Does Mariah Sing Live?

David Munk:

As someone who specializes in singers, real singers, devoted almost the entirety of my 20 year career (now over, I guess) to working with real singers, your posting on Mariah Mania wound me up.

The elephant in the room with Mariah is that she is thought by many (especially the younger generation) as the singer’s singer — and she doesn’t even sing live. Anybody in the industry (and I’ve had this confirmed by her sound engineers and producers) will tell you that when performing "live", she drops in live vocal lines only occasionally and when she feels comfortable. The live vocal parts are interchanged with pre-recorded vocals that differ from the recorded versions. She is, therefore, essentially, a studio singer.

Unlike you, I can name and sing a bunch of her songs, but that doesn’t change the depressing fact that she lacks either the chops or the guts to sing live. Madonna does the same thing with her vocal parts "live", but she is, essentially, an entertainer — a dancer — and it was presumably never about her voice. Mariah stands there and "sings", only she is not singing. And no one knows the difference and I wonder if anyone, the younger generations especially, raised on videos, would even care. This kind of subterfuge is commonplace nowadays, but just listen to Aretha, Joplin, Streisand in the 60s, Ann Wilson et. al to consider how far we’ve sunk.

Instead of listening to Mariah’s whistle notes why doesn’t someone please blow the whistle?

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Hey Bob. Instead of challenging us to sing three Mariah Carey songs, maybe you should challenge Mariah to sing those three songs herself. Have you caught any of her most recent live performances on Oprah or American Idol? Hell, even go back to Live 8. She has taken to lipsyncing the second half of her songs. It’s quite curious. She starts off…tolerable. Face it, she doesn’t even have much of a low range anymore, then, when the song swells and the bigger vocals come in, cue the backing track! It’s hilarious. She starts flailing her arms, pointing to the crowd and running around the stage, as if this entire act helps her muster the energy to bring those big notes to life. It’s a horrible cover-up. I wonder just how much Pro-Tooling was done on E=MC2? Hooray for Melodyne.

You are completely right about her new album being a product. Her new single, "touch my body" is a carbon-copy of her last big single, "we belong together". When your voice and any remote ablity you once had to write a somewhat decent song goes, put a mental picture in young boys’ heads of them grabbing your fake boobs, and maybe you’ll get a few downloads out of the deal. I wonder if Mariah really believes that she is still on top? Unfortunately for her, "you know it’s just a sweet, sweet fantasy baby."

Jimmy Mancus

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Re: Mariah Madness

I was talking to one FYE store manager (friend of mine) and he was complaining that they were shipped 300 copies of the album for his store and that he would be surprised if they sold 5. I just called him and they sold 3 for the week.

Please withhold my name if needed

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