John Pareless at NYT has a useful take on the Mariah Carey debacle last night on the ABC Ball Drop-Show. Our family did our usual 30 minute interrupt of our TV binge to watch the show, go to the bathroom, and call/text family and friends. We saw her set, wondered what we were seeing, and read some internet snark that she got caught lip synching. Then I didnt really think about it any more.
Pareless says though that 1) it wasn't that the main vocal track did not come on (which is what we assumed), but that they had planned on having her do the main vocal (to an absurdly difficult song) live and she realized that she just could not do it. I still can not quite believe that Carey and her management team really planned on doing that main vocal live, at midnight, outside, at Time's Square. Maybe she could have done that when she was 25 (even then, I doubt it), but never now. I still suspect that main vocal track for some reason did not come on. But more interesting is his point that: 2) the fault lies not so much with pop starts who try to fool us with lip synching, but a mainstream audience that was raised on music videos to think that live concerts do and are supposed to sound like studio albulms. When I was in high school I had a chance to hear Paul Simon perform, and remember a little disappointment that his version of I think Kodachrome did not sound like the record. My older cousin who took me gave me a withering lecture about the joys of live concerts, and that if you just want to hear the record you should stay home. We need some kind of high profile live TV concert with some of the beat current singers in which they carefully explain to the audience that there will be no sweetening, no vocal tracking, that this will often mean the songs will sound different because it is physically not possible to reproduce the same sound live, and also because the artistry of music involves the performer making changes on the spot to express their current thinking and feeling about the song, not what they and or thier producers were thinking 5 years before. Live human performances are often in places out of tune, off-beat and contain mistakes of various kinds - that is part of how you know it is live. My daughter tells me even this is not all of the problem - that so many live concert shows are so overly produced that many people hardly ever hear real, live singing from gathering bigger name acts. So I guess I should not blame TV concerts as the cause of the problem, but they still can be part of the cure... http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/01/arts/music/mariah-carey-new-years-eve-live-performance.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share -- Sent from Gmail Mobile -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
