I would have to agree. Performance is quite different outside the studio. To achieve the recorded sound, pop musicians often have to lip-sync to reproduce that sound in very different conditions. That doesn't mean things don't go wrong in live performance every week at church. I sometimes say my place is 30 seconds from disaster at any given time. Stuff happens.

I didn't watch it, only heard about it. I have gone my entire life without even caring that there is a Mariah Carey.

I do understand what you are getting at. But the mishaps of highly paid performers is not one of the things I worry about. We have to be on our toes all the time in sacred music to keep the unexpected from happening, but it still does.

Someone who requires a microphone to perform is a performer, not a singer.

Well, to perform for a large audience *outdoors* in a non-acoustic space (I'm not talking about Greek and Roman theaters that did have some good acoustical properties), amplification is hardly unreasonable. When Miss Anderson started her career (and she antedated Ethel Merman by a decade), operas in opera houses were not amplified - nor were musicals on Broadway.

And to sing in Times Square with the din of a million people: that's simply insanity. Performers should just do pantomime and not even pretend to sing - something more like non-dialogue movies. Would be fitting.

When King Kong performs "Puttin' on the Ritz," francis, when else?

Francis

I can't give you a *reason*. I can, however, give you many *unreasons*! I am so *not* a pop culture person, so I can't date the advent of concerts in Times Square for NYE precisely, but I believe it dates back over 40 years to when Dick Clark competed on NBC with CBS's Guy Lombardo in his last years (whose band performed indoors at the Waldorf), and Lombardo's orchestra was not able to sustain his legacy with CBS for more than a couple of years. I never liked "Rockin' New Year's Eve" even as a teenager at that time. (Then again, while three of my older siblings were blaring rock music out of the windows of our home, I was playing Bruckner and Mahler and others on my stereo or playing horn (as in French horn). I was the Counterculture as *I* understood it. Our neighbors nicknamed our house as "The Music Box".)

What's so funny about this is that Times Square in the mid-1970s was one of many places in NYC that people tried to avoid being in for very long. That was its nadir. It was something of a Slough of Despond. The tarting up (and extraordinarily over-lighting) of the place started in the 1980s (Koch administration) and has only accelerated over the years.

It's not the place where my mother and father met on NYE while the latter was on leave in World War II, and my mother was lifted off the street by the pressure of the celebrating crowd and lost her heels in the process.

Good points, Liam.

My question is simply an answer in a question. I wasn't expecting you to respond, actually. But thanks just the same.

There is NO reason to EVER go to a concert in which the performer is not really performing, but the whole world has run after just that. It is foolishness chasing a fool for foolishiness sake.

And to try to do this in church... well... God cannot be fooled no matter how good your lip syncing skills may be.

The incredible thing to me is that a million people would show up to mark a moment (less than one second long) that brings one from one year into another. The 'ball' is simply a mechanism to extort along with any of the 'performers' including Dick Clark or anyone else. I slept well on December 31 (starting at 10:30pm).

It was only until this post that I became aware of the many people's major goof of buying a ticket to an event that was so lame. The joke is on them, the premium hacks and media demagogues of tinsledom.

and lost her heels in the process.

Sounds painful.

her first mistake was showing up to do it. from there it was predictable.