On the recent Nottingham stop of her tour, Lily Allen picked actress and comedian Selina Mosinsinski—better known by the name of her web series character, Charity Shop Sue—to be Madeline. In case you don’t know what any of that means: Lily’s Allen’s 2025 album West End Girl is a confessional pop concept record detailing the downfall of Allen’s marriage to actor David Harbour; “Madeline” is a song on the record about a woman with whom Harbour allegedly had an affair; “being” “Madeline” ostensibly means dancing, posing, miming, pulling faces, etc. under a spotlight while Allen sings. During her Saturday Night Live performance last fall, actress Dakota Johnson appeared as Madeline, reciting the song’s lengthy spoken-word passages while obscured by a curtain and emerging at the end to reveal herself as the titular other woman. My immediate thought while watching was, “This is gonna become one of those concert cameo gimmicks, isn’t it?”
You know the phenomenon I’m talking about: when a specific moment in a specific song by a pop star becomes the designated celebrity guest spot in their live show. Each night, a couple bars of a song are used to showcase a different famous person—and to let the crowd know to pull out their phones for this one-night-only appearance from whoever’s turn it is to be stunt-cast in a non-singing, non-speaking walk-on role that tends to entail little more than appearing onstage or on a jumbotron for a few seconds. The celebrity concert cameo has become a go-to way to generate viral moments from an artist’s tour. Each night, audiences—by which I mean both the people attending and the people who’ll be watching the footage from the show online later—can look forward to the appearance of a surprise guest. These appearances can be easily compiled into reels showcasing, for example, everyone who’s played Role Model’s “Sally,” from Kate Hudson to Reneé Rapp to The Dare to Al Roker (yes, really).
With the rise in popularity of short-form video content in general, musicians have been incentivized to optimize their music for viral, clippable moments. Certain songs (or more often, parts of songs) lend themselves easily to lip-syncs or bite-sized skits that can be replicated via TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. In addition to tapping into the viral potential of their songs through social media content, there’s also a push to build these digitally marketable moments into live performances so those too can be fuel for content—made by fans and marketing teams alike—creating a feedback loop in which viral videos entice fans to come see these moments in-person and maybe even help continue the trend themselves.
One of the most famous instances of the celebrity concert cameo spawned from a fan-made TikTok trend. Internet personality Kelley Heyer created a dance to the bridge of Charli XCX’s song “Apple,” which went viral on TikTok during the summer and fall of 2024 and led to Charli incorporating it into her shows during the Brat tour. Each night, just before Charli got to the bridge of “Apple,” the camera would pan to “the ‘Apple’ dancer(s).” Usually, this would be a celebrity (or two, or three) who Charli’s publicly associated with: models like Gabriette, Alex Cosani, and Quenlin Blackwell, who’d all appeared in Charli’s “360” music video; Bowen Yang, who’d played Charli in a couple SNL sketches; and even Charli’s husband, drummer-producer George Daniel.
The influence of the clip-economy on live music certainly isn’t new, and neither is the trend of pop stars spotlighting a fan during their concerts. I was in middle school when Justin Bieber’s “One Less Lonely Girl” was topping the charts and thousands of girls would scream and sob to be brought onstage and sung to, and I remember the discourse stirred up by Matty Healy kissing his fans onstage (and eating raw meat, but that’s a different thinkpiece). In an even cringier trend, pop singer Sombr has a segment in his live shows called “The Sombr Dating Show,” in which he picks a fan to come onstage and call one of their exes on speakerphone. Pinkpantheress will often bring a fan onstage to dance with her during “Romeo,” but the guest star is usually just that—a fan, not a fellow celebrity engaging in a publicity stunt (she did, however, showcase the now-Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani during her rendition of “True Romance” in Brooklyn last fall). Sometimes, a moment of viral audience participation doesn’t require the singling out of an audience member at all. For example, the “Mute Challenge,” started by Beyoncé during her Renaissance tour: when Beyoncé sings the line “everybody on mute” in the song “ENERGY,” that’s her signal for the crowd to fall silent until the music starts up again. Artists like Cardi B and Olivia Rodrigo have since incorporated a similar moment into their sets.
These moments still hinge primarily on star-to-fan interaction and an element of wish-fulfillment. With the celebrity concert cameo, the point is a sort of star-to-star moment of cross-promotion and audience-triangulation: raising the status of both already-famous people onstage and letting the audience live vicariously through them. Watching an actor or influencer dance onstage with your favorite popstar, you—the fan—can imagine what it’d be like for you to be playing Sally to Role Model or Madeline to Lily Allen or getting arrested by Sabrina Carpenter in her Bachelorette Party-esque “Juno” intro (Carpenter is perhaps one of the most successful players in the concert-clipping game, having gone viral for her cheeky, location-specific “Nonsense” outros and for her raunchy and frequently controversy-generating acting out of various sexual positions during the “Have you ever tried this one?” part of the aforementioned “Juno”).
I’m obviously not the first and won’t be the last to talk about the negative effects that short-form video content has had on live music in recent years. Many musicians have grown frustrated with the way hyper-onlineness has caused a disconnect between them and their fans during live shows, with concertgoers treating the performer more like an image on their screen and less like an actual human being in the same room as them. Steve Lacy smashed a fan’s phone after they threw it onstage (he later apologized for this) and voiced his frustration about fans capitalizing on live renditions of his hits for video content. Mitski—who, like Lacy, has had her fair share of viral TikTok songs—momentarily returned from her indefinite social media hiatus to express her discomfort with excessive phone usage at her concerts. Jack White—famously a borderline Luddite who got his first cellphone just last year at the age of 50—has been known to enforce a no-phones rule at his concerts. As part of his Don’t Tap The Glass album cycle, Tyler The Creator hosted phone-free listening parties and urged listeners to, as the saying goes, “dance like nobody’s watching” (“dance like nobody’s filming an Instagram Reel,” to get even more specific).
Beyond being another facet of fans, artists, and marketing teams farming concerts for content, the live celebrity cameo feels symptomatic of the broader Avengers-ification of pop culture. Must everything be a reference, an Easter Egg, or a multiverse? Shouldn’t we want more from our entertainment than just two famous people standing next to each other? Famous people stand next to each other literally all the time! A singer bringing another singer onstage to perform a duet is one thing. But really, what is the value in just seeing a celebrity guest walk across the stage, wave to the crowd, hug the star, and leave?
Maybe the apple’s not rotten right to the core. Some of these trends were cute, fun additions to live shows when they felt spontaneous, and when the artists in question knew not to repeat the gimmick until it got played out and predictable (there’s a reason Sabrina Carpenter retired the “Nonsense” outro bit, even if that reason was just that she could only come up with so many locality-based innuendos). Now when I see these stunts, they come across as blatant bandwagon-hopping, stars (and/or their teams of digital content strategists) trying to reverse-engineer virality. It’s easy to phone a famous friend for a 30-second clip that’s otherwise virtually identical to all the other 30-second clips of other celebrities dancing to the same song. It’s harder to create a truly memorable live performance. Sorry Sally, the wine’s run out.
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
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