I know what you’re thinking: “Chappell Roan may be good, but is her music so good that it’s capable of qualifying as a full-on medical request?” That’s a debate we can go back and forth on forever, so instead, allow me to enlighten you on a few key details before this misinterpretation gets out of control.
When TikTok‘s @eggomusic recently went to the hospital for an MRI, she was given the option to request some music while undergoing the scan, as MRI machines are loud and this is apparently one of those fabled “fun hospitals.” Egg, ever the maverick, elected to queue up some Chappell Roan for the 25-minute ordeal, and relayed her request to the staff as such.
Imagine Egg’s unprecedented horror, then, when it became apparent that the staff misheard her, and gave her a pair of headphones that was blaring an artist named Chaperone instead of Chappell Roan. For those of you wondering what the big deal is, Chaperone’s song titles include the likes of “sky blue above the gang violent motion,” “morose vandal the white-out memorial,” and, I s*** you not, “anxiety interlude.” And really, the song titles are all you need to telegraph the strikingly ominous, ambient hellscape that made its home in Egg’s head for 25 whole minutes.
Egg originally posted this on Aug. 13, and notes in the video that Chaperone has 143 monthly listeners on Spotify. It is Sept. 3 at the time of writing, and Chaperone’s monthly listeners have since shot up to 19,331. Chaperone himself also began an AMA in in TikTok’s comments section and named “anxiety, malaise, serenity, asceticism, and the rage to punch a cop in the f****n’ face” as the emotions he hopes to inspire with his music (which, for all we know, are the exact emotions that comprise the most undiluted MRIcore out there).
Salutations to Chaperone for racking up their listener count in a rather unorthodox way, but there’s still one detail that doesn’t add up: How might a pair of headphones even work in an MRI machine? After all, according to Yale Medicine, there are a great many metals that don’t interact well with an MRI machine, including pacemakers, braces, bullets lodged in the skin, surgical plates, piercings, aneurysm clips, and even tattoos made from metal-based inks. There are ways to accommodate patients with such add-ons, to be sure, but how did a pair of headphones cooperate with the MRI machine when so many other things don’t?
Well, if the MRI machine happened to catch an earful of Chaperone’s music, maybe it was just too intimidated to try and mess with the headphones. Yeah, let’s go with that.