If you’re like us, then you spent New Year’s Eve with your loved ones and friends watching the ball drop over New York City’s Time Square. Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest was the talk of the evening and for all the wrong reasons. Pop diva Mariah Carey graced the stage with a luxury gown and tons of feathers until everything began to crumble around her. If you haven’t seen the disastrous performance check it out for yourself below.
Since the ill-fated performance, the legendary singer and Dick Clark Productions have slung allegations back and forth at one another. While Carey’s camp is claiming that the singer was sabotaged with broken mikes, DCP is saying that not only did the singer lip-sync, she also missed rehearsal. Mariah Carey’s manager, Stella Bulochnikov sat down with Entertainment Weekly to set the record straight.
She said, “Not only did she not ditch rehearsal, we got to Times Square at 2:30. They weren’t ready for her until 3:20. The most important thing to her was the sound. The sound was coming in choppy. She was assured it would work by the evening.” Bulochnikov went on to state by 11:20 that evening, Carey’s mic packs were still not fixed, They brought her a new one, and that one didn’t work either, the mic pack was dead. “They changed the battery pack. She said she still couldn’t hear. The second stage manager said, “It doesn’t work here in the tent, it will work on the stage.” She said, “Great, let’s go to the stage.”
Clearly something went very wrong on the stage as well because what viewers saw was probably the worst of Carey’s illustrious career. Bulochnikov stated, “When it goes live, she can’t hear anything. The ears are dead. They’re dead. So she pulls them out of the ear because if the artist keeps them in their ears then all she hears is silence. Once she pulled them off her ear she was hoping to hear her music, but because of the circumstances — there’s noise from Times Square and the music is reverberating from the buildings — all she hears is chaos. She can’t hear her music. It’s a madhouse. At the point, there’s no way to recover. On the third song when she could hear her track playing it was so bad she said, “F— it, I’ve had enough. She was gracious enough to walk over to Seacrest and do the ball-drop moment and then she left.”
But what about those lip-syncing accusations? We all can clearly see that once MC stopped performing, the music continued on without her. Bulochnikov told EW, “No. It’s not lip-syncing. Lip-syncing is when people don’t sing at all. This is what people should understand. Every artist sings to a track, especially in circumstances like that when it’s really loud and impossible to have a great musical performance.”
While Dick Clark Productions did acknowledge that they had technical issues that evening, for Bulochnikov and Mariah Carey that acknowledgment just isn’t enough, “But to not apologize to her formally? That’s disgusting. We live in this viral world where anybody will do anything for a viral moment.”
Clearly this was not a good moment for Mariah Carey however, despite any technical issues that may have come up, she is a seasoned enough performer to recover during any mishaps, but she chose not too. We don’t think this will be helping any of the ticket sales to her forthcoming North American tour.
What did you think of Mariah Carey’s New Year’s eve performance? Let us know in the comments below.
