Beyonce sound board recording a hoax?
In case you haven’t seen/heard this audio that has been making it’s way across the internet allow me to bring you up to speed. Basically this is a recording of the Howard Stern radio show where he plays and comments on Beyonce Knowles “board feed” from a performance of hers on The Today Show. Basically it’s supposed to be what Beyonce was singing into the microphone -- which doesn’t get played to the audience. No, you see most pop artists like Beyonce choose to lip synch at their shows more often than actually singing, so what is usually heard is a backing track and what’s being sang into the mic doesn’t come through the speakers. Anyway, this video is supposed to be the raw feed of what Beyonce REALLY sounded like that day.
It turns out that the whole thing is a hoax however. Rollingstone.com has found the culprit and has an interview about the whole process. The 26-year-old computer art student from Connecticut has stated that he digitally manipulated the actual audio from The Today Show performance in order to prove a point. He said to Rolling Stone, “I wanted to show people how easy it is to manipulate someone’s voice. If I can do it with a clip I pulled off of TV, imagine what they are doing on records and during live performances. The entire industry has been so manipulated, because there’s such an emphasis on perfection, so when something like this happens, it causes such a stir.”
In a world where most of the popular main stream artists can get away with lip synching and faking it (see Britney Spears, Ashlee Simpson, Mariah Carey, etc.) instead of actually performing, I was glad to see someone call out Beyonce. Too bad it turned out to be fake. The person who made the audio brings up a good point though. Why is the music industry so screwed up?
Read the whole RollingStone interview here.
