ten years now, and she released her album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess in September of last year. Her discography has been compared to artists such as Madonna and Kate Bush, while being reminiscent of 80s synth pop. Having a total of fourteen songs, it’s a mix of pop-punk upbeat music that you can dance along to (such as Femininomenon and My Kink is Karma), and slowed down acoustic ballads that bleed emotion (Kaleidoscope and California).
Throughout the album, you see her slow journey from barely-held-together static frustration, to navigating her twenties while moving to a new city, to queer joy, to broken hearted anguish; and Casual is a particularly raw track which explores the downfall of an unfulfilling ‘casual’ relationship. The pop genre of music is almost oversaturated with stories of break-ups and lost loves, but I would argue that Chappell still manages to make this track stand out. What could easily have been a cliché track about a significant other only wanting ‘something casual’ is elevated to something vulnerable, delicate and exploding with emotion.
The music at the beginning is brooding with a certain grim quality to it, with persistent reverbs and muted drums. The first few lyrics set the tone for the narrative of the song,
My friends call me a loser / ‘cause I’m still hanging around
I’ve heard so many rumours / that I’m just a girl that you bang on your couch.
It’s unhappy, and it’s explicit, with the tone of almost being flippant about hurt feelings. While the song starts out slowly, it builds into a mini-crescendo at the chorus, which describes a physical relationship, devoid of any emotional intimacy which she craves. It’s also excruciatingly self-aware, as she says ‘I love being stupid’ while dreaming up an impossible future for them, even when there is no reason to hope for it.
Maybe we’d have an apartment / and you’d show me off to your friends at the pier.
But it’s all dampened by her lover insisting –
You said, baby, ‘no attachment’.
While the song at its core mourns for a relationship that could have been, it’s also about unequal attachment. The bridge starts to slowly bring out the building resentment –
It’s hard being casual / when my favourite bra lives in your dresser,
It’s hard being casual / when I’m on the phone talking down your sister.
For her, it’s these seemingly insignificant aspects where their lives entangle – for me (or for you), it’s numerous nights talking to someone until four A.M., exchanging friendship bracelets, and eating from a tub of ice cream with the same spoon. It’s an endless cycle of longing; of wanting more. It’s being comfortable in their home, enough to put your feet up on the couch, but still hesitating to have a scary, but honest, conversation. It’s realising that you can’t shield yourself in wistful daydreams any longer, that the way you’re hurting is far too acidic for this incomplete dance to go on any longer. It’s being good friends when you want to be best friends, in an alternate scenario. It’s giving parts of yourself away, because you’re young, and too in love to know any better – and then you have to put yourself together again with incomplete jigsaw pieces.
Casual is a deeply personal song which managed to shapeshift to suit my experiences, despite it being very different to Chappell’s. It evoked melancholy, hatred and lonely love. Suddenly, I wasn’t curled up in my bed with my eyes closed. I was standing at the edge of a beach, screaming at the sky about the unfairness of it all (though in my case, I was mourning a friend that wasn’t a friend anymore).
The building narrative hits its climax at
I tried to be the chill girl but / honestly, I’m not.
Chappell’s voice is sorrowful and gentle at this point, and the music seems to calm after the outburst. And then it swells again, with the drums getting louder and her voice escalating from tired acceptance to vengeful, because the end is so much more heart wrenching than anything so far. While it’s anger at her lover, it’s also a wave of self-loathing that ends in –
I hate that I let this go on so long / now I hate myself
I hate that I let this go on so long / you can go to hell.
The explosive belt at ‘hell’ trails off as the music comes to an end, and conveys her explosive emotion. And at almost four minutes, the story is complete. Because the end of this relationship is not a peaceful parting – t’s mostly just sadness, anger and a whole lot of cursing and regret. At the end of it all, what’s left behind is a crying girl who laments something that never was; who buries herself in the bittersweet notes of the love left behind.
In high school, when I had my first taste of unrequited love, I crawled into my mother’s lap and cried my heart out. And these days, when the weight of the sadness and unfairness in the world begins to push me into a spiral, I find myself thinking about the woeful (and mostly insignificant) aches of a teenage me. Because don’t we all grow up too quickly? I swear I was seventeen only yesterday, why am I already in my twenties now?
In the midst of trying to keep afloat in the fast currents and new waters of the tempestuous sea that life has become, sometimes all I want to do is lose myself in the emotions of a love gone awry. It’s a story as old as time, but we still return to its reiterations again and again, because there’s an inherent beauty in the way humans refuse to stop loving, and in a similar strain, perhaps there’s beauty to be seen in the passionate emotions explored in Casual as well. And whether you listen to it for the music, or the vocals, or the lyrics, or the excellently directed music video on YouTube, it will leave you with something profound at the end – a lovely something with the hollow echoes of memories long-gone, a vividly captured story in hues of blue and red.
Listen to Casual by Chappell Roan on YouTube and Spotify
Edited by Yatin Satish
Article 19 