Alicia Keys’ Super Bowl flub already erased from the official record
Alicia Keys sounded less-than-perfect during the Super Bowl Halftime Show, but you wouldn't know if you watched the YouTube version
Aux News Keys
The growing danger of the Internet is that we won’t be able to trust what we see or hear. It’s already pretty easy to spread misinformation on social media, but as artificial intelligence and deepfakes become more precise and accurate, it will be even harder to separate fact from fiction. Maybe it’s a little dramatic to apply this logic to the editing of Alicia Keys’ Super Bowl Halftime Show performance, but the truth is, reality is already being tweaked before our eyes.
In this case, millions of people watched (and heard) Keys’ voice strain and crack on the opening notes of “If I Ain’t Got You,” which she played before transitioning to her duet with Usher, “My Boo.” Fans reacted by teasing Keys for being off-key, and a video still exists on the web of the singer—who is a tremendous vocalist—briefly struggling with the song. But if you watched the performance after the fact via the NFL’s official YouTube page, you won’t hear any sign of imperfection; the voice crack has been smoothed over, presumably autotuned into something more soothing on the ear. You can see both versions below:
There’s precedent for something like this being done—an (in)famous example is when Saturday Night Live uploaded a version of Jennifer Lopez’s 2010 performance of “Until It Beats No More” with the raw vocals instead of a mixed version. In both cases, unless you witnessed the performance live—or unless some helpful Internet archivist preserved it and delivered it to your feed—you wouldn’t necessarily know there was any imperfection in the original version. The differences between the original and the edit are truthfully minimal in both. What makes the Keys example significant is the scale; the Super Bowl Halftime Show has a much larger audience than a random episode of Saturday Night Live.
@itsshannonburns #jenniferlopez #snl #ayoedebiri ♬ original sound – Shannon Burns
Still, it’s not a clear-cut act of censorship to alter one small mistake out of a Super Bowl performance. There have been much larger, much more public and visible gaffes on the Halftime Show stage: Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson’s “Nipplegate” or M.I.A.’s middle finger, for example. That’s what makes it all the more curious how quickly Keys’ minor flub was struck from the record. It wasn’t a scandal or even really a mistake. It was an incredibly brief moment of human weakness, a raw reminder that she was performing live with her actual voice in front of a crowd of thousands.
Perhaps the reason why it was edited is because the Halftime Show is now sponsored by Apple Music; given that it’s a streaming platform, the brand is more invested in making sure the audio it produces is high quality. (The A.V. Club has reached out for comment.) Whether Apple was behind the tweak or not, the change erases what is exciting and enjoyable about live performances: the element of uncertainty and vulnerability, that anything can happen onstage, that what we’re hearing isn’t just the same thing we can get on Spotify. That what we’re hearing is real.
“Real” is the operative word. While a tiny edit of Alicia Keys is not at all approaching the danger of a Joe Biden deepfake spreading lies about public safety, it still represents an alteration to reality. Sure, we all know now that the Halftime Show video was edited, but what about five, ten years from now, when you’re trying to remember what Usher sang and you click the first video you find from the 2024 Super Bowl? Will you remember, while you’re watching, that it didn’t sound quite like that on television? Does it matter that the version on the official record isn’t “real”? Will “real” mean the same thing then as it does now?
117 Comments
It’s going to take a lot for Apple to do something worse than hoping Robert De Niro just didn’t notice they took out an important thing he wanted to say, and this doesn’t get there.
Eh, ‘real’ has always been subjective. Two hundred years ago if you witnessed an event with 10k other people, there would be 10k slightly different versions of the event. Nothing about that has changed but now we can at least record things, so accounts of events have a greater chance of being objectively true.
Unfortunately, thanks to YouTube, podcasters and a million ‘experts’, it’s getting darn near impossible to determine what the ‘truth’ is now. And videos of cops killing people in prisons will be nicely scrubbed or altered too. It already happened in my city. Since we no longer have a proper newspaper, we’re assuming the city wrote the guy’s parents a decent-check (not generous, by any means) and they split town.
