By Clovis Westlund
“I promise to tell the truth,” Maggie Rogers whispers through blown-out speakers.
It’s 21 degrees outside the art deco doors of the Aragon Ballroom in Uptown Chicago. Inside, it’s a mixed bag for a Friday night. A dad in sequins speaks of intergenerational interests and margaritas behind me in the coat-check. The voter registration booth sits idle and boyfriends stand hunched over beers. I’m asked if this is my first one during Del Water Gap’s opening set and hear stories of her 2019 show. We glare at the 6’4’’ man in flannel moving his way to the front of the crowd.
Our talk stops at the sight of clouds and wheat projected behind the drum set. We hold our breath at the sound of Maggie Rogers’ promise, only to breathe again when her bleached pixie cut turns the corner. She takes in our screams among boxes of white peonies tucked in every crevice of the stage, basking in the energy she’s inspired.
We know her promise, and have come to witness it ourselves. Her music is pop with an electronic physicality and folk simplicity, her message found between soft refrains and freedom-soaked belts. She promises truth, and this promise is her power. At $100 a ticket, we pay to trust the face plastered all over Surrender, the 2022 album she now performs across America with the Feral Joy Tour. Tonight, her face is framed by a blonde ring of hair, a halo of her own making.
My friend, who saw her in Boston the week before, gives me a one-word review: sexy.
Her brand of high-gloss ferality touches a suppression we self-impose. We restrain for business casual, for mothers, for until you find another job or move out. Maggie sings to our squirming and her promise permits us to scratch freely. A couple’s embrace turns erotic next to me. A woman holds a Liquid Death between the crook of her arm and ribcage to wipe away her running eyeliner. Another neighbor checks the set list each time the lights dim, ensuring not one song is skipped. Maggie’s words and movements impact us spectators, creating something both precious and pressing.
While shuffling out the venue doors and waiting on the train platform, there is mention of cult followings and scalpers. A group in Maggie’s “want want” tees huddle together in the chill. One girl in patchwork bell bottoms carries a sign at her side reading, “treat people with kindness – any extra tickets?”.
As the other concert goers get off at their stops, I’m left in a near-empty train car heading south to the couch of a sister of a friend. I ask what compelled me to buy that concert ticket, that plane ticket, those Ventra cards, and these boots for walking a city known for its frigid winds.
How do we explain why another speaks for us better than ourselves—how do we make sense of a cowbird egg in a robin’s nest?
For me, Maggie is a sort of modern pop oracle. She is a truth-sayer in her brand and a foreteller in her impact. In past iterations, she spoke for gods by interpreting bird flight patterns and shifts in the wind, and with neither the king’s scepter or the queen’s incisive whisper, she lived by the tact of her words.
Nowadays, the oracle speaks with lyric, rhythm, and rhyme; with lead singles and album art; with performances at NPR and the Bowery Ballroom. She has abandoned the holy and turned towards the populist. She focuses on the drives we all possess, our obsession with escape, and offers us a twelve-track respite from our nine-to-five pressures. For about 46 minutes, her words block the demeaning forces we inflict on each other.
In “Anywhere With You”, under flashing yellow overhead lights, Maggie sings of losing your mind, packing up your shit, and letting the miles make up for the things you lack.
Her world is made up of you’s, me’s, and want’s. She welcomes you into the narcissism of feelings and pop music, telling you the guiding force is found inside. To her, life is pointless without this inward truth and its outward presentation.
In Maggie’s 2016 breakout single “Alaska”, she walks off you and walks off an old her.
Just as she did this February night, she will likely perform “Alaska” at every show until her prophecies lose their appeal. Cutting your hair, shifting within, and moving on is universally relatable—but not so much the $6,000 wilderness retreat that bore this song, or the viral moment of Pharrell Williams’ praising the record. Her populism weakens with knowledge of her elite New England boarding school and privileged access to the music industry.
Yet, we consent to the willful construction of her authenticity. Her peonies grow from boxes, not the ground. The clouds projected behind Maggie during “Begging for Rain” crackle with a lens filter.
Perhaps we believe the oracle’s stories because they are perpetually beautiful. The Aragon Ballroom could swallow other artists whole. Despite a galaxy ceiling with a misleading depth, swirls of blues and violets, and embedded lights imitating stars, as well as Moorish turrets and balconies surrounding the main floor, Maggie’s white shimmer dress and ripped tights dominate. The Aragon Ballroom’s decor is whimsy for the eyes, but her performance is an illusion for the mind. Maggie is a performer, undeniably, and a vocalist, unexpectedly. Even as the lights shift upwards, projecting her shadowed silhouette and revealing the ceiling’s tricks, Maggie just becomes more palpable.
That is not to say we, the audience, are powerless to her promise.
Just as the oracle exists apart from the dealings of the king’s advisors and clergy, Maggie’s music is strongest when apolitical. The success of her message is measured in its resonance and popular interpretation, and neither metrics plot well along partisan lines. There is no space for party divides or differences in her words of you, me, and “want wants”.
Maggie ends her concert with “A Different Kind of World,” prefacing with the story of its birth, her frustrations with the state of the world, the pandemic, and general disconnectedness. She toes the line. The crowd is unsure, and their muted reaction shows it. There are more aw’s than hollers. More sentiment than agreement.
When the oracle clears her throat, we listen, but only when her words reflect us. She is strongest in two-dimensions, a projection for our hurt. Her words cheapen in the jump from the personal to the political.
Maggie’s power limits her—she has access to emotions that reports of tragedy can’t touch, but is banned from issues larger than that of you and me. She is a product of a compartmentalization necessary to our day-to-day self-preservation. She gets our money and our streams, but not our ears, not all the time.
But, in fact, are creative expression and politics ever really divorced? There is a long history of protest art and creativity as a means of unpacking oppression and working towards liberation. Many believe all art is born of and lives within political contexts. Even Maggie’s songs of sentiment are political expressions themselves. For her largely-white, largely-middle to upper-middle class, and young audience, she is a pop oracle simultaneously answering questions of coming-of-age and relieving us from confronting the faults present in our inherited institutions. Maggie’s insular journeys momentarily distance us from the concerns of the world, unburdening us with concerns of the self, for better or worse.
Surely, the limits of her reach don’t evade her. Her album, Surrender, shares its name with her master’s thesis, exploring power and communal gatherings in pop culture. Maybe there is power in the communion formed around words of escape—I have experienced this myself, but never for long. Its shaky foundations always catch up to me.
That weekend in Chicago, Maggie’s image stayed with me. As I stood before Nighthawks and walked around a college I didn’t apply to, pictures of peonies in boxes and thunderstorms in black-and-white moved through my mind.
The spell would last until Sunday when walking through Grant Park away from the lakefront. I saw a weighted object on my left rolling towards Michigan Avenue. Closer, I recognized a dried hydrangea flower interwoven with dirtied synthetic blonde hair, the strands constricting and tying together the thin veined petals. Its wet weight made its roll slow and inconsistent.
The blonde hair might be remnants from Maggie’s bleach halo, and this hydrangea could have been one of many discarded by the tour manager when designing the stage hours before the show. I thought of authenticity, escape, and what led me to this city the weekend before midterms. That Sunday night, she sang to Milwaukee and a group of similarly grasping onlookers. Another 1,500 tickets, more boyfriends with beer and flannel, more talk of which next-door bars to hit up after, and maybe another dad in sequins.
To this crowd, she would again promise to tell the truth. The oracle’s promise, some truth, and our trust.
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