Her kink is… country?
Chappell Roan went from the “Pink Pony Club” to the country club on “Saturday Night Live,” surprising fans by going country in both look and sound for her second number of the show, the premiere of a brand new song that marries C&W with LGBTQ+.
“I get the job done,” Roan sang in the refrain of the new song, which shares a theme with “Femininomenon” in making the argument that pleasing a woman is sometimes (or always?) a job best left to a fellow woman.
“All you country boys saying you know how to threat a woman right,” Roan said during a spoken word aside in the song — “Well, only a woman knows how to treat a woman right. She gets the job done.”
For this second appearance late in the show, Roan was still wearing the large red wig with white streaks that marked her initial look, when she performed her signature song “Pink Pony Club” earlier. Apart from that, everything was different, all the way to Roan’s background singers and all-female band having switched to old-school denim and plaid shirts, while Roan reappeared in a halter top, short-shorts and boots that could have been right out of “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
Except dukes didn’t have much to do with it: Roan was distinctly celebrating the duchesses of Hazzard, with moderately risque lyrics about partners who give and receive and the assurance that “it’s just in my nature to take it like a taker” and “you don’t need to hurry.”
Cartoon bears and other animated forest animals looked on as Roan’s suddenly fiddle-powered band drove the country banger home.
Roan did not immediately announce or post an official title for the new song, which from the sound of it is likely to be either “I Get the Job Done” or “She Gets the Job Done.”
This past week, Roan posted a photo of herself with the album cover of her debut album and suggested in the caption that it was about to be supplanted by a new one, though no hint of a timetable for recording or release was offered.
Earlier on “SNL,” Roan performed “Pink Pony Club” and went off-mic for the final pre-chorus so that the studio audience could sing it on her behalf. Perhaps the show’s audio technicians turned the ambient sound up more than normal, but it sounded as if the entire audience might consist of die-hard Roan fans, judging from the volume of the sing-along coming through television sets.
Roan’s performance was 13 years in the making, or at least the dreaming. On her social media earlier in the week, she posted a screenshot of a Facebook post she made in April 2011, under her pre-stage name, Kayleigh Amstutz, which read: “I am determined to be on SNL.”
Roan’s new song is not the first lesbian country song, of course. Among them is the Highwomen’s “If She Ever Leaves Me,” and points of comparison in this burgeoning subgenre could come up as a topic of conversation when Brandi Carlile moderates a discussion with Roan and her producer Dan Nigro in Los Angeles this week.
