Role Model, a.k.a. Tucker Pillsbury, is a performer and an excellent singer. There's no denying that.
But after seeing him at Red Rocks, I can't stop asking myself two questions. What's the right amount of performance to expect from a pop star? And is there a gender gap in what we expect from a concert?
What I walked into
I knew what I was getting into. I've seen the TikToks and the highlight reels, and I knew there would be a lot of hip grinding. That's the reputation, and he delivers on it.
What surprised me was how little was around him. The set was incredibly bare bones: some chalk writing on the stage, good lighting, and not much else. No elaborate set pieces, no video wall doing the heavy lifting, no story being told around him. Then he walked out and had the entire amphitheater watching his every move.
The crowd reaction was the part I keep coming back to. Girls screamed at every slow roll of the hips and practically shrank when he made a move. It was incredible to be part of, and I say that as someone who genuinely loves his music. But I'm also not fully bought into that side of the fandom, so I spent part of the night watching the room as much as the stage.
The local band standard
I should say where I'm coming from. I haven't been to many big concerts lately. Most of what I see is local bands, and the expectations there are pretty simple: put on a good show, be a performer, be tight, keep your shit together, and have fun. If you're up there with a bare stage, you'd better earn it, because there's nothing else to look at.
So part of me walked in holding Role Model to that same standard. Is a bare stage enough when you're an internationally known pop star? Or does someone at that level owe the crowd more than showing up, looking good, and letting the room do the rest?
The other side of the pop world
That question gets sharper when I look at what women at the same level are doing right now.
Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift are putting on shows that are closer to theater than to concerts. There are costume changes, narrative arcs, and staging that turns a setlist into a story. Lily Allen, who also played Red Rocks recently, brought her own version of that. It's almost like watching a Broadway play with a band.
Set those next to chalk on a stage and good lighting, and the gap is hard to ignore. Women in pop seem to be expected to build a whole world around the music, while a male pop star can stand in the middle of a mostly empty stage and have it read as effortlessly cool.
That was my first instinct: he was doing the bare minimum, and women are held to a much higher standard. And if that's true, it raises another question. Have the expectations for women gotten out of hand? Are elaborate productions something artists want to make, or something they now have to make to be taken seriously as headliners?
Where my theory falls apart
The problem is that the pattern doesn't hold up. Women are putting on very bare-bones shows too. Lorde and Charli XCX have both built their live reputations on stripped-down, low-frills performances, and nobody accuses them of coasting. Minimal production isn't a male thing, and it isn't automatically lazy. Sometimes it's a deliberate choice, and sometimes it works better than any set piece could.
So the simple version of my argument, that men get away with less, doesn't work. The gap in production levels is real, but it doesn't line up neatly along gender lines.
So why did it leave me cold?
That leaves me with the question I started with. If the bare-bones set wasn't the problem, why was I so turned off?
Here's my best guess so far. Maybe it isn't about how much was on the stage but what the show was built on. When a performance leans almost entirely on the body and the crowd's reaction to it, the audience is doing a lot of the work. It's a different kind of show than one built on songs, storytelling, or spectacle. And there's something to notice about a crowd of women screaming at a man's physicality. It's a flip of the gaze we usually talk about, and I'm not sure how I feel about it, or whether my discomfort is about him, the crowd, or me.
There's also the double standard I can't quite shake. If a woman had walked out onto that same bare stage and relied mostly on her body to hold the room, would she have gotten the same reception? Would I have had the same reaction? I don't think the answer is obvious, and I don't think it's a comfortable one.
I don't have a clean conclusion. Role Model is a performer, and the crowd's reaction proves it. But "performer" can mean a lot of things, and I'm still figuring out which one I want from a night like that. If you were there, I'd love to know what you thought. Did it work for you, or did you leave with the same question I did?
