Mariah Carey’s Lip-Syncing Fiasco: A Theoretical Consideration

By now the video has been shared endlessly — spliced into memes and tweets, mashed up with a thousand other pop culture references and scattered into the winds of the internet. In it, Mariah Carey stands embattled, defensive; unable to do much besides watch helplessly as a choreographed musical number falls to shambles in a matter of seconds. What exactly happened is a matter of some debate. Did she intend to lip sync her entire set for Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rocking Eve 2016–17, or was she using a backing track, designed to give her a vocal assist (especially in her stratospheric 1991 single “Emotions”), but ultimately leaving some of the work for the live performance?

Whatever the answer to that question may be, the end result was the same. A fatal technical malfunction after her “Auld Lang Syne” opener left her unable to hear any music in her in-ear monitor. Without the guidance of that track, she was unable to sing along (or, perhaps, pretend to sing along) or follow the rehearsed routine with her cadre of background dancers. By the time she reached the final song — her 2005 chart-topper “We Belong Together” — it was clear the issues were not going to resolve themselves in time to salvage the performance. “It just don’t get any better,” she opined, and left the stage shortly thereafter.

Public reaction to the performance was swift and largely condemnatory. If she couldn’t hear her track, why not simply sing the song a capella? Surely a more professional or stage worthy star would have turned out a winning performance despite a cascading series of mishaps. Mariah, who once made Rolling Stone’s list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time,” now seemed a fraud, long past her vocal prime and clinging to a moment of glory that had definitively passed.

But Mariah’s lip-syncing controversy is not the first to ensnare a major pop diva. Our historical memory in this country is notoriously short, but it was only 4 years ago, during the opening moments of the last presidential administration, that Beyoncé found herself embroiled in a scandal over lip-syncing at the January, 2013 inauguration of Barack Obama. Performing the Star-Spangled Banner near the end of the inaugural ceremony, Beyoncé gave what many felt was a flawless performance, even ripping out her earpiece in a dramatic, impassioned gesture as she finished the song. But it was later revealed that she had not been singing at all: given the low temperatures that morning in Washington, D.C. and the fact that she had missed rehearsals with her accompanying band, she had decided to play it safe and perform to a prerecorded track. Her decision drew ire from the public as well as the music community. Aretha Franklin, who performed “My Country ’Tis of Thee” at Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, said that she “cracked up” when she heard the news, adding that she would never pull such a stunt herself: “‘I wanted to give people the real thing,” she opined, “and pre-recording never crossed my mind.”

Franklin’s invocation of “the real thing” speaks to the heart of why lip-syncing is so upsetting to many fans of popular music. There is a general cultural consensus that performances using pre-recorded vocals are a sham, that spectators have been manipulated or duped by investing themselves in a spectacle that was orchestrated in advance. Going back even further in time to 1991, Whitney Houston was subject to backlash when it was revealed that her iconic performance of the national anthem at that year’s Super Bowl was prerecorded. Writing for the St. Petersburg Times shortly after the news broke, journalist Mary Jo Melone wrote “This was the nation’s most precious piece of music sung by one of its best performers at a most precarious time. If we were going to make such a deal of the moment, for the troops in Saudi Arabia, we should have heard the real thing.” Evidently, the fact that Houston had taken time to pre-record the song in a Los Angeles studio, then lip sync to it days later in Tampa accompanied by a full orchestra, followed shortly thereafter by a flyover of fighter jets, was not a sufficient tribute to “the troops” “at a most precarious time.” Calling on ill-defined notions of patriotism and an investment in “the real thing,” Melone dismissed Houston’s performance as a deception that was somehow unbecoming of American ideals.

