As the DNC’s (wrongly) rumored ‘special guest,’ Beyoncé, and pop fandom, stole the show

Odds are, she’ll sing for Kamala Harris at some point.

In January 2013, she performed the national anthem at President Obama’s second inauguration; in November 2016, she sang “Formation” at an 11th-hour rally for Hillary Clinton. And she’s already blessed Harris’ use of her song “Freedom” as a 2024 campaign anthem (and sent Donald Trump a cease-and-desist for using the same tune in a social media video).

Harris even came onstage to a recording of “Freedom” at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, shortly before accepting her party’s nomination for president.

But despite the increasingly fevered assurances that rippled across the internet in the lead-up — including from the expert gossip-mongers at TMZ, who are almost never wrong — the one and only Beyoncé did not show up in the flesh to perform at Chicago’s United Center.

At 7:01 p.m. Pacific — two hours and change after TMZ posted an exclusive claiming the pop superstar would appear at the convention — the Hollywood Reporter quoted Beyoncé’s rep saying that the singer “was never scheduled to be there” and that the “report of a performance is untrue.”

Within minutes, the disappointment washed over social media — which kind of made you feel bad for the pop star who had shown up in Chicago.

Taking the stage with her 13-year-old daughter, Willow, Pink sang a touching acoustic rendition of her song “What About Us,” which is one of those nifty pop tunes that can be about either a broken romantic relationship or (provided you squint just a little) a nation of people demanding better from its leaders.

“What about us?” Pink and her daughter sang, accompanied by an acoustic guitarist and three backing vocalists. “What about all the times you said you had the answers?”

When Willow took a verse on her own, Pink slipped her right arm behind her daughter’s back as though to steady her before the crowd of thousands — a celebrity tasked with a political mission, yes, but also a mom determined to protect her child.

Yet when CNN’s cameras cut to the audience inside the United Center, folks looked listless, as though Pink was merely an opening act to be endured ahead of the promised main event.

And who could blame them?

Beyoncé — oh, you thought I meant the vice president? — is without doubt the most thrilling live entertainer of her generation: a one-woman power plant of vocal and physical talent capable of lighting a place up and burning it down in just a few minutes flat.

So what are we to conclude by the fact that she didn’t show up?

If you’re inclined to give Democrats the benefit of the doubt, you could say the DNC was seeking to avoid overshadowing Harris on her big night — that the party believes enough in her message that it trusted viewers to care more about her than the celebs she attracted.

To be clear, Pink is a major pop figure, a reliable live act who fills stadiums year after year (as indeed she did in October at SoFi Stadium and likely will again next month at Dodger Stadium). But she’s not an object of parasocial obsession like Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, to name another music megastar who defied rumors that she might show up Thursday night.

By booking Pink — as well as the Chicks, who sang a charming (if fairly pitchy) “Star-Spangled Banner” to open the evening’s proceedings — the DNC seemed to be putting faith in the old-fashioned idea that music can serve as a kind of neon light to draw interest to the real matter at hand.

But that’s not how pop fandom of the highest order really works today, when blind obedience to one’s chosen icon supersedes all other considerations. And by allowing speculation to run rampant regarding Beyoncé and Swift, the Democrats showed a crucial misunderstanding of the way music operates in the lives of the voters they’re hoping to target.

Who started the rumors that Beyoncé would perform Thursday night? Who declined to shut them down before they took over the DNC’s real narrative? (After the convention ended, TMZ paraphrased the lyrics of Bey’s “Texas Hold ’Em” on X: “We gotta lay our cards down, down, down … we got this one wrong.”)

As I said, Beyoncé will probably sing for Harris before election day. Hopefully when it happens for real, you won’t feel that much closer to understanding how people get sucked into QAnon.