Feb 1, 2013
Did Beyonce lip-sync ? The Final Update…
So, at her pre-Superbowl press conference today, Beyonce finally answered direct questions about the “mime-gate controversy” – starting by giving a 100% live performance of the American national anthem. You can see the whole thing in the video above.
Answering questions about the lip-syncing allegations, she said:
“I am a perfectionist. One thing about me, I practice until my feet bleed, and I did not have time to rehearse with the orchestra. It was a live television show and a very, very important, emotional show for me – one of my proudest moments. Due to the weather, due to the delay, due to no proper sound check, I did not feel comfortable taking a risk. It was about the president and the inauguration, and I wanted to make him and my country proud. So I decided to sing along with my pre-recorded track , which is very common in the music industry. And I am very proud of my performance.”
So that settles it, right ?
Well, maybe.
When is a quote not a quote ?
Watching the reporting of this story in the mainstream media over the last ten days has been highly… educational. Seeing the quotes and rumours spreading, being re-quoted and misquoted – a web-wide case of chinese whispers. One article even referred to me as “the engineer who worked at the inauguration” !
(The misunderstanding probably arose because of the way the title of the interview was mis-shortened in a tweet about my interview with MTV.)
Only a handful of news outlets have reported the press conference entirely accurately – and that’s why I’ve bolded two parts of the quote above – because the way they have been used and “interpreted” by the press is interesting.
Instead of “I did not feel comfortable taking a risk“, Beyonce is being widely quoted as having said “I did not feel comfortable singing live“. And the phrase “I decided to sing along with my pre-recorded track” has been taken by many to mean “I decided to lip-sync“.
But we already know she sang live, and that we heard her in many, if not all, of the broadcasts. So why are people still saying she lip-synced ?
Good question.
How live is live ?
Ever since music recording became possible, we’ve lived in a strange era of “not 100% live”. So:
- Milli Vanilli – 100% lip-sync
- Beyonce’s press conference – 100% live
- The Wall Street Journal video – 50% live, 50% tape
- The New York Times video – 75% live ? On balance, the clues still make me think we’re hearing the live vocal
- Some-other-YouTube-clip-I-haven’t-seen-yet which only used her pre-recorded vocal – 25% live ?
The key point for me is that those last three options are all just different perspectives on the same performance.
Virtually every live performance these days involves some kind of pre-recorded element. Deadmau5 famously said that at his gigs he just turns up and hits play. Almost every “live” album or DVD involves re-records and overdubs.
And they’re more satisfying as a result.
Does it really matter ?
Beyonce sang along with a backing track – does that automatically mean she was lip-syncing, even if we heard the live performance ?
Does the fact that she sang a live vocal categorically mean she didn’t lip-sync, even if not everyone got to hear it ?
The fact is, since her mic was live but the pre-record was also on a tape, you could have heard entirely different mixes depending on which network or web feed you were watching. You could have heard the live version or the pre-record, or both at once !
And that means the answer to the question “did she lip-sync” is – it depends.
It depends on the audio mix you heard, and it depends on your point of view.
What is without doubt is that Beyonce has now sung three entirely excellent performances of the American National Anthem, and that she will be singing live at the Superbowl half-time this weekend, whereas countless other singers’ “performances” won’t ever be heard – in front of paying fans at every concert they give.
Is Beyonce really the one we should be giving a hard time ?
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She wanted to “make [everyone] proud”, and “works until [her] feet bleed”, but didn’t want to put in the work to practice for this “very, very important” moment. Rather than prioritizing this, she was doing something else. That’s why people are upset.
Also, if singing along to a prerecorded track counts as a pure performance, then everyone who sings along to the radio in their car is a performer, and people doing karaoke are doing too much heavy lifting.
No, I think people were upset because it was a significant moment for them and they felt cheated by the idea that it was somehow not real.
Everyone who sings to themselves in a car or does karaoke IS a performer – just not as good as Beyonce (probably) and on a much smaller stage…
What Beyonce did is exactly what Ashley Simpson did on SNL years ago. While “lip-sync” is a questionable term, it can’t be called a true “live” performance, as the lower third indicated.
The “live” label carries a sense that you’re going to get to see the performers actually creating the music in realtime. She also forced the Marine Band to truly mime in the process. Most of what you heard wasn’t “live”, unless you have a very strange definition.