These episodes have been especially galling to our collective cultural consciousness because of the particular figures they involve. Mariah, Beyoncé, and Whitney are all known for their superlative vocal abilities — in the landscape of popular music, they stand as archetypical representatives of the “real thing” because they are gifted singers whose voices have heavily influenced many of the artists who followed them. They remain locked in a certain dialectical tension with those pop music icons who are known less for their voice than for their marketing and public image — people like Britney Spears, Janet Jackson, and Madonna, who are not exceptional vocalists but have traded on a specific persona and a continuous process of self-reinvention. It would only be slightly overstating the case to argue that these two groups feed off of and require one another for their own continued legitimation. For the Whitneys and Beyoncés of the world, the existence of singers like Britney adds to the value of their own work because it highlights the exceptionalness of their talent. For the Britneys and Madonnas, the existence of singers like Whitney prevents a wholesale societal dismissal of pop music as inauthentic and manufactured, allowing the field to remain intact as well as commercially and culturally viable.

If Mariah, Beyoncé, and Whitney represent a benchmark of authenticity and formal quality in contemporary popular music, it is not difficult to see why their very visible lip-syncing controversies would provoke so much outrage from the American public. But these moments of collective anger — of denouncement and disparagement of what is deemed to be “inauthentic” — rest, I would argue, on a notion of the “real” that is equally specious. The reality is that singing live in the middle of a deafeningly-loud Times Square on a freezing night is an almost foolhardy undertaking. Broadway star Idina Menzel opted to sing live when she performed her Frozen hit “Let It Go” for the festivities in 2014: when her voice inevitably cracked on the high notes due to the low temperatures, she was similarly dragged by online commentators for “flubbing” the entire performance. In the same vein, Christina Aguilera sang the national anthem live and a capella at the 2011 Super Bowl and not only forgot portions of the song’s lyrics, but inadvertently ended the performance in a key one half step higher than the one she began in due to her heavy-handed and ill-advised vocal runs and excessive bravura.

A flawless performance of the kind expected by contemporary viewing audiences is rarely possible outside of the studio or the concert hall. While Broadway and opera represent a certain pinnacle of live performance in this country, it is worth noting that many Broadway actors are prohibited by union regulations from singing live in venues where temperatures drop below certain thresholds. And the use of backing tracks is not unheard of in this sphere, either — it is widely known among industry professionals that the high notes of the Christine role in The Phantom of the Opera are played from a prerecorded track on Broadway each night, so that the actress performing the part does not lose her voice to strain. Ultimately, Menzel’s “flub” comes closest to the “reality” of live performance — that artists will sometimes miss notes or lose their voice, that the overall effort will likely be somewhat flawed because the performer is a living human being who makes mistakes and whose body doesn’t always cooperate. The fact that viewing audiences at home seem not to recognize this reality speaks only to the ubiquity of contemporary concert technology and its illusions, of the degree to which our expectations have been altered and reshaped by the proliferation of failsafe methods like backing tracks and pre-recording. What we demand now is not the real, but its perfected simulation made possible by an invisible army of helpers and assistants.

To borrow from the language of critical theory, the lip-syncing faux pas is significant because it represents a breakdown of the mythologies of pop music — what we might call a moment of trauma, a crack in the façade when the real that has been hidden behind a screen of images (or in this case, sound) emerges. What we witness is perfection undone, when what was assumed to be genuine and flawless is shown to be only one of those things, and at least partially constructed. Our mistake lies in misunderstanding what these events actually signify. What is seen as an anomaly — a performer who is “faking it” and selling us an auditory bill of goods — is actually much closer to the norm of televised vocal performance in the contemporary moment, which rarely goes without technological enhancement or supplementation to guard against the hazards inherent in a live production.

The public response to these episodes works to “screen” and mask the real — to push back against it and make it disappear. Pop stars that lip sync are “phony,” but what is valued and championed instead is not the flawed and variable conditions of live performance but a mythic standard of perfection that is often unattainable and almost always subtly enhanced through non-vocal means. What emerges is a new sense of “reality” which is, in fact, an illusion. These three moments in pop music history are therefore a type of limit case that defines and contains the boundaries of the real, shoring up and “resetting” our cultural mythologies by referring back to an imaginary and nonexistent benchmark. Just as the divas themselves must operate in opposition to one another to stake their own territory and define their identity, these perennial mishaps are necessary to establish and reinforce a cultural baseline about the nature of “good” performance. That “good” and “real” are often code for something that is simulated and manufactured is in keeping with the cultural conditions of late capitalism, when what is sold to us is often intended to mimic a heightened version of reality that doesn’t actually exist.

