Singer Chappell Roan performs in Gothenburg, Sweden, last week. Her new song The Subway premiered at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 this week.ADAM IHSE/TT/AFP/Getty Images
Chappell Roan’s new single The Subway had been hidden in plain sight for months before its release last month – so when it finally dropped, the team at Tourism Saskatchewan was ready to rise to the occasion. Why? Because she name-checked the Prairie province.
The American pop star had performed the song live and had teased it in conversations with both Saturday Night Live’s Bowen Yang and the viral Vancouver interviewer Nardwuar the Human Serviette. So within a day of the The Subway hitting streaming services – bearing the line “I’m movin’ to Saskatchewan” – the province’s tourism agency had listed a whole package of Roan-themed activities high up on its website, correctly anticipating a surge in interest from around the world.
Fans of her song Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl were welcomed to Saskatoon’s Remai Modern museum. Those seeking a Red Wine Supernova, the website suggested, could watch the stars at the Dark Sky Preserve at Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park. And for anyone dreaming of dancing at the Pink Pony Club, the tourism agency recommended Manitou Beach’s Danceland Ballroom.
“Roan’s whole ‘Midwest Princess’ persona subverts traditional rural expectations, something Saskatchewan knows a little something about,” the agency wrote on its website.
It’s too early to know whether Roan’s fans are flocking to Saskatchewan. But they are definitely interested. Tourism Saskatchewan chief executive Jonathan Potts said social-media mentions of people toying with moving to Saskatchewan (likely quoting the lyric), have jumped 1,700 per cent. Total interactions with the tourism group’s own social media went up 1,800 per cent, Potts said, with nearly a million worldwide social impressions based on the song.
“It’s not every day that one of the most popular performers in the world is name-checking Saskatchewan,” Potts said.
Premier Scott Moe was even more reactive during an appearance on a local radio show, encouraging Roan to visit the province. He wasn’t available for an interview to discuss the singer, but the Saskatchewan government sent a statement attributed to Alana Ross, the Minister of Parks, Culture and Sport: “It’s always exciting to see our province reflected both in popular culture, and on the global stage,” she said. “If Ms. Roan decides she would like to perform in our province, we would certainly welcome the opportunity.”
Across the aisle, the NDP’s Nathaniel Teed, Saskatchewan’s first openly gay MLA, went a step further. He sent a letter to Roan’s booking agency encouraging her to perform in the province. He name-dropped former resident Joni Mitchell, who’s also elevated Saskatchewan in song, while decrying the Moe government’s law requiring parental consent for children under 16 to change their names or pronouns at school. (An appeals court just found that the legislation can face a judicial review.)
“Our vision is a collaboration with Chappell that offers an unapologetic middle finger to bigotry and signals to queer and trans people across this province – especially youth – that they are not alone,” Teed wrote.
When Roan discussed the then-unreleased song with Nardwuar last year, she said she’d been looking at venues in the province. “I owe it to them. I can’t sing a song about Saskatchewan and not go there and play a show,” she said. (Asked whether her team was making any headway, a publicist for Roan said she wasn’t available for interviews.)
The Subway is already one of the world’s most popular songs, premiering at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 this week. Roan is at the peak of a career built on songs that are alternatingly sexually liberating and self-deprecating; in doing so, she speaks the language of the least toxic, most fun parts of the modern internet.
Going viral wasn’t a thing when Lou Reed mispronounced Saskatchewan in 1979’s Stupid Man – not that the Velvet Underground alumni would have cared. Nor was it when the Proclaimers paid greater respect to its pronunciation nine years later on Cap in Hand: “I can say Saskatchewan without starting to stutter.”
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Among Canadians, the province has played a role in songs by artists including Mitchell, Stompin’ Tom Connors, the Rheostatics, the Guess Who and Joel Plaskett.
Less generously, but perhaps more frequently, Canadian jurisdictions appear in song as convenient rhyme-completion placeholders. “From Chicago to Toronto / she’s the one that they call ol’ Whatsername,” Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong sang on She’s a Rebel in 2004. Two years later, Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard sang, “You and me have seen everything to see / from Bangkok to Calgary,” on I Will Follow You Into the Dark.
But none of those caused the stir that Lil Pump’s Gucci Gang did in 2017, when a Westjet vice-president had to race across a company Christmas party to ask the DJ to change the track before guests heard the novelty rapper shout an expletive at the airline in the viral song.