This is maddening. None of those hacks are talented. It’s just money
I can’t altogether disagree with you. Keys is a minor talent, imo. She sounds better with electronic help, but so does everyone.
I saw another one of your posts and can’t disagree with that either. For every music megastar there are hundreds of people who’ll never be heard – far more talented people, I’m sure. I know some people who’d put Beyonce’s voice to shame. They’ll never get a record. And I just think Swift is…. not good. So I don’t talk about it. And, yeah, it’s all about money. And luck. Always has been. If you’re in a band or have musician friends who work, they are entertaining people, bringing them joy and are very appreciated. Local music is vital. We can’t all be famous. I wouldn’t want to be, frankly. Don’t let successful (if seemingly undeserving) people bug you. Their lives probably aren’t that great and they’re aware that someone with more talent will likely come along and replace them.
“it’s all about money. And luck. Always has been.” True to an extent, but theres more to it. There are MANY other skills that have to be navigated to becoming successful as well as luck. Charisma to attract a mangager and an agent, ability to navigate those who will support your career vs those there only to leach, management skills to cultivate a good network, a good work ethic to get projects done, taste that meshes with the public over an extended period of time AND doesn’t come afoul of new taboos that are constantly being generated. Knowing complementary skills like playing the piano for singers, not a requirement, but may have won her a critical audition when she knew it at the right time. Luck isn’t always just purely random, it can often be gamed. Its a combination of skill, opportunity, willingness to risk taking an opportunity when presented, and being willing to go to the effort even before knowing that you’re working on your big break at the time.
“Keyes is a minor talent, I know people who put Beyonce to shame, and Taylor Swift is not good” is exactly the type of post I expected to see from someone who thinks local artists playing dive bars are always more talented than [”seemingly undeserving”] touring musicians.It’s not true. I spent a LOT of time in bars watching local acts play. None of them had the drive or commitment to put in the hard work to make it big. And it is hard work, even if you have money and connections, to make it to the “Top of the Food Pyramid” positions like Beyonce or Taylor Swift (or Metallica, or any other modern musical act that has reached the upper echelons of fame).
For every music megastar there are hundreds of people who’ll never be heard – far more talented people, I’m sure.If they are FAR MORE TALENTED, either they’re not driven to succeed, or they have other issues that stand in the way (often drug addiction or alcoholism or mental health problems, all of which go hand in hand with “creative” lifestyles of artists and musicians).
There will always be artists that make you go “But WHY, tho?” when they get to the top of the charts… because the human animal is driven by novelty and dopamine. But in general, to get to the top and be recognized as a top-tier artist, the artists have to put in the time. All three of the women you brought up have careers spanning 2 decades. That’s most of their lives dedicated to being at the top of their game.
“it’s getting darn near impossible to determine what the ‘truth’ is now.”
No it isn’t: there’s your truth, his truth, her truth, their truth, my truth.
See how easy that is?
Audiovisual capture devices most certainly record objective data. “Real” is real (within the constraints of the capture device).The image sensor is capturing frames at a fixed frequency, splitting it according to wavelength via a Bayer matrix, filling up photon wells, then reading out the charge of each. This is then directly translated into pixel intensity values for each channel of each image of the video data.The synchronized audio sensor is converting vibrations into electrical signal, sending them to an audio-to-digital converter, which reads it at a fixed frequency and converts the continuous signal to a sequence of digital samples.There is no subjectivity here. The transforms applied to the data are transparent. The correspondence between the captured signal and actual reality are well-understood.
