(By Chris Richards, Washington
Post, 23 January 2013)
Moments after President Obama
recited the oath of office Monday, Beyonce floated to the podium on the steps
of the Capitol — golden tresses spilling onto her shoulders — to deliver our
national anthem. Both acts were largely ceremonial. He had been officially
sworn in the day before; she allegedly mouthed along to a recording
made Sunday with the U.S. Marine Band. Now,
the president is back at work and the pop star is busy ignoring torrents of
criticism. Fans flooded social media with praise for Beyonce’s agile rendition
of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on Monday, and then replaced it with harrumphs on
Tuesday when we all learned she might have been lip-syncing. If anything, our disappointment shows how
confused our culture has become over its wobbly standards of authenticity.
Whether we’re channel surfing or
grocery shopping, Americans consistently and zealously demand “real.” But not
really. Instagram filters our memories, Cherry Coke Zero involves zero
cherries, and the friends we collect on Facebook are rarely people we would
invite into our homes. So why draw the line at Beyonce? Pop music has always been a place where
fantasy and reality have ground up against each other to create hot sparks.
From artists’ mythologized narratives to the actual transactions taking place
up onstage, deception plays a huge role in how we consume this stuff. Was Paul
dead? Has Taylor Swift ever used Auto-Tune? Does Bruce Springsteen sing from a
teleprompter? Did Rick Ross once work as a correctional officer? WasWhitney Houston’s 1991 gold-standard
rendition of the national anthem lip-synced, too? (Answers: No, not
sure, yes, yep and uh-huh.)
When it comes to live performance,
contemporary pop fans are caught in a riptide. We expect kinetic concert
experiences filled with lung-monopolizing choreography. Meanwhile, a dozen
seasons of “American Idol” have made us all connoisseurs of acrobatic,
soul-inspired pop vocalization. How many times has a “little pitchy, dawg”
thought bubble involuntarily bloomed above your head? Too many. We want it both ways, and we demand that it
all be real. To paraphrase author and thinker David Shields, our culture craves
reality because we experience so little of it. Social media have scrambled our
perceptions of friendship, fellowship, and, thanks to the recent and galactic
humiliation of Manti Te’o, courtship. Add
that to a century of pop culture built around the principle of suspension of
disbelief, and it becomes tricky to be honest about when we’re okay with being
deceived.
We blew our whistles at Mike Daisey and James Frey because we laid
our money — and secondarily, our trust — down for one thing and were given
something else. A pop concert operates on a similar kind of contract, even
though the fine print often remains unacknowledged. We all expect Madonna to
lip-sync. Yet, somewhat illogically, many of us would be aghast if Adele did
it. Or maybe not. At Adele concerts — or
any pop concert — fans are quick to raise handheld phones to capture the
performance on video, their eyes locked on a small, glowing screen instead of
the three-dimensional humans up onstage. We often prefer not to experience the
real thing even when it’s right there in front of us.
Regardless of what happens out on
the dance floor, live pop music has always been a compromise between stagecraft
and spontaneity. And considering the occasion, our disappointment with Beyonce
this week is steeped in our muddled, unflagging desire for the latter. Because this was a once-in-a-lifetime gig.
Hundreds of thousands assembled to cheer history along. An ocean of flags
flapped in the January cold. Before finally retreating to the warmth of the
Capitol building, Obama paused for a moment to soak the entire scene in.
Beyonce was seeing it, too, right?
That’s why it’s reasonable to hope that the images landing on her retinas were
influencing the sounds bursting from her throat. It’s what ultimately invests
us in a live performance: the idea that our presence plays some kind of role in
the outcome. Instead, the lip-syncing
allegations punched a tiny hole in the fantasy of Monday afternoon. They made
an uplifting mass gathering feel like hyper-scripted ritual — which, like so
many big, beloved, all-together-now pop culture moments, it absolutely was.
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