Truth in Lip-Synching

Lining up with a post I wrote last week about musicians using tapes in concerts, the Musicians' Union of Britain is calling for performers to acknowledge when they're lip-synching. It's truth in labeling, after all. Somewhat disingenuously, it seems to me, union spokesperson Keith Ames said, "Stand up and be honest about it. We won't knock you for using recordings." They won't need to knock those performers because the label of lip-syncing alone will be a stigma to many. Still, they should be stigmatized if they're trying to fool the public.

For me this really is an issue of live authenticity. If we think we're seeing a live performance, whether that's in person or on a TV show such as Saturday Night Live, we should be made aware if we're not. But I don't feel as strongly about using studio tricks on a recording. That's part of what recordings are for. I never understood the whole flap over Milli Vanilli all those years ago. People were buying CDs. The music on the CD still sounded as good (or not) as it always did whether it was sung by those two guys on the CD cover and on the videos or not. You're buying a song--it doesn't matter who did the song if it still sounds the same as it always did. I don't know if I'm blowing the lid off of anything or not, but if anybody's reading this who's old enough to remember Archie cartoons on Saturday mornings, the Archies weren't really singing, either. They're cartoon characters. They don't even have real voices. (And just for the record, it always sounded like Archie's singing voice was far closer to Reggie's speaking voice than it was to Archie's. In my imagination, Reggie was always the lead singer, whether Archie was the frontman or not.)

I'm with the British union. Let's make it clear when we're hearing a live performance and when we're not. If a performer or band can't replicate its studio sound live, then they've got no business taking their show on the road.