Additional post-capture transforms may then be applied, and to do this in a non-destructive way, these should be global in nature, such as amplifying signal or boosting or suppressing certain frequencies by a scalar factor.As soon as you choose to selectively edit the data, you are destroying “real” information and masking it with generated data. This doesn’t mean there was no objective measurement taken, it just means you have chosen to discard it and replace it with something with a weaker correspondence to reality.For creative audio-visual applications, this may be the intent. You don’t want the viewer to feel they’re in a film studio, you want to edit the data to make it appear they’re in a space shuttle. For recordings intended for scientific or news reporting purposes, such edits are highly questionable.Live concerts are a grey area. Any choice to discard real data and replace it with generated data should at least be declared in publishing the recording. Discarding the accurately-recorded data is a choice, and it is not necessarily the best one.
Yep, that’s why I said accounts of events are more likely to be true now: Audio/visual data can be edited now, but 200 years ago all audio/visual data absolutely was edited through peoples’ perception and memory.
It’s mildly interesting, but “live” recordings have been remixed and overdubbed for decades. Albums from the ’70s are still being tweaked and tinkered with.I do appreciate the validation though because I, watching the telecast as a non-singer with a questionable ear, thought she sounded horrible and no one else in the room even acknowledged it.
Not MY Live At Leeds!!!
It actually lended the performance more authenticity, considering how the half time shows always seem so pre-packaged and produced. I’m sure she didn’t want it preserved for posterity, however.
Yeah I Was gonna say the same thing, like aren’t these performances usually lip synced in the first place. Like the half time show is a ONE shot for glory, live. There is no room to screw it up.
That’s why I like imperfection – I know the artist cares enough about making it live and real. Personally, I don’t see it as a one-shot opportunity. You’ve already got to be very good to even get this kind of gig. I don’t see how it could possibly harm her career.
Oh I agree and it will have zero impact on her career. But the halftime show is a machine timed to the second and the NFL wants it to go off without a hitch, as do some of the artists, though most would prefer to do everything for “real”.
She’s already in the legacy artist stage of her career, there’s no way it would hurt how she’s seen..
seem?
I mean, really? In THIS age of hyper-autotune? At least she tried singing live.
She’s terrible! Have you no ears?!?
It was terrible! You have ears, you know it’s true! Why do I bother as a music teacher to teach my students anything? None of these ‘stars’ have any talent- it’s all fake, bought and paid for. We’ve all been scammed.
That’ll learn her.
George Harrison botched his solo when All You Need is Love was broadcast live. For the single release, it gets faded out in the middle of the solo.
And it was BRILLIANT!
Man, remember when people pretended to be mad about M.I.A.’s middle finger? Oh, the Twenty-teens. Such an innocent time.
but she was PREGNANT!!!!
her finger was pregnant???
no, no I don’t. does her middle finger need autotune?
She’s a rapper, so, no.
Life vs video always makes me think of this guy from Slacker (1990).
To me, my thing is, a video image is much more powerful and useful than
an actual event. Like back when I used to go out, when I was last out, I
was walking down the street and this guy, that came barreling out of a
bar, fell right in front of me, and he had a knife right in his back,
landed right on the ground and… Well, I have no reference to it now. I
can’t put it on pause. I can’t put it on slow mo and see all the little
details. And the blood, it was all wrong. It didn’t look like blood.
The hue was off. I couldn’t adjust the hue. I was seeing it for real,
but it just wasn’t right. And I didn’t even see the knife impact on the
body. I missed that part.
it is weird how we are often reminded that we are “just human”, that mistakes happen, that we are not defined by our failures but our mass media says the opposite. photoshopping, de-aging in film, replacing live vocals, this new “best take” feature on google phones.
I mean, I’d rather hear a mistake or two than watch them acting it out to a pre-recording. And a lot of it was pre-recorded, the girl playing guitar (not sure her name not a hip hop fan) got behind her pre-recorded strum at least once when she made some gesture to the crowd and forgot she had to keep “playing,” and the chorus of Yeah was literally just the studio version playing.Live music has flaws, but I’d prefer a real show of talent over a lip-sync spectacle, props to her for actually singing that live.
“Live music has flaws, but I’d prefer a real show of talent over a lip-sync spectacle, props to her for actually singing that live.”
