Cheating on the dream husband assignment: one dyke's analysis of Chappell Roan's "Good Luck, Babe!"
“Good Luck, Babe!”, at least according to my extensive ethnomusicology background, is the first certified banger about compulsory heterosexuality.
The first time I heard “Good Luck, Babe!” by Chappell Roan, my fondest wish was to have spoon-fed this song to my 11 year old self.
When I was 11, my family had just relocated to Utah, from suburban St.Louis, MO. In the midwest, I was a classic tomboy. I wore basketball shorts and asked for my Jazz Band tee to arrive in an XL. Treasured hobbies included gathering worms for fishing bait in the pile of leaves in the backyard, chasing torpedoes down through the deep end of the swimming pool, and playing my trumpet as if my life depended on it.
If you’re living under a hetero rock, Chappell Roan is a queer musician skyrocketing to well-deserved superstardom. With her campy, Midwestern drag aesthetic and absolutely insane lyrics such as “I heard you like magic? I got a wand and a rabbit”, she’s tearing it up in the Gay Pop Zeitgeist. (Sorry, Ms.Siwa, you did not invent Gay Pop). Her lyrics? Horny and clever. Instrumentations? Pure pop magic. She’s everything, and every Gay Person Knows It. As us lesbians are wont to do, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to work through her lyrics like our final semester grade depends on it.
The Dream Husband
Our move to Utah rattled my sense of self. There’s the standard-issue shock of junior high, this one in particular, was reinforced with the deeply homogenous, heteropatriarchy of the Church. (For those outside this pocket of the United States, Utah is a deeply conservative state, home to a pronounced religious group. Globally, this is a small religion, with most of their constituents residing in this state). I began to shed my authenticity as I met other young people. Upon finding out my family wasn’t part of the Church, I was immediately invited to join in on Church happenings. Suddenly, I had a bumping social calendar full of weeknight activities, summer camps, the lot. I joke today that I shot out of my seat with glee at the chance to attend “Girl’s Camp”.
I began attending “Young Women” activities at a neighboring house. I thought I might get to do some of my favourite activities I’d experienced as a young “woman”, whip up some mud pies, play freeze tag, and do a kickflip. Instead, I found myself, under the direct and orderly supervision of Blonde Women, proving my ability to fry an egg, and iron a pair of pleated pants. (Note, if you are a married woman, disgruntled with your inequitable domestic labor responsibilities, how about you talk to your husband, and not task a bunch of nearby preteens?). It was clear the intention of these “community-oriented” events for youngsters were efforts to uphold the heteropatriarchal family structure. After I returned home from Girls Camp with a worksheet called “My Dream Husband”, my parents decided to throw in the towel.
The “Dream Husband” assignment is exactly what you think it is. A CSI-style outline of a boy we were to fill in with emotional, physical, sociological attributes we hoped for in a husband. Basically, DIY-ing The Sims character you make to live alongside the Sim that looks suspiciously like you, in Pleasantview, SimCity.
I ended up friggin cheating on my Dream Husband worksheet. How sick and twisted to find yourself lying during a daydream activity. I don’t know how it was for the heteros in the space, but I was coming up blank. Gulping and sweating next to my peers, who were scrawling with reckless abandon. These girlies were practiced in the art of Manifesting Boys. Eventually, I thought to copy the only man I knew intimately, Carrie Underwood’s hockey-playing husband, Mike Fisher. That’s it! I took pen to paper. My ideal man is - 100% Canadian, blue eyes, brown hair, scruffy beard. I snuck a peek at my friend’s sheet, “Devoted follower of Christ '' and quickly scratched out “Loves country music”. Fellas, this entire worksheet should be buried. While you’re never too young to establish standards and boundaries, 11 is too young to be materializing a martial partner for review. Let every pre-teen answer “Cole Sprouse” and let’s get on with our day!
Comphet in song
“Good Luck, Babe!”, at least according to my extensive ethnomusicology background, is the first certified banger about compulsory heterosexuality.
This isn’t just horny lesbo hearsay, Ms.Roan herself teased the release saying this song is “about wishing good luck to someone who is denying fate”. The song blasts off with a fiery “it’s not me, it’s you” accusation that softens, establishing a sincere connection between narrator + subject. The tension is goddamn Chehkovian. Who is this insatiable lover, and what wicked force is stopping her?
