Oops! ... She did it again! Yes, Britney Spears mimed during a live show and her Australian fans weren’t happy about it. So unhappy in fact that they reportedly walked out of the gig three songs into the Perth show. Her tour promoter, Paul Dainty, denied the claims, but did concede that Spears was “aware of all of this and [was] extremely upset by it”.
But why did they leave? It seems strange when you consider that at the previous 84 dates of the worldwide, massively publicised Circus tour she has mimed through the show. The fans who walked out had presumably been cohabiting under a large rock in the months leading up to the gig.
In the midst of the brouhaha Dainty hit the nail on the head, concluding that focusing on the “mimed or not mimed” aspect of the show was missing the point. “This show is about an incredible spectacle, which it is,” he said.
Miming has always been an extremely contentious issue, with serious muso types complaining about the preponderance of prerecorded tracks during pop concerts and television performances. They value the live vocal above all else, which, in the context of a classic rock show, is understandable. But the realities of a pop concert are very different.
During these high energy, two-hour-plus shows, performers are contending with multiple dance routines, sizzling pyrotechnics and costume changes, making the likelihood of adequately recreating a studio-quality vocal near impossible. Indeed on the eve of her last tour, the Onyx Hotel tour in 2004, Spears’s manager Larry Rudolf publicly stated: “On those numbers that are difficult (if not impossible) for her to sing completely live, what we do is we’ll put a backing track which will support her.”
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And why not? Would we really want to see a sweaty Spears wheezing through a jazzed up version of Oops! ... I Did It Again, dressed in a skimpy two piece, hanging upside down from a trapeze, all the while trying to do the “I’m trapped in a box” dance?
Pop fans have long been savvy to the audio tools that more and more artists use during their live shows. Prerecorded vocals are mixed with live ones, which are in turn, massaged using pitch shifters and Auto-Tune techniques that iron out all the off-key moments. These knowing punters go along to a pop show expecting an exciting live spectacle, not to be wowed by vocal somersaults and the depth of songwriting. They’d rather not see their favourite songs being ruined by off-key singing. Instead, they want to see a good show.
But not everyone agrees. In 2004 Elton John publicly guffawed at the Q Awards when Madonna won the Best Live Act category. “Since when has lip-syncing been live?” John said. “Anyone who lip-syncs in public on stage when you pay £75 to see them should be shot.” Madonna retaliated on Parkinson, saying “yeah ... but” and then mimed John’s hair transplant blowing off in the wind. Her point seemed to be: one persons definition of authentic is another’s definition of fake.
More recently, there was controversy when Cheryl Cole’s much-hyped performance of Fight For This Love on The X Factor consisted of a partly prerecorded vocal. The performance, which included a stunning, Janet Jackson-inspired dance routine, was much heralded. Understandably, Cole herself could not fathom why the miming issue was so huge. “I really don’t see the problem. I will be singing live,” she told the Evening Standard. “I just won’t have time to get changed and get prepared for the performance and be a judge on the show. It would be too hectic.”
Surely that Cole had proved herself vocally, week in week out, on Popstars: The Rivals in 2002 should have been enough to make the questioning of her ability to sing live null and void?
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Television shows have long stood by the policy of miming. From Ready Steady Go onwards, it just made more sense, considering the audio/visual practicalities of TV, for a singer or band to lip-sync to a prerecorded track. At the dawn of the 1980s with MTV and the growth in importance of the promo clip, audiences got used to their favourite song being accompanied by a visual spectacle and artists mouthing the words to a track. The chasm between the amateurish live show and the slick, Duran-Duran-on-a-yacht spectacle of the video grew and what fans expected from performances changed massively.
Indeed, when Top of the Pops announced its doomed “real music” mantra in 1991 and adopted a “live vocal to a prerecorded backing track” policy (infamously parodied by Kurt Cobain during his performance of Smells Like Teen Spirit), it was the death knell for the show. The curtains were lifted to reveal that the Wizard of Oz-figure was in fact quite a bad live singer. And, as it turned out, we’d rather have the slick choreography and the song sung in the way we know and love, thank you very much.
In the context of all this, the apparent outrage of Spears’s Perth fans seems faintly ridiculous. As the singer/songwriter John Mayer recently tweeted on the matter: “If you’re shocked that Britney was lip-syncing at her concert and want your money back, life may continue to be hard for you.”