YEAR OF LIVING FAMOUSLY
Yes, sure, you read some good books during lockdown. You got out on your bike and your sourdough game was fine. But you didn’t do what Benee did.
In a year she was meant to spend on planes and in fancy hotels, the singer, like almost all of us, stayed home. But from her bedroom in Auckland’s Grey Lynn, 20-year-old Stella Bennett did innumerable Zoom interviews, appeared remotely on Ellen, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and The Tonight Show with Stephen Colbert – and racked up a staggering two billion plays of her songs on streaming services.
The majority of those were for, a sad, goofy, catchy song about breaking up with her boyfriend that became a global lockdown anthem after an endorsement from Elton John. On TikTok, views of user-created videos using the song – often with such hashtags as #coronavirus, #quarantine and #happyathome – are nearing 10 billion. What could have been a crushing blow to a new artist’s trajectory somehow became a triumph that could only have happened in 2020.