Same. If I want to hear musical bots I’ll just stay at home and stream. It looks like a lot of tours might be moving to theatres in the future. It will be interesting to see how that entire industry (both actually) figure that out for maximum profit and perfection.
This – to go off on a tangent here – is what the AIbros don’t understand: that art is intent and execution, not merely ownership. Simply saying “Milli and Vanilli’s names are on the album” and crediting them and promoting them as singers doesn’t actually make them…singers.
Good tangent. Yes, art is intent and we know what AI is intended for.
It’s annoying that they edited it, but I’m more annoyed by people giving her shit for her voice cracking. Like, it happens to every singer. You can’t predict it or account for it, it just happens sometimes. And she recovered from it as smoothly as you possibly can.
Plus, she’s playing for 80,000 people in the stadium itself and a billion people on TV. Even the most seasoned performer would be shitting their pants on that kind of stage…
I would’ve paid to see her shit her pants on that kind of stage.
I’m not one to kink shame but…
to be fair, it’s only because she’s a no-talent hack and all the haters are flawless professional singers./s
If her in ear monitors were not working correctly, that would make it harder for her to hear herself. That would definitely impact her singing.
I wonder if singers with her experience still get terribly nervous before/during a performance. That can seriously mess up your perceptions.
that reminds me of this grammy story sheryl crow told this week. say what you will about her music, but this is absolute professional skill
Holy shit, she’s so untalented! I mean, the real version is soooooooo bad. So horrible! Why are we real musicians struggling when these Hollywood phonies can’t even sing? Singing is EASY!!! This is the biggest scandal ever, and not just for her! It’s all fake! Do you hear how they made that garbage she did sound TOTALLY different? It’s ALL fake. Everything you hear on the radio. With money, they can make ANYTHING sound good. It’s not just Keys. All of it, it’s all fake as hell.
Holy sh!7, she’s so untalented! I mean, the real version is soooooooo bad. So horrible! Why are we real musicians struggling when these Hollywood phonies can’t even sing? Singing is EASY!!! This is the biggest scandal ever, and not just for her! It’s all fake! Do you hear how they made that garbage she did sound TOTALLY different? It’s ALL fake. Everything you hear on the radio. With money, they can make ANYTHING sound good. It’s not just Keys. All of it, it’s all fake as all h3ll.
Wow, she’s so untalented! I mean, the real version is soooooooo bad. So horrible! Singing is EASY!!! This is the biggest scandal ever, and not just for her! It’s all fake! Do you hear how they made that garbage she did sound TOTALLY different? It’s ALL fake. Everything you hear on the radio. With money, they can make ANYTHING sound good. It’s not just Keys. All of it, it’s all phony.
Testing
She is terrible! You have ears, you know it’s true! Why do I bother as a music teacher to teach my students anything? None of these ‘stars’ have any talent- it’s all fake, bought and paid for. We’ve all been scammed.
why do your students bother with you?
Get off the drugs you trump-loving sociopathic freak. Obviously you have no idea what you’re talking about or who you’re talking to, you worthless talentless nobody who could dissappear from this Earth without a single person noticing. My mistake- your family will notice, and celebrate when you are gone.
Woo boy, looks like some aneurysms are happening in the greys.
Don’t read the greys; there’s weird shit in there!
she keeps it pumping straight in the greys…
Singing at that level is a physical performance as much as it is art. And just like sport, sometimes you miss. But also just like sport, people expect greatness from star performers just like athletes, and will get on them when they show that they are human and not super human. It’s not fair at all, but it’s par for the course of celebrity. I hope she just brushes it off and just ignores social media for the next two weeks. It will be forgotten as quickly as it became news. She actually sounded slightly sick for the entire performance. Her voice was raspier than her other live performances. And if that’s true, then she’s a trooper with still belting that out the best she could and not complaining about it after the fact.
Singing at that level is a physical performance as much as it is art. That’s why have so much respect for Beyonce. I may not think she’s that great of a singer, but her ability to perform along with her breath control are pretty amazing.
