For all the confusion, charges, and countercharges surrounding Mariah Carey’s ill-fated New Year’s Eve performance, one thing has now become clear: Team Mariah is waging an all-out war to ensure that she does not become the next Janet Jackson.
Carey’s representative could have taken the predictable route of issuing a statement defending its star and then moving on. Instead her manager has heaped blame on the producers of ABC’s Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest, including an extraordinary, profanity-laden interview with Entertainment Weekly.
The implicit takeaway from these fireworks is that Carey’s allies are bent on protecting her reputation so that her career does not suffer like Jackson’s after her infamous “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime performance.
To understand the strategy of the Carey camp, let’s walk through the events in question — including the strong denials of the show’s producers that they did anything wrong.
By 2am on Sunday, Carey’s Twitter account posted a response to the social media maelstrom that exploded after the just-before-midnight performance.
“Have a happy and healthy new year everybody!” she wrote. “Here’s to making more headlines in 2017.”
The account moved on to promoting Carey’s reality series on E!, which, coincidentally, was premiering that night.
Then Carey’s supporters went to work.
“I will never know the truth, but I do know that we told them three times that her mike pack was not working and it was a disastrous production,” Carey’s manager, Stella Bulochnikov, told Us Weekly magazine on Sunday. “I’m certainly not calling the FBI to investigate. It is what it is: New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Mariah did them a favour. She was the biggest star there, and they did not have their” act together.
A spokeswoman, Nicole Perna, said that Carey was not at fault for the performance.
“Unfortunately there was nothing she could do to continue with the performance given the circumstances,” she said.
Perna also told Billboard magazine that the production had “set her up to fail.”
Dick Clark Productions, which produced the show for ABC, released a statement in which it strenuously and emphatically denied it was in any way at fault for the glitches on New Year’s Eve.
“To suggest that [Dick Clark Production], as producer of music shows including the American Music Awards, Billboard Music Awards, New Year’s Rockin’ Eve and Academy of Country Music Awards, would ever intentionally compromise the success of any artist is defamatory, outrageous and frankly absurd. In very rare instances there are of course technical errors that can occur with live television; however, an initial investigation has indicated that [Dick Clark Productions] had no involvement in the challenges associated with Carey’s New Year’s Eve performance.”
Which brings us to Monday, when Bulochnikov gave a detailed — some might say exhaustive — interview to Entertainment Weekly, running down the events of the night and who was at fault minute by minute.
“It’s now four minutes to showtime. She says, ‘I hear nothing in my ears, my ears are dead.’ The other stage manager says, ‘It will work right when we go live.’ Then things start to get chaotic. They start counting her down — four minutes, three minutes. Mariah: ‘I can’t hear.’ Them: ‘You’re gonna hear when it goes live — two minutes!’
“So, right 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.”
Bulochnikov called the production company “disgusting” for not apologising to Carey.
Why the impassioned defence of their artist? Aside from loyalty, Carey’s representatives know all too well that when a performer stumbles — or even appears to stumble — justice is delivered swiftly in the court of public opinion.
In 2004, Justin Timberlake ripped a key piece of Jackson’s costume during a Super Bowl halftime performance, thrusting the word “wardrobe malfunction” into everyday language.
The incident came at the end of their final song. Jackson clapped a hand over her breast, and the lights went dark.
In the days and years that followed, neither performer was ever able to completely escape the performance, though Timberlake was far more successful than Jackson. Radio and television stations refused to play her songs, a planned performance at the Grammys was cancelled, and nearly every interview she gave for the next decade at least mentioned the incident.
“I probably got 10 per cent of the blame,” Timberlake told MTV. “I think America’s probably harsher on women, and I think America is, you know, unfairly harsh on ethnic people.”
In 2014, Michael Powell, who was the chairman of the FCC during the performance, told ESPN The Magazine that Jackson unfairly took the brunt of public shame for the incident.
“I personally thought that was really unfair,” Powell told the magazine. “It all turned into being about her. In reality, if you slow the thing down, it’s Justin ripping off her breastplate.”
In January 2013, as Beyonce was singing The Star-Spangled Banner at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration, the bombs were bursting in air when she reached up and, seamlessly though somewhat dramatically, removed the earpiece from her left ear.
The performance was celebrated, though the next day it was revealed that she had been lip-synching. CNN reported that she chose to rely on a recording because she had not had time to rehearse with the Marine Corps Band.
Beyonce’s reputation did not suffer. Even the Marine Corps Band’s spokesperson took pains to call Beyonce a gifted singer whose musical ability had nothing to do with the performance.
Ashlee Simpson, who had already performed her song Pieces of Me on Saturday Night Live and was about to perform another as a musical guest in 2004. Instead, Pieces of Me, complete with Simpson’s recorded vocal track, began to play. She lifted the microphone to her mouth, then let it drop, then gave up and started dancing a jig. Then she walked off the stage.
The producer Lorne Michaels told 60 Minutes that it was the first time, to his knowledge, that a performer had lip-synched on his show and that had he known that was the plan, he would not have allowed it to happen.
“If the plan had been, you know like, they’d done the Thursday rehearsal and had lip-synched and said, ‘Well, that’s what we do,’ then we would have said, ‘No, we can’t do that,’” he said.