In his 1991 essay “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” social theorist Michael Warner ruminates on the idea of the celebrity as a stand-in or projection for society as a whole. In the modern world where figures like kings and monarchs no longer serve as representatives for most nations, the body politic reassembles itself around a new collection of public figures, including politicians, actors, and singers. These “mass subjects” are intimately tied to the proliferation of visual media, which allows citizens to identify with public figures through the repetition of images. “Where printed public discourse formerly relied on a rhetoric of abstract disembodiment,” he writes, “visual media — including print — now display bodies for a range of purposes: admiration, identification, appropriation, scandal, and so forth. To be public in the West means to have an iconicity, and this is true equally of Muammar Qaddafi and Karen Carpenter.”

This concept is particularly germane to the divas who have shaped pop music over the last thirty-plus years. We see this idea surfacing when Whitney is described as “America’s sweetheart,” for example, or when Beyoncé’s “Beyhive” bestows her with divine status in memes on social media. Warner notes that the public’s relationship to its icons is one of “witnessing”: we watch these figures’ lives play out in an extremely public forum, looking to them as surrogates for ourselves in ways that are both sympathetic and dismissive. Warner describes this process of witnessing as an alternation between sadism and masochism — for some public figures, their hardship becomes a basis for public grieving and sorrow (Jackie O.), while for others it is a source of reveling and glee (Anna Nicole Smith).

Looking back on these three separate incidents of lip syncing in light of Warner’s analysis, I would argue that the public response to Whitney and Beyoncé falls within the bounds of the mass public’s masochism, while Mariah was subject to the sadistic response. The reason for this difference lies primarily in where these artists were in their professional trajectories at the time the incidents occurred. Although Whitney’s good fortune eventually left her, making her a perennial punching bag for late night sketch comedy as she slid deeper into drug addiction, her 1991 Super Bowl performance saw her at the height of her powers both artistically and commercially. Similarly, Beyoncé still reigns as a diva with the ability to command our culture’s collective attention and influence its tastes. Although their lip-syncing controversies were met with an initially hostile reaction, each was ultimately forgiven and quickly returned to their former positions of collective adoration and praise. This process of absolution was aided by the fact that their performances, while pre-recorded, were not subject to technical malfunctions at the time they occurred (in a press conference given to address the controversy, Beyoncé redeemed herself in the eyes of most of her fans when she performed the anthem live in front of an audience of reporters).

In contrast, Mariah, while certainly an icon with a long and successful career, was performing well after her commercial and critical peak, when her voice was no longer the reliable clarion of the 1990s and early aughts. In addition, her lip syncing was revealed as it happened — rather than the initial delight of a flawless performance “ruined” by subsequent revelation, her image of perfection collapsed in real time, revoking the audience’s ability to believe in the illusion even momentarily. The response to her flub therefore seemed distinctly more negative, taking the tone of a morality play as a way of reinforcing “values” of integrity that define our society as a collective. The outrage over her performance acted once again as a way of reaffirming our dubious notions of the real — that she could have somehow performed a capella in front of a roaring crowd, or that a Broadway actor would certainly have done it better.

Although these responses speak to a collective ignorance about the technical details of live televised performance, they remain a benchmark for our ideas about the nature of artistic quality and the sincerity of our public figures. That these illusions are now taken to be real speaks to the way in which music itself has been enhanced, packaged, and marketed for the last forty years — what was real eventually transforming into a simulacra or imitation of a cultural condition with no actual precedent. If Mariah was jettisoned by our collective cultural sadism, it is because she could no longer proffer this mirage and screen the real with the reliability of those who preceded her. In this way, her public shaming and dismissal worked to reinscribe the values of simulation and artifice that we have collectively mistaken for the “real thing.”