Forget truth in advertising... how about truth in "live" performances?
We have now learned that neither Faith Hill nor Jennifer Hudson performed live at Sunday's Super Bowl. This, after finding out that Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman didn't perform live at the Obama inaugural either. If they tell me tomorrow Bruce Springsteen was on tape, there's no hope.
What right does a network have to present an apparently "live" performance before, during or after an apparently "live" (God, who knows?) football game with no indication that the singer is lip-synching to an earlier-recorded version?
Here, the defense, as quoted by the Associated Press from the producer of the pregame show, Rickey Minor, a producer and music director of American Idol: "That's the right way to do it. There's too many variables to go live. I would never recommend any artist go live because the slightest glitch would devastate the performance." (Ignore the word choice and wrong subject-verb agreement.)
What is this guy really saying? Professional performers, paid a king's ransom to do their stuff on the most-watched telecast of the year, cannot be relied upon to get it right, so we get it right for them. And furthermore, the audience doesn't know or care, so doesn't deserve the courtesy of a heads-up. I'll bet that if you polled the audience as to whether Hill and Hudson were singing live, more than 99 percent would answer "live." And apparently, according to ABC News, the Super Bowl lip-synching has pretty much been standard operating procedure since 1994.
Late last month, The New York Times provided a pseudo-scientific explanation for why Ma, Perlman and company couldn't play live at the Obama inaugural, having to do with potential "broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation" caused by the freezing temperatures and wind on the Mall Jan. 20. They could sell that because, frankly, how many people know enough about the fragility of classical instruments and the variability in tone that extreme weather conditions might cause to dispute that? But, come on, Tampa's weather was in the 60s, there are Teleprompters for the words, and, again, these are supposed to be professionals. That's why they're at the Super Bowl.
And when things do go wrong, or the forecast "glitch" does occur, sometimes it adds to the charm and the memorable nature of a live occasion. Anyone old enough to have watched John F. Kennedy's inauguration remembers (probably with a few tears) the scene when the 87-year-old Robert Frost could not see the words on the page of his poem written for the occasion due to his failing eyesight and the bright sunshine off the snow, and instead recited "The Gift Outright" from memory. Far from a "glitch," it was a noble, human moment in a glorious inauguration ceremony.
Finally, don't these producers feel they owe the audience anything? Or, is it just how much they can get over on us? If they're not going to allow the "live" performers to perform live, how hard is it to tell us? "Performance by Jennifer Hudson previously recorded." Newspapers and magazines certainly know how to inform readers that "portions of the above article appeared previously in" another publication, or that photographs are not what they appear to be: "photo illustration by the New York Post."
The bottom line is: they don't want to take a chance on a live performer, no matter how professional, and they don't want to tell us when they don't. They want us to think we're getting The Real Deal when we're actually getting Memorex. And how far from Milli Vanilli is that, really?