r/LiveFromNewYork • u/keritro • 21h ago
Lorne Michaels reacts to Ashlee Simpson SNL lip-sync debacle in unaired 2004 clip Article
https://www.justjared.com/2024/09/24/lorne-michaels-real-time-reaction-to-ashlee-simpsons-snl-lip-syncing-unearthed-in-newly-released-2004-audio/165
u/rekipsj 21h ago
She’s paid the price professionally. I absolve her of her sins.
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u/windmillninja 21h ago edited 20h ago
I don't think the media backlash would have been quite as harsh had she just not said anything during the goodnights instead of trying to do last minute damage control and throwing her band under the bus.
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u/NickNash1985 20h ago
She was 19 and just fell into an embarrassing professional situation that was out of her control. People say dumb things. It's not that big of a deal.
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u/kingofthemonsters 17h ago
Her manager had to have been there though, or at least someone to tell her the right thing to do (I hope at least)
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u/SmarcusStroman 16h ago
Bold to assume it wasn't a manager or publicist that gave her the poor advice to word that into throwing her band under the bus instead of a DJ.
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u/FridayHalfDays 20h ago
“My band played the wrong song!!”…yeah, right. I remember her also getting booed at a football game half time show. Orange Bowl maybe.
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u/W00DERS0N60 14h ago
It was the Orange Bowl, and hoo boy I did actually feel bad for her, because that crowd let her have it.
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u/abgry_krakow87 16h ago
In her defense too, something like that hadn't really happened to the point that she would've known how to respond either way.
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u/wrong_again 8h ago edited 8h ago
I mean to be fair, her drummer did cue up the wrong backing track (of the song they had already performed). She’s the one who bailed on the performance sure, but what she said isn’t totally false either.
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u/Zeppelanoid Someone's gotta watch the white sports 21h ago
Ehhhh she was on the fringe anyways, it’s not like she was some great talent. So to find out she was lip syncing…why bother with watching her shows then?
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u/SocietyAlternative41 21h ago
1 good song would have stopped it all.
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u/keritro 21h ago
glad to know he had a normal reaction unlike... the rest of the country
and glad he brought her back the following year.
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20h ago
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u/corpserella 20h ago
I don't think OP said what she did was good, just that it wasn't the grievous faux-pas a lot of people wanted it to be.
I am not in any way a fan of Ashlee Simpson, but she got a raw deal here. MOST pop starlets like her lip-sync for gigs like SNL. This girl was was young, not in charge of her own career, and listening to people who were more experienced telling her things would be fine. And for a lot of other artists, they WERE fine. Someone else screwed up, playing the wrong song and not the one she'd prepared for.
Was her response less than ideal? Sure, but it's also a lot to say "a-ha! We gotcha! Now we know you lip sync so no one should ever buy your albums again!" Britney lipsyncs. J-Lo lipsyncs. Mariah does too. No one is coming for them whenever this shit happens.
Ashlee felt like a vulnerable target that it was safe to socially pile on, and that kind of sucks.
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u/Fergi 20h ago edited 20h ago
She was the next young woman in line to be torn down by American society. I don’t think people who didn’t live through that era can appreciate just how gleeful people were to hate these women. It was a normalized blood sport. People felt entitled to the viciousness and the media facilitated it because it made money. Yuck.
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u/corpserella 20h ago
Exactly. You really couldn't have a human moment (as a female starlet) or fuck up at all in the public eye or else people would be excoriating you for not deserving your celebrity.
As though celebrity is some kind of privilege gifted to only those who can be trusted to use it with dignity and earnestness.
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u/tyler-86 19h ago
You're not wrong but she also just wasn't that good. She was propped up and it was a lot easier for people to knock down a house on flimsy stilts than one with a solid foundation of talent.
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u/ExistentialKazoo 6h ago
she was relatively as talented/untalented at making music I can't stand to listen to as many who had come before her, including her sister, and many who would come after. Oh, she wasn't as wildly talented as Avril? Hillary Duff? Selena Gomez?
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u/tyler-86 5h ago
Ashlee had a lot more to prove to people since there was perceived nepotism, but Avril would've been absolutely trashed for a similar incident on live television. Both came across as manufactured. Selena and Hilary maybe earlier in their career but they had the Disney stamp of approval.
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u/firedsynapse 19h ago
I got news for you. She ain't the first and she ain't the last. Anytime you see a performer dancing with a tiny mic wrapped around her face? She's singing to a prerecorded track if she's singing at all. Last one that comes to mind for me is Tate McRae.