It’s fine, it’s cool
You can say that
We are nothing
But you know the truth
And guess I’m the fool
With her arms out like an angel
Through the car sunroof
I don’t wanna call it off
But you don’t wanna call it love
You only wanna be the one that I call baby
I vividly remember, after a raucous night of watching American Idol with my parents, I had my first horny dream about Idol judge and pop savante, Paula Abdul. She let contestants down easy, applauding their passion and dreams. I thought her background as a performer provided a helpful perspective to mentor up and coming talent (read: she is very beautiful to me). I thought about her constantly. So much so, that one fateful night, she visited me in a dream, and kissed me. I woke up sweat-stained in my royal purple ikea sheets. Looking back, I really should have known something was in the water.
You can kiss a hundred boys in bars
Shott another shot, try to stop the feeling
You can say it’s just the way you are
Make a new excuse, another stupid reason
Good luck, babe!
Well good luck, babe!
You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling
Good luck babe!Well good luck, babe!
Alright gays, let’s crack open these books: Compulsory heterosexuality, aka comphet, originated as a term in Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence”. It’s the theory that heterosexuality is assumed and enforced upon people by a patriarchal and heteronormative society. Comphet is a powerful force that essentially assumes everybody’s straight (blech). The ubiquity of comphet is evidenced by nobody ever saying “when did you know you were straight?”.
While comphet is an issue faced by all kinds of queers, it’s important to acknowledge its origins within lesbianism and as a reaction to Rich’s observations of lesbian exclusion from feminist spaces and literature. The plight of lesbiansim is often one of disgust. Choosing to de-center men in romantic relationships is a disturbance to the patriarchal hegemony. All to say, in a comphet society, lesbians (and when I say lesbian, I do mean anyone of any marginalized gender who identifies with “lesbianism”as an act, including trans, bi, pan, queer folks, etc. In a word, I’m utilizing the word lesbian as an umbrella term, and will not be jabbing or excluding anyone with said umbrella) face comphet as a powerful barrier on top of the life-changing menace that is homophobia.
Comphet looks like “Girl ask Boy” dances, any toddler tee that says some creepy “Lady’s Man” type shit. The 1999 cult classic, But I’m a Cheerleader, explores comphet through the dykey hero’s journey of Megan (Natasha Lyonne), as her parents send her to conversion therapy “boot camp”. Megan’s family and friends believe her to be a lesbian, despite Megan’s insistence that she is straight, and in love with her boyfriend.
The “first step” in the camp program is admitting you’re a homosexual. In the “support circle” scene, everyone introduces themselves in the archetypical support group style: “Andre. Actor, dancer, homosexual,”. “I’m Graham, and I like girls. A lot. And I’m a homosexual,”. Megan rebuttals “I’m not like you all. I get good grades, I go to church, I’m a cheerleader!”. In spite of her obsession with girls (her locker is filled with photos of bikini-clad women), Megan firmly believes herself to be straight. She assumes everyone finds women attractive, and doesn’t enjoy kissing their boyfriends, all while certifying straight and “normal” is the only way to be. This piece in particular feels visceral - the conversation around sexual pleasure is largely phallo-centric. While this is changing, there are boundless jokes about women not enjoying sex with men (cc-ing 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon). Comphet also rears its ugly head in the earlier seasons of Glee, where a closeted Santana (Naya Rivera) purports her “relationship” with Britney doesn’t mean anything, because it’s just sexual.
Horny Bubblegum Sapphic Pop
“Good Luck, Babe!” with its jaunty 117 bpm and charging synth, warps this academic concept into (claiming it now!) the song of the summer.
Along with the rest of her discography, it’s thrilling to witness the rise of horny, bubblegum sapphic pop. For so long, queer folks have had to endure languid, lesbian heartache across the mediums. If you were there for TV’s “bury your gays” era, I salute you. Or, “queer-coded” media that is ultimately just quirky straight people and that dreaded dangling carrot known as queer-baiting.
