Every time a new “pop girl” comes to the fore, it seems that their primary influence—whether in aesthetics or lyrical content—is Lana Del Rey. Indeed, it’s no wonder Billie Eilish “jokingly” told the audience during her onstage appearance with Del Rey at Coachella 2024, “This is the reason for half you bitches’ existence. Including mine.” And maybe even Chappell Roan’s, whose own meteoric rise to fame (à la Eilish circa 2019) in the past year has positioned her as “the one to watch.”
Yet it wasn’t her 2023 debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, that transformed her into an international phenomenon, but rather, a single that came out in the year that followed: “Good Luck, Babe!” And it was because of said single putting her at the top of the charts that the formerly casual listeners started discovering her so-called back catalogue, the crux of which was released the year before. But it was “Pink Pony Club” in particular that started to resonate with audiences, eventually leading the track to tie “Good Luck, Babe!” for Roan’s highest-charting single. Further evidence that, in a post-TikTok world, everything that’s old can be made new again.
As such, with renewed interest in the song, suddenly people became aware of the video, released back in 2020 when the single itself first came out (as Roan mentioned, it was a case of bad timing, since no one [apart from the privileged and the rule-flouting] was going out to the club during the lockdowns of pandemic, and only Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia seemed to be acceptable dance music to absorb in the “at home” space). Directed by Griffin Stoddard (who also directed “Good Hurt” from the School Nights EP), the simplicity of the concept still manages to find common ground with Lana Del Rey’s more grandiose “Ride” video. Or rather, “short film.” For, at ten minutes and nine seconds, Del Rey (not to mention director Anthony Mandler) has plenty of screen time to create a thorough narrative centered around her lust and love of older biker daddies.
While Roan might not have been able to expand the “Pink Pony Club” universe outside the confines of the bar they shot the video in, the overall impression is still the same: Roan finding her “people” amid the leather-clad and bad daddies. Of course, in Roan’s case, the setting is far less butch. Though, at first, the clientele does have the look of being decidedly hetero. Indeed, it isn’t really until Victoria “Porkchop” Parker (with fellow drag queen Meatball, too, eventually making a cameo) appears on the stage to pantomime like she’s actually playing the electric guitar solo that the setting starts to shift toward a more queer-centric one. And yes, by the end, the entire bar has transformed into a sea of leather daddies of the homo ilk. Something that Del Rey, in all her uber straightness (shit, even Taylor Swift has more queer sensibilities), would never be turned on by. Hence, keeping it strictly hetero in all of her videos, but most especially “Ride.”
Even so, both Roan and Del Rey are essentially saying the same thing: that they feel freer and more accepted amid the strangers they’ve found in their proverbial “home away from home” (as Del Rey says during the monologue before the song starts, “…there’s no use in talking to people who have a home. They have no idea what it’s like to seek safety in other people. For home to be wherever you lie your head”). For Del Rey, that’s the open road on the back of some rando old guy’s motorcycle; for Roan, that’s the gay clubs she became privy to once she arrived in L.A. (though being inspired by The Abbey to write this song hardly speaks highly of Roan’s “street cred” as a gay/gay ally). Or, as Roan puts it, “Every night’s another reason why I left it all.” The main reason being: to be free, truly “unbridled” (a pony pun had to be made). A feeling Del Rey also acknowledges in the “Ride” monologue when she says she has “a fire for every experience and an obsession for freedom that terrified me to the point that I couldn’t even talk about it.” But then, of course, she definitely starts talking about it throughout the song.
In the video for “Pink Pony Club,” that reason for leaving it all—apart from liberty—is to dance with such abandon—ultimately leading her off the stage and among the hoi polloi seated throughout the bar—that one man even decides to offer her a dollar to complement her stripper-esque stylings (another Del Rey trope highlighted in Tropico, another short film she released not long after “Ride”). By the final moments of the video, Roan has been fully embraced by every creed and gender in the bar, looking visibly more secure with herself as she’s lifted into the air by her gay brethren. Del Rey might have a far less platonic and age-appropriate stance in “Ride,” but the parallel is, nonetheless, still there. Complete with the reverence for the “off-the-beaten-path” dive bars that both women so closely align with “true Americana.” Not to mention singing in sparsely populated places like these, with each one playing the role of a singer in these videos (hence, “working late”). To be sure, Roan could certainly relate, pre-2024, to Del Rey’s monologue musing, “I was a singer, not a very popular one.”
Considering that Roan once said, without hesitation, “Lana” when asked, “Were you ever a fangirl?” by Drew Afualo of The Comment Section, it wouldn’t be surprising if “Ride” had crept into her subconscious for the “Pink Pony Club” video. Maybe “Ride” was even the song she’s referring to when she says, “When I sing that Lana song, it makes you cry” on “Naked in Manhattan.”
With Sabrina Carpenter’s recent “Manchild” video, too, being clearly influenced by “Ride” (in addition to, of course, the song itself being influenced by the lyrics of “Norman Fucking Rockwell”), it’s increasingly obvious that the next generation of songstresses have all proven Billie Eilish’s abovementioned statement to be accurate.
Even so, Roan took the opportunity to more glaringly queer-ify her rendition of the single when she performed it at the 2025 Grammys, complete with a greater amount of literalism in the form of a giant pink pony positioned at center stage. In other words, Roan, too, just rides.