Ever wonder why standard mics pick up inhales and those tiny mics - the ones an inch from their mouth while they're dancing like crazy - don't?
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u/LinkLT3 18h ago
Because those small mics aren’t directly in front of the performer’s mouth and so the mic doesn’t pick up breaths as strongly as they would if they were on-axis. Because of that, they’re easier to run a de-breather plugin during a live situation with fewer artifacts than the handheld is. Weird to just invent your own little explanation for something that has a real one that’s super easy to explain.
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u/crazyguyunderthedesk 18h ago
Thank you for commenting. I was reading their comment like, do they have any idea, at all, about how mics work? Let alone that there are different kinds?
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u/Officialfunknasty 20h ago
Tell me you don’t know that not everything on TV is exactly what it seems without telling me you don’t know that not everything on TV is exactly what it seems 😂
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u/corpserella 20h ago
What does this comment even mean? I got lost in the triple negatives
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u/Officialfunknasty 20h ago
What I mean to say is: Not everything on TV is real. And this person having such strong feelings about someone on TV lip syncing clearly doesn’t know that a lot of what we see on tv is not real 😂 (lip syncing on tv has always been quite a common occurrence)
I think when I wrote it I managed to keep the negatives in line so it means what I think it means, but would I bet my life on it? Definitely not hahaha
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u/ForTheLoveOfOedon 17h ago
You know absolutely zero—possibly negative about the music industry, don’t you? You don’t even understand it as a baseline.
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u/nitelitecafe 20h ago
The hoe-down, little jig she does as the cameras pull back is my take-away. It should be the gold standard to cringe out of a cringe moment.
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u/bankersbox98 20h ago
Can’t believe that was 20 years ago. I felt bad for her but she shouldn’t have blamed the poor band. Just own it. Most live performances are lip synched.
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u/Draxtonsmitz 19h ago
Link to the interview: https://youtu.be/CsDRqoorztA?si=xhjSwd6i2Fw_Sr53
Link to the lip sync fail: https://youtu.be/lWJCfbMw0Yo?si=5U6NM3cfY26KJuI8
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u/jalabi99 12h ago
Ironically the new PayPal ad with Will Ferrell played right before the interview vid :)
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u/TheRippedMrTalently 21h ago
I watch plenty of "live" performances from the 70s that are obviously just the band pantomiming over the very obvious studio version of the song. When you add the element of choreography, it makes sense as well. She just happened to get messed up by the audio, and then her reaction was what really made the whole thing a fiasco.
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u/SssnakeJaw 20h ago
This is literally ever performance on American Bandstand. They even lip-synced through the fade out.
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u/TheRippedMrTalently 20h ago
There's a funny Kinks performance of Mr. Pleasant where they are making themselves laugh because Davies is holding up a guitar wire that isn't connected to anything.
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u/hamilton_burger 20h ago
SNL always promoted the acts as being live. There’s a big difference between SNL and something like the old Dick Clark show.
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u/Truecoat 20h ago
I've been watching some old performances recorded live in the 60s and 70s. Some shows did record live but the ones that didn't can be pretty bad. The drummer will just kind of wave his hands up and down.
On an unrelated note, Edwin Starr doing War on the Midnight Special is amazing.
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u/TheRippedMrTalently 20h ago
Check out Focus doing Hocus Pocus on I think Midnight Special. Song is like 6+ minutes and they only had a 4 minute slot, so they had to play it sped up.
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u/Corporation_tshirt 18h ago
Hot damn! I’ve never seen that. I’ve never been much of a fan of theirs, but man you’vengot to give them credit for that barn burner of a performance. My favorite thing about that band is that the drummer Pierre van der Linden uses a traditional grip with his sticks. Amazing. Thanks for that.
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u/Michael_G_Bordin 16h ago
Nothing will get a drummer more pissed than telling them to pantomime. Hire a fucking actor if that's what you want.
If you want to know if a band is pantomiming, look at the drummer first. Cymbal crashes that don't match, fills not quite looking right, or they'll flat out just be half-assing it.
It makes it really easy when there are no microphones on the drum kit.
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u/Corporation_tshirt 18h ago
The word ‘live’ in the name of the show sort of makes it implicit that the artists will be performing live. As somebody else said, though, I mainly disagreed with the fact that she blamed her band, which might have hurt their chances to find work later. But big deal. So she couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, if people like her music then let them enjoy it.
