O que tem no carro goes from a stolen microphone to a setlist

On the morning of 18 September, at Cais do Sodré station in Lisbon, a woman walked onto the stage during Bluay's set, took the microphone out of his hand and sang four bars about a supermarket. "O que tem no carro? O Pingo Doce." Production staff and a police officer walked her off a few seconds later. She has since surfaced on Instagram as Stella LS, and says she will tell her own version of it when she is ready. The clip has not stopped moving since.

The gig was RFM Sem Olhar a Quem, the fourth edition, run with the Fundação Ageas, which took over the station from the morning of the 17th until 10:00 on the 18th. It is a programme about cultural accessibility, and not in the abstract: Portuguese Sign Language, audio description, vibration vests, the practical apparatus that lets more people actually be at a concert. Bluay was halfway through Voar. He is a rapper from Casalinho da Ajuda who took Artista Revelação at the PLAY awards, and he is losing his sight, which is the detail almost every account of the past week has led with and the one he has spent years asking people to come to last:

Quero que as pessoas ou a indústria olhem para mim como músico e não como um músico que tem um problema de visão.

I want people, or the industry, to look at me as a musician and not as a musician who has a vision problem. He said that to Bantumen in December 2021. On the night he laughed the interruption off and posted the clip himself.

None of it was arranged. RFM published its own account of how a stranger got that close to a live microphone, and the answer is the oldest one there is: the station assumed she was with Bluay, Bluay's team assumed she was with the station, and for a few seconds nobody moved because everybody thought somebody else had booked her. Bluay had no idea who she was.

Then the musicians got hold of it. David Fonseca, of Silence 4, had a go at it. MARO, who sang Saudade, saudade at Eurovision in 2022, posted a cover captioned "este hit vai directo para a setlist", days before opening a tour that runs from Boston on 24 September to Mexico City on 18 November. LEAPS, a brass band out of Porto, had it arranged for horns and played it in the street. Márcio Beats turned it into a kizomba. Mary N answered with a joke instead of a cover, the setup being artists in the studio recording a hit and the punchline being which hit. And Sofia Fernandes, a Portuguese Sign Language interpreter who signs concerts for a living, put the whole thing into LGP, which took a joke born at an accessibility festival and handed it back to the language that festival was built around.

Pingo Doce took about a day. What it posted was an AI video of its mascot, a white cat, singing the verses in an accent that is not the one in the clip, and it deleted the post not long after. What worked better was the cheap stuff: on TikTok it asked the platform to help it find "a autora deste banger", and captioned the clip "era a fome a falar mais alto". The odd part is that this is a company that knows how to do the other thing. It has paid Cuca Roseta, Milhanas and Fernando Daniel to sing for it at Christmas.

Six musicians answered a supermarket jingle inside a week, in kizomba, brass, pop, sign language and a punchline. The brand it was about answered with a cartoon cat and then took it down. Whatever that moment was worth, the people who did something with it were the ones holding instruments.

The versions

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