TopicPosted on 01/07/2017 at 10:00:04January 7, 2017 editorial: comments
Smoke and Mirrors
Happy New Year! I hope yours was a lot happier than Mariah Carey's. In case you hadn’t heard, she had a bit of a meltdown during an appearance on the New Year's Rockin' Eve telecast. You could tell that something wasn't right through her first couple of songs, and by the third, her lips were so out of sync with the vocals it looked like a badly dubbed movie.
Apparently there was something wrong with her monitor mix, and partway through the third song she gave up in frustration, and stopped even pretending to sing. Meanwhile, her recorded lead vocal played on.
In an account of the Carey incident in the New Yorker, a network executive is quoted as saying that it’s considered “safer” to lip-sync for a TV appearance than to actually sing. I’m sorry, to me, that’s cheating. If you lip sync to a recording, it’s not a performance, it's smoke and mirrors.
Lip-syncing seems to be particularly common in the pop world. My theory is that if you see dancers on the stage behind the singer, there’s a good likelihood that the vocal is lip-synced. Why? Because it’s an indication that the artist considers the spectacle more important than the music.
Carey, or her management, perhaps, clearly decided it wasn’t worth the risk for her to actually sing on the telecast—they thought the safer route was to fake it. But, as it turned out, the opposite was true. A couple of flat or sharp notes wouldn’t have been nearly as embarrassing as what transpired on that Times Square stage.
I have more respect for a singer like Adele, who was at least trying to sing at last year’s Grammys, in what turned out to be a disastrously pitchy performance—also due in part to technical issues in her monitoring system. While I’ll admit to feeling a bit of schadenfreude from seeing somebody at that level mess up like that, at least she was actually singing. For Carey, I have no such sympathy. She was faking it, and she got busted.
Next time, Mariah, try singing. You might even enjoy it more—and the audience certainly will. Oh, and lose the dancers.
The worst of course is that she was such a great artist before falling prey to the "I've-got-boobs" showbiz syndrome.
I was a big fan of hers. Boy, she could sing!
In Europe, at least during the later 1980's, it was almost forbidden for "pop stars" to sing live, in most public situations. I remember with a smile one of my experiences of lip-syncing in front of a few thousand people at La Bastille in Paris. The very wonderful French actor and human being Richard Berry was the master of ceremonies and the whole thing was superbly organized (with a bar and bar girl there just before you went on stage - for a little "shot of courage")… I was doing fine singing along with the playback to my hit song of the moment, CITY LIGHTS, when suddenly the mic just disconnected itself from the cable and fell, silently, to the stage floor. So, there I was, and for the few seconds it took for a sound man to get me connected again while my recorded voice continued singing the song, all I could do was smile and shrug my shoulders. The public was kind. I got off easy. Apparently, that wasn't the case for Mariah Carey.
Anyway, I'm a firm believer in "back to basics" - with my acoustic guitar, my real voice, and all the LOVE I can put into the two of them.
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