Like, it happens to every singer.It doesn’t. And if you listen to her duet with Jack White for the James Bond song Another Way to Die, she was struggling there too. She seems to always be trying to sing outside of her capabilities.
It does. The voice is an imprecise instrument that has a million different variables that can affect it, from mood to illness to outright random contractions. Show me a vocalist that never makes a mistake, and I’ll show you a vocalist that is very lucky live and very private about their sessions.
If there is one artist you can predict this would happen to, it would be her. She is a scream singer and has been straining her voice since the beginning of time. She has given pitchy performances for years now.
Maybe she should’ve just mimed to a track like everyone else does?
Wait I thought all SB halftime performances were all lip-synced?
I also thought that. The performers are moving/dancing around a lot and usually do a medley of songs so it’d be hard to actually sing, and with the roar of the massive crowd and other noise.
I was thinking of the Red Hot Chili Peppers apologizing for “lip syncing” in 2014, but apparently I got it wrong. According to Flea:
“It was made clear to us that the vocals would be live, but the bass, drums, and guitar would be pre-recorded.”So I guess vocals are live but everything else is mimed.
I like that the shittiest member of RHCP gets to perform live while the talented ones have to mime it…
I wondered if that piano was just a prop.
It was lascivious. I can’t believe we ruined Janet Jackson’s career over a nipple and then I had to watch that oddly sexual thing on stage.
Hmmmmm.
It’s no Schimmel Pegasus, but.It was designed by…wait, a German!?Oh, he had an Italian name. All good.
Well, when one piano loves another piano very much…And that’s where baby pianos come from.
gross
“That, um, cutout of Alicia’s piano. It looks like a big dick, pointing at her crotch. And we’ll have usher standing at the other side of it. Legal and HR and Standards & Practices with have a fit.”“What if we make it look only three-quarters erect?”“Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, that works.”
And keep it away from that Schimmel Pegasus’ orifice.
Nine months later…
Man, that thing would embarrass Little Richard.
which one are you talking about?
What a Prop it was. That sucker was beautiful in a wierd way.
Yeah there are plenty of articles with the guy who did most of the Super Bowl halftime shows. Vocals are always live but do have a pre-recorded track underneath should something go wrong with the mics they can “rescue” the show. Instruments aren’t because they have so little time to setup stages and ensure all the audio cables are plugged in and also not somehow unplugged. Just too many cables would need to be setup between that and lights. I also get editing that with the pre-recorded track to fix the crack, like yeah it is nice to have a reminder of it being live but also the internet would make a million memes and all the folks who swear they can hear autotune everywhere, would be making reaction videos left and right.
Bummer, Frusciante is the only thing I really dig about that band.
Since she had the luxury of sitting maybe that affected her choice.
Have you seen any clips of P!nk singing while she flies through the air (aerial performances)? She never fakes it. Unreal.
no I haven’t
Usher sang the entire way through live. While rollerskating and dancing. It’s why it was so impressive.
I bet he didn’t
I think they all are just a little (I mean for example, I’m no trained ear but there were definitely a few moments where you can hear the backing track when Usher’s singing), but they’re generally at least mostly real. It’s just that the main way you can only tell when one’s really bad. But I imagine soon like this article is talking about, you’ll never see a bad sounding halftime show again… at least on Youtube where they’ll tweak/fix it like they did this one.
I can think of so many resources I found on the internet even six years ago: stuff that was well-sourced, in-depth and had integrity…. gone.The world wants a perfect version of itself, and the Money Men are going to keep selling that and selling us remedies for our basic humanity and we’ll keep throwing them our money because, jfc, we have just got to be our Authentic Selves, which is the greatest scam. There is no actual ‘self’, just some (perfect) paradigm of conformity. I’m grateful for Keys’ flub because it’s hard to be both passionate and calculating at the same time.
I watched this live and didn’t even notice.
I have never been a fan of Alicia Key’s voice, whether it is raw or enhanced. I just find it blah.
yeah, well you know what? You’re no one, noooooo ooooneeee, nnnooooooooooowahhhhhhn specailatall.
