Carey me back

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, that's one thing.  Just don't forget to make sure you're ready to sing when you go on live TV.

Peggy and I were flipping the channels on New Year's Eve when Mariah Carey, modestly and elegantly clad as usual, strutted out onto Times Square and began performing on the Dick Clark Rockin' New Year's Eve Starring Ryan Seacrest Show.

She got through the Robert Burns hit from 1788, "Auld Lang Syne," but her own hit from 1991, "Emotions," got the better of hers. She was complaining that she couldn't hear the background music, and danced around with her backup dancers, telling the crowd and the millions of home viewers waiting for 2017 to start, "I want a holiday, too. Can I not have one? I'm trying to be a good sport here."

The show must go on, so they played the next song, the 2005 hit "We Belong Together." It was then that she committed the cardinal sin of lip-synching - she took the mic away from her face but the sound of her singing continued! 

"It just don't get any better," she said at the end of the song.

Shortly thereafter, she stormed off the stage, saying, "That was...amazing."

A woman named Nicole Perna has the daunting job of being Mariah's spokesperson, and she tried to pick up the pieces, telling Billboard magazine: "She was not 'winging' this moment and took it very seriously. A shame that production set her up to fail."

Perna said that Mariah had told the crew her earpiece wasn't working, and that the crew told her it would all be ok once she got out there on the stage.

(This is SO like when you buy a pair of pants and the salesman tells you they'll fit a lot better once you leave the store.)

All parties involved are going back and forth about the earpiece, whether or not it was malfunctioning.  There is no question that she was performing to a "backing vocal track," and Perna said, "it is not uncommon for artists to sing to track during certain live performances".

So she wasn't lip synching, you understand...she was singing along to a recorded track.

The suggestion that Dick Clark Productions set Mariah Carey up to fail is absurd.  Why would they want to turn their own show into a laughingstock?

Especially when Mariah Carey was there and willing to do it for them.