RATHER PERFECT FAREWELL TO 2016

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RATHER PERFECT FAREWELL TO 2016

Postby Marsbar » Fri Jan 06, 2017 4:45 am

This is an exceptionally well written article about the incident at Times Square on New Year's Eve

The article is from the New Yorker Magazine and written by - By Amanda Petrusich

BTW - it is not my place to razz any artist. Art It's is after all very subjective.

out ten minutes into “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest,” a pleasantly inane variety program broadcast live from Times Square each New Year’s Eve, the pop singer Mariah Carey—wearing a voluminous white winter coat over a bejewelled nude leotard—began singing, or at least pretending to sing, a few bars of “Auld Lang Syne.” None of this seemed remarkable. At home, viewers topped off flutes of champagne and tested the trigger strings on their miniature confetti cannons. Midnight was approaching, and promising, as the new year does, a kind of instantaneous psychic cleansing. Many of us were hungry for it.

Onstage, in New York, a group of male backup dancers hoisted giant feathers, creating a wispy, undulating frame around Carey. She launched into “Emotions,” an airy disco track about falling in love. (“You’ve got me feelin’ emotions,” she discloses in the chorus.) “Emotions” was released more than twenty-five years ago, in 1991, and it became Carey’s fifth consecutive No. 1 single in the United States. Carey famously sings in what’s called the whistle register—the highest range of tones a human being can organically produce. It is extraordinarily unusual for a grown person ever to make sounds that piercing, although babies and small, angry children can sometimes get themselves there without much help. On the studio recording of “Emotions,” Carey arrives, miraculously, at a high G, all those octaves up the scale, during a run at the end of the word—and why wouldn’t this be literal?—“high.” Is it pleasant to the ear? It sounds, to me, like a rabid bat has just flown up and under my sweatshirt, and we are both shrieking dementedly in terror.

Still, this is a significant and enviable achievement—to manipulate the body in service of art. Her G7 remains the highest note ever performed in a pop song. Now, thirty years into an undeniably successful career, Carey is beloved, sometimes cheekily, for her insistence on living a rarefied life: purportedly, the entire staff of her Los Angeles mansion wears shoes by the luxury designer Christian Louboutin; her eight Jack Russell terriers travel exclusively via private jet; she gave birth to twins while listening to a live version of herself singing “Fantasy,” an early single; and so on.

On New Year’s Eve, though, something was wrong. From the outset, Carey was catastrophically behind the beat. Two men appeared at her elbows, presumably to help her traverse a short staircase. (This is something she likes: being accompanied down short staircases.) “Just walk me down,” she said, smiling wanly. “Well, happy new year!” Some fussing. “We can’t hear.” Carey flipped her long, shiny hair, fiddled with a gold necklace, put a hand on her hip. “All right, we didn’t have a check for this song, so we’ll just say it went to No. 1,” she announced, striding across the stage in heels. “And that’s what it is.” This routine went on for an uncomfortable amount of time: a bit of singing, a pronouncement, some striding. When it came time for the G7 note, Carey was not holding the microphone anywhere near her mouth, but there it was, nonetheless: that wild, clarion G7, blaring from the speakers.

Carey was lip-synching to a backing track, which plenty of august and capable performers do when participating in a live, televised event. Somehow, her dancers kept dancing, as if everything were going super-great. Bless them. One, with a dark mustache, was smiling especially widely. They gently ushered Carey about the stage, dutifully adhering to the choreography as they’d been taught it. What else could they do? Pyrotechnics were deployed behind her. The year was ending. Surely, by this point, Carey had surveyed the audience and taken note of the endless cell phones pointed in her direction. “I’m trying to be a good sport here,” she said.

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Everyone around her appeared uncertain of how to respond. Perhaps ABC’s camera operators were selectively panning to audience members too drunk or otherwise enraptured to be concerned with the authenticity of Carey’s performance, but it seems worth nothing that there was not any visible ill will percolating in the crowd. Carey, to her credit, was the only one frank or funny enough to acknowledge the debacle as it was unfolding. The song ended. “We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves,” Goethe wrote.

“That was.” Carey paused. “Amazing.”

Next up was “We Belong Together,” from 2005, still the second-longest-running No. 1 song in American chart history, behind “One Sweet Day,” Carey’s collaboration, from 1995, with Boyz II Men. It really seemed like she could get through it. She was still lip-synching, but if you squinted—and gamely emptied your entire glass of champagne, and then refilled the glass, and then emptied it again—you could maybe say it was a convincing-enough approximation. But Carey seemed to have reached the end of her generosity, or her patience. She only periodically bothered to mouth the words. The song, of course, kept playing.

She was so plainly aware of both the humor and the absurdity of her predicament. In my favorite moment of the nearly six-minute performance, Carey yelled, “Bring the feathers on!” The dancers were already in place. “Yes!” she added, as they fell into perfect alignment around her. “It just don’t get any better.” For anyone who might have endured an especially draining 2016, it was not hard to find this coda—defeated, bewildered, sarcastic—cosmically apt. It felt like a startlingly on-the-nose metaphor for the strange act of going about routine tasks while the world dissembles.

Artists lip-synching during high-stakes live appearances is so ordinary now as to be tedious to discuss. “There’s too many variables to go live,” the Super Bowl pre-show producer Rickey Minor told ABC News, in 2009. “I would never recommend any artist go live, because the slightest glitch would devastate the performance.” It seemed that perhaps we’d come to accept lip-synching as a necessary bit of stratagem, given our hunger for instantaneous and collective judgment. We know now that when Whitney Houston performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” to open the Super Bowl, in 1991, she was lip-synching to a prerecorded track. Yet her iteration continues to be thought of as a kind of pace car for aspiring anthem singers. She’d sung it—she just wasn’t singing it then.

Besides, Carey is a notably unpredictable television guest. During a 2008 performance of “Touch My Body,” on “Good Morning America,” she came to believe that one of her backing vocalists was trilling too loudly, and announced, “Stop singing my part now, baby.” (She did this without breaking from the melody, and while incorporating pointing at the offender into her dance routine.) In 2011, when Carey appeared on the Home Shopping Network to promote her jewelry and clothing line, she breezily directed the cameras to reorient around her better angles. Bring the feathers on.

The day after, Carey’s team blamed technical glitches: her in-ear monitors weren’t working; the teleprompter pooped out. “Unfortunately, there was nothing she could do to continue with the performance, given the circumstances,” Nicole Perna, one of her spokespeople, said. Carey’s manager told Billboard that they’d alerted producers to the supposedly malfunctioning earpieces ten minutes prior to showtime, but were forced to charge on regardless. TMZ suggested that ABC staged the entire fiasco to enjoy higher ratings. Representatives of Dick Clark Productions retorted by telling the Los Angeles Times that there were enough stage monitors amplifying Carey’s prerecorded music that it would have been audible to her even without the aid of an earpiece. (It is getting increasingly difficult to locate footage of the performance online.)

That this has inspired outrage—that people felt fundamentally cheated or bamboozled by a forty-six-year-old woman fudging the high notes while wearing no pants, in freezing temperatures, on a temporary stage erected in the middle of Broadway—feels silly, but telling. In an era in which so much of what we are promised is true is in fact manipulated, if not faked, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that we are all now confused about where to direct our bubbling ire. Nobody likes feeling hoodwinked. Objective fact has lost value, and in the ensuing panic to restore its place—which is imperative, necessary—we are overcorrecting, or at least misaiming our guns.

Carey, for her part, quickly arrived at a healthy perspective on the snafu. “Shit happens,” she tweeted on New Year’s Day. And this, too, felt like a purgative end to 2016.
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