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u/crazyguyunderthedesk 17h ago
No way it hurt them finding work later. That lie was for the public, not industry professionals.
As simple and easy as the songs are, the only way you get that job is being a proper professional musician. Nobody in the position to offer them work would have believed for a second that the band was at fault. If anything, they now have a wild anecdote that may actually increase their odds of getting in the audition room.
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u/deviousmajik 21h ago
Am I missing something, because I couldn't find the clip in that article. One link opened up the podcast app, but I don't see anything about SNL in the recent listings.
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u/thedude0425 19h ago
The dude probably sees 50 things every night that he didn’t like, didn’t go how he thought, or didn’t work. We may not see them, but he does. To him, this was probably just another one of those things.
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u/Chaghatai 17h ago edited 15h ago
So Lorne called it an "accident" that had nothing to do with him or his crew
In the linked article the article linked to that had Simpson's comments, she said her people asked to go on with pre recorded vocals because she had damaged her vocal cords
So what was the "accident"? Getting caught?
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u/keritro 16h ago
yeah lol + the person who was in charge of playing the prerecorded track also messed up and played the track she had already performed minutes earlier and exposed/threw the whole thing off (so if Lorne says that had nothing to do with his crew maybe it was weirdly someone from her band who was in charge of doing that and why she blamed them?)
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u/notmenotyounotmenot 10h ago
Love seeing Ashlee owning the mistake years later though! https://youtu.be/Nac0KKXbqdI?si=ZwmYtyCnqJKxYE6I
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u/MikeDubbz 20h ago
I remember watching her reality show that retroactively tried to stage that whole scenario like she was sick. And it's like who are you kidding? This was never going to be an actual episode if she wasn't found out to be lip-syncing. And was anyone even buying that episode as genuine? Maaaaybe she really was sick and that's why she lip-synced, but I suspect the reality is that she's simply not a genuinely good live singer.
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u/877_Cash_Nowww 18h ago
I remember watching this live and my dude and I were like WTF is happening. She looked like an idiot.
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u/Additional_Score_929 20h ago edited 20h ago
The lip-syncing would've been okay had she not walked off the stage and just given up completely. That's why she made headlines. She walked off. So many pop artists who dance their butts off lip-sync on SNL. Who cares if you perform the same song twice? It's live TV. Be professional, roll with the punches and finish your damn performance.
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u/simonthedlgger 17h ago
The band was playing Song 2 and the vocal track for Song 1 started to play, then immediately went way down in volume but kept playing. The band, to their credit, shifted to play Song 1 but they clearly had no clue what was going on. She didn’t really have an opportunity to play Song 1 again, though I think that would be equally bizarre/memorable.
I don’t see it as unprofessional, it’s not like she dipped on a concert of die hard fans. It was a trainwreck late night performance, go ask The Vines about it. The unprofessional part was blaming it on the band, though apparently that is indeed what happened (drummer was in charge of triggering the vocal tracks but played the wrong one). Still, no need to take your bandmates down with you.
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u/Additional_Score_929 17h ago
I'd say walking off stage, instead of adapting like the rest of the band did, was unprofessional. The band seamlessly went into playing song 1.
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u/Different-Aspect-888 2h ago
Yeah like pretend that snl audio team knows nothing about their setup.
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21h ago
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u/TalkinBoutGerbils 21h ago
lol that’s a lot of emotion for something that happened 20 years ago
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u/glacinda 20h ago
And SNL has had pre-taped segments for decades. It’s been 20 years. Relax.
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u/MikeDubbz 20h ago
They don't try to disguise those pre-taped segments as not pre-taped though. Not exactly the same.
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u/hamilton_burger 20h ago
A pretape is not even remotely the same as presenting a music act as if it is live, when it is actually lip synch. Sometimes Lorne should be more concerned with servicing the audience than with servicing entertainment business cronies. Upvote, downvote, but outside of this bubble this was considered one of the most embarrassing moments in SNL history, and for Lorne. It isn’t only because it was lip synch - plenty of shows are known for lip syncing, it was because they were trying to pull the wool over the public’s eyes and were exposed for the lie. The show is Saturday Night LIVE, with the connotation that the music performances are LIVE, not canned.
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u/ShortBrownAndUgly 21h ago
For Lorne it was good publicity. People talked about that shit a lot. She’s the one who suffered the consequences. Plus, after decades of live TV I’m sure he’s seen much worse