We’re a day late this week because it was Waitangi Day in Aotearoa, our national day.

On Thursday, I went to Laneway. Amazing day, incredible weather, Chappell Roan rules. One of the recurring conversations all day before Role Model took the stage was, “who’s going to be Sally?”.

Let’s back up quickly for some context.

Role Model (real name: Tucker Pillsbury) released a song called Sally, When The Wine Runs Out in advance of his North American tour. At a certain point in the song on stage each show he cries out “Where’s my Sally tonight?” and someone comes on stage to join him, singing and dancing through the bridge, “Heard through the grapevine, she can be a diva. Cold like Minnesota, hotter than a fever.”

At first, the Sally each night was a fan, plucked from the crowd and thrust into the spotlight. Now, the Sally is inevitably a celebrity. Kate Hudson has been Sally, so has Renee Rapp, Natalie Portman, Hillary Duff. In Auckland on Thursday, our own BENEE was Sally.

Tucker says the whole Sally phenomenon started more or less accidentally, when he invited social media personality Jake Shane on stage.

“We had no plans to do this whole ‘Sally’ thing,” Role Model aka Tucker Pillsbury, tells Teen Vogue. “I knew right before the tour started that Jake Shane was going to be in Dallas at the same time doing the show, so we were like oh we should bring him out. And then online there was this rumor that started that ‘Sally’ was about Jake Shane. So we were like why don’t we just play into this and have a silly Internet moment and do a ‘One Less Lonely Girl’ type of thing and bring back that moment from [Justin] Bieber.”

For those of you too old, or too young to know about the Biebs in his heyday (before he was playing guitar at the Grammy’s in his boxers last week or whatever), when he was 17 he had a song called One Less Lonely Girl. On tour, a fan would be chosen from the audience to come up on stage and be serenaded to the song while sitting awkwardly on a chair.

This was sort of Y/N fiction writ large. You’ve been chosen, out of thousands, elevated. Looking back, it’s impossible not to see how much this was a precursor to stan culture at its most unbalanced: proximity as reward, attention as currency. Plus there was the seething jealousy and resentment — this is an amazing story of how one Lonely Girl became the most hated girl in Singapore.

Bieber’s efforts harked back to Springsteen’s iconic music video for Dancing in the Dark, starring a young unknown Courtney Cox.

Springsteen apparently thought she was a genuine pre-selected fan, though she’d auditioned for the role. What’s wild is how much cultural weight we’ve piled onto that moment since. It worked because it looked spontaneous, because Cox wasn’t famous yet, and because the power imbalance was uninterrogated.

The thing about touring in the current era is that everyone is filming every show and posting it. This produces this curious flattening effect — I’ve written about this before — how we’re all chasing the identical concert experience. The only way to distinguish one show from another is these little viral moments. Who get’s Taylor’s 22 hat? (Usually a child)

Who is getting arrested by Sabrina Carpenter for being too hot? (Always a celebrity) Who’s doing the apple dance during brat summer?

And now, who’s going to be Sally. Rumours danced around Laneway during the day. Some people thought maybe it would be Chappell Roan. Maybe it would be Lorde (who was wandering around delightfully unmolested as an attendee). Justin suggested finance minister Nicola Willis (lol). Even people who didn’t really care about Role Model’s set came back to hear the final song.

What’s interesting about the live Sally phenomenon is that it’s changed over time. When this article was written, the Sally was always a fan. Now Sally is someone famous, it somehow democratises it a little bit. It doesn’t crown a single girl. It multiplies her. Everyone can be Sally; no one is the Sally.

The Apple Dance moment often zeroes in on one person who knows the moves, hits them perfectly, and gets the crowd’s roar. For a few seconds, that fan is the show. But it’s about competence, not desirability. You’re not chosen by the artist so much as recognised by the room, because you understood the assignment.

Pop still wants audience participation, but it’s moved away from desire and toward play — which seems so much more fun.

more good stuff

• it’s Winter Olympics time and can we talk for a moment about how the Haitian uniforms absolutely pop off?! Even if (especially because) the IOC hates them.

• Brandy Zadrozny’s reporting on conspiracism is always a must read, but this is especially interesting. How the conspiracies around Charlie Kirk’s death are affecting the trial.

• last year I wrote about my love of maps and all the little mapping projects that keep bouncing around my head, so this is extremely my jam - a tool to make beautiful minimalist maps for posters.

finally, in my lego city

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