I wish people were all as passionate as you are about it
People outside of big cities rarely really attend live performances of music these days that aren’t being put on by people already mega-stars, and this “live” music people go see is predominantly over produced in the way that you describe, even at what is supposed to be a “real” performance.
I wish more people were interested in hearing it without any makeup on.
At least some of the big pop stars and almost all rock bands still sing/play live, at least in their own tour shows.I blame EDM/house music or whatever you call it for people not caring about true live shows. Granted I’m 32 so I might as well be a boomer, but even when I was in college the “shows” that people went to see on weekends were just a guy with a computer that pre-mashed up synthetic beats. No one cared about the actual shows, and our school had decently big names at homecoming week and our downtown area has a big festival every year that’s had bands as big as Matchbox 20 and Train.Some is definitely the cost these days, and I really think that in order to get into live music if you weren’t brought up going to shows you gotta go to at least one really good one first. I’ve been to my fair share of concerts starting in high school but my wife never did, and never was really into going to see live shows other than with her girlfriends once or twice when the Jonas Brothers were in town. I took her to 2Cellos (highly recommend) just before covid and last summer dragged her to see (hold your laughter) Nickelback and Brantley Gilbert. Even though she gets annoyed when I turn them on in the car she said it was a show on par with Ed Sheeran, and was the best show I’ve ever been to. Since then she’s been looking at the next shows coming up and wants to see other rock bands when they come to town, and we’ll likely bring our daughter next time too. If they could get scalpers under control and it didn’t cost $500 for seats on the floor to see your favorite band (or a full weekend commitment in the summer for a festival) I think more people would get into it and hopefully appreciate live music more.
32? You sweet summer child.
(I don’t know what that means)
People outside of big cities rarely really attend live performances of music these days What?
FWIW, she did wear makeup. She obviously wore makeup at the SB and usually does wear some level of makeup at appearances – at least concealer and powder so she’s not blotchy or shiny under the camera lights. It’s just not full-face contouring and bright red lipstick, so people get confused as hell.
This is what happens when you don’t pay performers.
No, it has nothing to do with that.
yeah, but they promised she’d get a LOT of exposure.
Why isnt anyone ripping on the one gal who came out with the guitar and was “playing” it like a 4 year old does with their first toy guitar. That being, her hands weren’t even remotely close to the chords in any fashion whatsoever and was just hand slapping it like it was a new born baby’s ass.She didnt even try to hide the fact it was staged.Far worse than a minor voice crack by Alicia.
you seem pretty concerned with new born baby’s asses.
H.E.R. has not been around for as long as many artists who make it to the Super Bowl, so she probably isn’t used to faking her performances. Think about how you can tell someone is lip-syncing – usually their breathing doesn’t line up. It takes practice to fake it successfully. (My dad told me as a kid that my fake-sleeping needed work, and I was fooling him consistently a year later.)
I’m waiting for the Gizmodo article fetishizing the technology they used for this; the Root article about how noticing her mistake is racist, or fixing it is racist, or how letting Alicia Keys play instead of running a 52 minute beat poetry drop by a collective of Harlem performance artists that nobody who isn’t on NPR all day instead of having a job has heard of is racist; and the Kotaku article that re-links all of them in a listicle slideshow with no added context.
This is depressing. At some point in the past two decades, the world’s music producers decided we listeners just couldn’t handle the unaided human voice, and between the scrubbing and pre-taping of live performances and the reflexive use of pitch “correction” — even for perfectly competent singers — there’s a whole generation of listeners who have no idea how affecting a natural voice can be.