We deserve an era of explicitly queer content. Sure, I’m a simple man, I could get my fix in by scouring Taylor Swift lyrics for evidence of Gay™ until the cows come home. Thankfully, we don’t have to anymore. MUNA, Janelle Monáe, Brittany Howard, Reneé Rapp, boygenius, ROES, and countless more are out here leaving no sapphic stones unturned. Finally, we’re getting mainstream queer music about heartache, first love, drunken flirtation, hookups, the lot. “Good Luck, Babe!” speaks to a very specific heartache; one in which a romantic interest succumbs to compulsory heterosexuality. In a world with thousands of stories where boy gets girl, Roan challenges; girl gets boy, girl has breakdown.
You can say it’s just the way you are
Make a new excuse another stupid reason
Good luck, babe! (Well, good luck!)
You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feelingGood luck, babe! (Well, good luck!)
There’s a cheekiness in the lyrics and instrumentation that really serve the premise. As queer people know all too well, heteropatriarchal expectations can really steal our thunder. “I love you, but I want to have a family one day,” “Of course I love you, but this wasn’t ever serious,”. “I could sleep with a girl, but never marry one.”
Love is love is love until you realize what you actually had was,
Experiments are Experiments are Experiments. :(
This song ultimately feels like one of self love and protection. Walk with me, as we examine the first and second pre-chorus.
(Pre-Chorus One)
I don’t wanna call it off
But you don’t wanna call it love
You only wanna be the one
That I call baby
(Pre-Chorus Two)
Think I’m gonna call it off
Even if you call it love
I just wanna love someone
Who calls me baby!
Ah, the classic lyrical inversion never felt so good as it does when a Gay Woman is standing her ground against a cold-footed situationship. We as a community deserve people who love us without reservation. “Good Luck, Babe!” is so important for telling us that we don’t need to putz around and wait for someone to be ready to love us. Someone else’s comphet is not your pill to swallow, as keen as lesbians are to hold space for one another’s trauma.
Reeling this back into the personal, so as not to toddle around in the theoretical, I spent most of junior high and high school, trying to squash “the feeling”. I held a deeeeeep admiration (I was desperately in love) with a high school friend of mine. We’d hold hands in the hall, play our trumpets in bed together, drive to a mountainous lookout, blasting Dr. Dog out the window. This person was out, and I was desperate for their affection. Their interest and care for me was all the validation I’d needed. I knew it then, I was a down bad lesbian.
You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling
You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling
I started leaving little gay easter eggs about town, hoping they’d inquire. We were tittering, knee-to-knee in a red and silver 50’s diner booth. “Do you think you might be queer?” They were gentle, with a comfortable and empathetic face. I wish I could tell you this story resolved into an erotic, milkshake teen fantasy - clumsily flirting with french fries, and sharing a kiss under the pink fluorescents, but it does not. Despite specifically manifesting this moment, I couldn’t follow through. I pretended to not know what “queer” meant, a memory that still haunts me today. I was too invested in my own comfort, too in lust with the ease of heterosexuality.
When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night
With your head in your hands, you’re nothing more than his wife
And when you think about me, all of those years ago
You’re standing face to face with “I told you so”
You know I hate to say it, I told you so
You know I hate to say it, I told you so
God, she’s ruthless with this bridge! I love that “I told you so” becomes an affirmation of sorts for the narrator. It’s a breakup song after all. One where Chappell Roan is keenly aware, she comes out the winner.
Armed with her drag aesthetic and throaty vocals, “Good Luck, Babe!” serves as the first single since her album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess launched Roan into the mainstream. It is a deeply sad yet celebratory cry for freeing yourself from society’s expectations. Repression is a kind of sick, peer-approved easy answer.
Her audience continues to grow in numbers and passion. And the release of “Good Luck, Babe!” brought her streams up by 52% to a whopping 14.6 million and climbing. Chappell Roan shows us what it looks like to abandon conventions, dancing in a strap-on or as Elizabeth the First— a true Femininomenon.
Ellis Durand is a Brooklyn-based stand up comic, writer, and lil chef.
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Further Reading / Sources
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I was actually humming “Good Luck, Babe!” at work when I saw this pop up - talk about good timing! I really enjoyed reading your analysis 😊