If I might respectfully turn this around on you, do you see no difference between musicians performing live (as they’ve done for millennia) and musicians performing simply an overdub? (Perhaps “overdub” is the most accurate term here.)
I typed a huge reply for you, and ended updating the end of the post, instead !
If you see a stream where you only heard the pre-record, then yes, I’d say that was like an overdub, albeit one done in advance. If you heard her as-it-happened performance, then the fact that an “overdub” exists is irrelevant.
I think it all depends how live we need our “live” to be. For you it has to be 100% live or not at all – fair enough.
It’s not Beyonce we should be criticising – it’s the media.
On the BBC site today – ‘Beyonce admits inauguration miming’. Read the article – Beyonce ‘admits’ nothing of the sort. The direct quote: “I decided to sing along with my pre-recorded track.” Note the quote “to SING along”. Exactly what you have been saying, and what I took to be fairly obvious the first time I saw the video.
When does ‘singing’ become ‘miming’? The difference between the two is what this row has been all about. I always thought ‘miming’ meant ‘not singing’ (as well as doing that weird thing where you seem to be trapped in a glass box – must have missed that bit).
Funny how the media is right even when they’re wrong.
Actually, it’s not funny. It’s very troubling. On most subjects in the news, I’m as hopelessly ignorant as the next man. I have noted over the years, though, that whenever the media gets in a frenzy about something I actually do know about, they often get it hopelessly wrong, or worse, actively promote distorted versions of the facts.
I guess my old sensei was right: don’t believe what you read! Even on the BBC. Disappointing.
100% agree…
I don’t require 100% to be live, but everything you heard except for one vocal was pre-recorded. If she had pre-recorded backing harmony vocals, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.
I saw Garbage last year, who were triggering various loops and backing sounds throughout a lot of the show. That’s understandable, because there are only so many of them on stage (and only so many sounds you can make live). If you looked at any given one of them though, they were producing all the sound that it looked like their instrument should be producing themselves.
If Beyonce stopped singing her live vocal, we still would’ve heard her vocal. They could’ve run a sequence of crowd shots while she walked offstage mid-song, and you would have no idea. The same for the Marine Band. If you cease to be a necessary part of your own performance, that’s where “live performance” stops being an accurate term for me.
Am I mistaken, or is the percentage live section new since we started this discussion? Whether it’s common these days or not is irrelevant. By that logic, we shouldn’t complain about auto-tuning everything, since it’s common.
I will agree with the critique of the inaccurate reporting on this though. She was still singing live, and thus didn’t lip-sync. The media is definitely bending the reports if they say otherwise. Certain disagreements aside, I still respect your efforts to figure out exactly what was really going on.
(I also love the site in general. It’s just odd timing that this happened right after I found it and subscribed.)
@ scarr – Yes, the “percentage live” bit was cut from my previous reply to you and pasted into the post, as I mentioned
I disagree that if she had stopped singing the vocal would have disappeared – in my opinion the live vocal was used for most broadcasts. See my previous post, especially the video at the end:
http://productionadvice.co.uk/beyonce-didnt-lip-sync-at-the-inauguration-but/
The mainstream media are saying she admitted lip-syncing and/or miming interchangeably, which annoys me. If I thought what you are saying were literally true, I wouldn’t have written these posts !
And, glad you like the site. Normal service will now resume
Beyonce explained that it was due to weather conditions, not having a proper soundcheck, etc..It is very hard to sing in cold weather and play an instrument in cold weather. Yoyo Ma airplayed at the ’08 Inauguration. The Marine Corp Band has airplayed for other events themselves. It sounds like an envious person just dediced to make it an issue this time. Beyonce used her “real live” voice to pre-record the track. Maybe it was important for her to not flub the National Anthem at President Obama’s Inauguration. She clearly said that she sung along to her pre-record track. Not that she entirely lip-synched her performance. At certain points, you hear her voice twice. I personally didn’t understand the issue with it since many people think the gold standard of the National Anthem is Whitney Houston’s version at the Super Bowl. The majority of people knew that she lip-synched that version. Beyonce, at least, did sing along to her own voice. It seems like the media is just not wanting to retract the story because they were so eager to report it. That’s why it’s now an attempt to twist her words.