There are some technical limitations with performing at the Super Bowl.The wireless signals from the instruments would see interference and lag making the visual portion out-of-sync is a distracting fashion. (even a small delay of the signal to account couldn’t be overcome by “quantization of the inputs”). That’s assuming someone was willing to have an instrument “drop” is they were to perform live.Vocals are an interesting challenge when using a pre-tape. The singer hears the instrumentation and responds accordingly. Usually someone applies a small delay to the audio track and syncs it to the video according to the algorithm (SMPTE code or whatever standard they use these days.)*I follow band that was ripped apart for using a backing track. It was damn impossible for the singer to perform the harmonies to his own voice and for the guitarist to play more than one. Such a minor part of the live experience but the online trolls needed to scream about lip-syncing the point where the band came out, explained how they did it and told their own “fans?” to grow up!
Too many blacks and not enough diversity.
No one is going to miss you
No one cares about you or any of your nonsense.
“Will you remember, while you’re watching, that it didn’t sound quite like that on television?”I will, because of all the memes going around Black Twitter currently. That said, everyone knows she’s a great singer, and her vocals weren’t the best that night (not just that first note). I wonder how she feels about their fixing it.
Temu also changed their pronunciation from Teeeeemu to Taymu, even on old videos from last year’s SB spot. They went in and edited them. Mrs. F. did not believe me and I had a hard time proving myself correct, which I then kept to myself.
I think what we’re losing is that vocal crack (and some extra noise when Usher first started singing) reinforces that the vocals were actually live (something that’s been debated from the performance through to now). I wonder if it bothered her at all or not. When I hear her singing voice, it sounds to me like like it’s probably prone to cracks. For what it’s worth, I liked it–it has character and humanity. Seeing (and hearing) the effort once in a while makes it more real and exciting. All that stated, it’s not like live recordings don’t get punched-up one way or another all the time.
This is not exactly a new phenomenon with Alicia Off-Keys.
I’ve always found Alicia Keyes interesting because while clear she can sing VERY well, all her songs (which she writes?) seem to be in a different key or pitch then her voice can actually handle so she’s always sort of straining and it sounds like its coming from her throat and could break at any minute. Even on her albums.
Didn’t she write a whole album of songs in the same key…for some reason?
That’s what makes it all the more curious how quickly Keys’ minor flub
was struck from the record. It wasn’t a scandal or even really a
mistake.
Having seen the broadcast version, it didn’t even really stick in my mind that she made a mistake. I found the whole performance entertaining. I wish people would spend their energy worrying about things that genuinely mattered.
“Having seen the broadcast version, it didn’t even really stick in my mind”
gee, I’m reminded of another BIPOC who performed at the superbowl . . .
No one, nooo one, nooo waaahn cares.
Every single live album that has been released since 2001 has been pitch corrected to some level and capacity. All of those live YouTube videos you see of singers singing their songs live in a studio? All of them got treatment to adjust EQ and pitch post processing. If what you’re seeing is the actual live recording instead of them singing to the recording while videoing.All those live performances on Jimmy Fallon or David Letterman or whomever the talk show hosts are nowadays? Since there are several hours between recording those and airing them, I suspect that they are also heavily tweaked.I watched the live stream of Bon Jovi’s Rock and roll Hall of Fame induction. When it was actually released on Showtime, and subsequent official versions were released on the internet, not only had it been pitch-tuned, but Jon had obviously gone into a studio and completely re-recorded the vocals after the event. Now granted in his case, we later found out that he had suffered from vocal paralyzation at some point in the previous year on one of his vocal cords. But still, that was much more egregious than this slight edit.Welcome to the party, pal. This is not new and has been going on for decades.
This is why most performers used to do lip syncing to their own pre-recorded music for live performances.
She needs to stop. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard her voice cracking and going off-key at a live performance. A few years ago she was on BBC and it was unwatchable.Just retire, live off her millions and stop damaging her voice.
I think the wireless feed was off throughout the performance affected by all the other wireless shit going on. Even usher had some drops in the audio.
People suck.I’d rather hear a live version and appreciate the effort, even if there is a misstep. H.E.R. getting crap for her performance pisses me off as well. She may have not played live (wish she did) but the woman did play the recorded version. She is an amazing guitarist and a hell of a musician.Again, people suck.