"Pink Pony Club" enjoyed largely positive reception amidst the rise of Roan's popularity after the release of its parent album, receiving praise for its musical composition and its story. The song drew commercial success four years after its initial release, charting within the top ten in the charts of Australia, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom, and the United States as well as the top 20 in New Zealand, becoming a sleeper hit as one of Roan's seven simultaneously charting songs on the Billboard Hot 100, along with "Good Luck, Babe!", "Casual", "Hot to Go!", "Red Wine Supernova", "Femininomenon", and "My Kink Is Karma".[1] The track reached its peak of number 9 on this chart following a performance at the 2025 Grammy Awards at which Roan won Best New Artist.
Chappell Roan was inspired to write "Pink Pony Club" after visiting The Abbey, a gay bar in West Hollywood, California, in 2018. Roan, who had recently moved from her hometown of Springfield, Missouri, stated that visiting the bar was "the first time I could truly be myself and not be judged".[2] At the bar, she became enthralled with the performing go-go dancers, stating that seeing them "sparked [something] in me... I want[ed] to be a go-go dancer. So I just wrote a song about it."[3] According to Roan, she had previously struggled with accepting herself in Springfield, stating in Headliner, "I always had such a hard time being myself and felt like I'd be judged for being different or being creative", adding that the bar was "something that I couldn't really have experienced here in Missouri... It was completely eye opening and changed my direction from that point on."[4]
The pop,[5]synth-pop,[6]dance-pop,[7]power pop,[8] and disco[9][10][11] song follows the story of a woman from a small town in Tennessee who moves to Southern California, and experiences freedom dancing in a gay club for the first time[6][12][13] inspired by a local club in Roan's former hometown of Springfield, Missouri, that was in "all hot pink".[14] The woman's mother disapproves upon hearing the news, saying to her daughter, "God, what have you done?"[13] However, despite her mother's opinions, the woman opts to continue, stating that "I'm just having fun", having found in what was described in a Capital Buzz analysis as a "safe space where you feel free to be exactly who you are".[15]
The song was written by Roan and Dan Nigro in two days.[16] Initially, Roan's label at the time, Atlantic Records, tried to dissuade her from releasing the song as the company thought it deviated too much from Roan's past songs, leaving Roan "devastated", making her "second-guess herself".[17] According to Roan, Atlantic Records refused to release the song for a year before they relented.[6] "Pink Pony Club" was officially released on April 3, 2020, as the lead single to Roan's then-upcoming debut album under Atlantic; however, the album was shelved after Roan was dropped from the label that August.[2] In the aftermath of Roan leaving Atlantic, the ownership of the masters for "Pink Pony Club", "Love Me Anyway", and "California" were transferred to Roan. In 2023, "Pink Pony Club" and "California" were included on her completed debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, released via Island Records.[18]
Music video
Along with the song's official release, an accompanying music video directed by Griffin Stoddard was released on the same day.[2] The video features cameos from drag queens Victoria "Porkchop" Parker and Meatball.[19][20] Roan, who was visibly nervous in the music video, stated that she was "absolutely terrified" of her performance during production.[4] The video takes place in "a Midwest dive bar", with Roan, Porkchop, and Meatball performing on the bar's stage[21] to a few leather-clad bikers, eventually turning the bikers into "leather daddies".[13] In an analysis by The Conversation's Jonathan Graffam–O'Meara, it represents "the utopic potentiality of performance" for queer people from "the stultifying and oppressive real world that awaits performers and audiences outside of venues".[21]
Critical reception
Although "Pink Pony Club" did not receive much critical attention upon release, it has received consistent positive reception in the years since. Vulture's Rebecca Alter praised the song in 2021, describing it as a "synthy infectious bangarang... It's a stripper anthem that squeezes itself in perfectly with the likes of 'WAP' and 'Twerkulator,' just with a little bit more of a drama-kid kick."[13] In a review of the song's parent album, Pitchfork's Olivia Horn proclaimed "Pink Pony Club" to be a "bold and uproarious pop project stitched with stories about discovering love, sex, and oneself in a new place."[22] Both The Guardian'sKitty Empire and BBC News' Mark Savage credited the song as Roan's first career hit, with both describing the song as a liberating queer party anthem.[23][24]Paste's Eric Bennett described the song as a "immediately memorable artistic statement", praising the song's chorus.[25] Reflecting on the song's performance as a sleeper hit in Capital Buzz, after her label's negative response to it, and its initial commercial failure due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Roan remarked, "it's like damn bitch, were you wrong? It was the worst time ever to release a gay club song [around the pandemic]. And it still had such an impact."[15]
↑ Horn, Olivia (September 27, 2023). "Chappell Roan: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess". Pitchfork. Retrieved January 9, 2025. The storied West Hollywood gay bar inspired 'Pink Pony Club,' a disco ball-dappled ode to escaping the suburbs for the California nightclubs.
↑ Salles, Vanessa (May 11, 2020). "Chappell Roan". The Daily Shuffle. Archived from the original on November 1, 2024. Retrieved October 29, 2024– via Issuu.
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