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This is supposed to be the season of hope and good cheer, but I’m troubled about certain events related to our industry stemming from NBC’s December 3rd live broadcast “Christmas in Rockefeller Center.” Sure, there are far more pressing developments in the news, ranging from freaky weather to racial tensions to the general state of the world. However, as live entertainment is our world, it bears discussion, as this could have some serious ramifications about the future of live performance. |
Presented both live to thousands of New Yorkers and tourists that stopped by for the free show and well as seen by millions around the world, the annual lighting of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Plaza featured performances by a star-studded lineup of top artists, including Mariah Carey, who opened the bill with her modern holiday classic “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” It’s a great tune and… so far so good — almost. In a few spots, Mariah was slightly shaky on intonation, and didn’t push the extended high notes so familiar to anyone who’s heard the record. It wasn’t her best performance, but hardly akin to Roseanne Barr’s unforgettable butchering of the national anthem at a baseball game in 1990. In fact, if Mariah ‘s recording on the record is a “10” (and it surely is) then this most recent one was a “7” — nothing amazing, but surely not brutal.
Back to the Rockefeller Center show, the brutality came soon after, as the web immediately lit up with social media “critics” slamming into Mariah’s performance, lambasting her for the “horrible” rendition. I believe the problem here stems from a society where we’re fed a constant stream of pseudo perfection, from Photoshopped fashion models to music performances that are either lip-synced (or heavily Autotuned) in the live world or multitracked, composited, edited and pitch-corrected in the studio.
If nobody in the public eye can have a bad hair day, is no one allowed to have a less than optimal song day? And several times during the performance, Mariah seems to be touching or moving her IEM earpiece — part of the problem here could have also been the monitor mix, or even an RF glitch? After all, Manhattan is probably one of the most difficult RF environments anywhere, so that could be another contributing factor.
The Quest for Perfection
Is absolute perfection — at every level — the only option? Maybe it all reeks too much of a certain mid-20th century maniac who tried to foist his visions of human perfection on the world, and I’m not looking forward to that.
I’ve heard all the excuses. I know, it’s tough to sing while doing all those onstage dance moves, but sorry, going to a concert to watch someone lip-sync lyrics from a Pro Tools playback doesn’t cut it for me. But if the world has moved to a point where perfection is better than live, then maybe we should just dispense with the onstage performers entirely and just roll in a video screen. Just think of all the advantages. With the perfect audio, we could create the perfect singing dance performance — and with editing, CGI, blue screen effects and insert shots of body doubles.
Once the 256-bit holographic process is perfected, we can dispense with the artists entirely and leave the creation process to a well-oiled corporate machine that has all the demographics and market research ready to deliver the ultimate cyber performer. Best of all, the research already been done. Did you ever wonder how those targeted ads seem to follow you around as you Tweet, browse the web, do a Google search or check your Facebook page?
Equally Disturbing
Unless you’re willing to live a long way away from the Internet, cell phones, street addresses, credit/debit cards and public utilities, you’ll probably see even more of that in the future. Not pretty but what also disturbs me about the case of Mariah Carey’s performance, was her dry vocal from the monitor feed showing up as Internet downloads for the “not good enough for me” crowd to stew over. Bear in mind that there’s no ambience on the track, no compression, EQ or even bit of delay doubling that’s pretty much de rigueur on nearly any live performance you might hear. It’s certainly not something meant for mass distribution, but once out, it’s impossible to put back into the barn.
As it’s unlikely that someone in the audience was tapped into Mariah’s exact RF mic frequency, had the correct model wireless receiver and was recording the iso’d vocal, it should be fairly easy to trace the recording back to the source and hold that (crew) person liable. This is a clear-cut ethics violation and is unacceptable under any circumstances as well as being an illegal action, in terms of stealing and distributing a copyrighted (NBC) performance. But given society’s overall opinion that stealing and redistributing music files is okay, I doubt anything will happen on this front — but it should.
Looking Forward
What can we learn from this? From here, I can only hope that these events will not have the negative impact of pushing more artists into opting for the relative safety of lip-syncing rather than live performances. And that would be the cruelest result of all.
