Jack Sparks, as usual, gets it right about the latest lip-synching hullabaloo:
There's a line of psychology that says abnormal behaviour, in an abnormal environment, can appear normal. Seems like kind of a truism, but the thrust of the point is that if a drunk guy wanders into a room full of drunks, no one's going to really notice if his pants are around his ankles. This is exactly the same kind of sick thinking behind this whole lip-synch issue. Trotting out corpses like Dick Clark to say "everybody does it and the old stuff is considered classic now," is wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.
The next time you plop down $85 to sit in the front row for a big name performer who does a lot of dancing along with his or her show...after paying $10-$20 to park...after spending $15 on the latest CD...after spending $20 on the t-shirt...after spending almost exactly the same amount on the person next to you so they could join you...ask yourself if you care that they're faking it. And while you're at it, look closely next Tuesday night at the Country Music awards show that's going to be on TV; there's gonna be a whole lotta lip-synching goin' on on that show for sure, and for two reasons: 1) most of those people are plastic to begin with, and 2) the dirty little secret in Nashville is that most of them can't sing a note, tone deaf like a drunk New York alley cat.
You can, of course, replace "Country Music Awards" with "Grammys," "Billboard Music Awards," or whatever craptastic, self-congratulatory, televised circle jerk the music industry is trotting out this month. The CMAs merely have the misfortune of being the first such event out of the chute after Ashlee Simpson's little screw up.
P.S. On a related note, Bol had the best hastily improvised graphic from the Ashlee incident.
I have stopped watching award shows. One, because it's time people realized that entertainment isn't a competition, and, two, because I have about 150 hours of other crap to watch that is currently backed up on Tivo.
As long as people spend the money, industries like this will be allowed to flourish.
Feh. I got a lot more out of shows at The Duck or Ruds than I did at Texas Stadium, where the only advantage over watching the Rolling Stones on TV was that the coldness made my date more cuddly. That and the clouds of smoke, but that's commercially available.
I suppose I should be proud to say that I've never even heard of Ashlee Simpson, until now.
OMG, Pete! That line's from My Favorite Year, isn't it? Peter O'Toole was perfection as Alan Swann---still a fav.