Mariah Carey has opened up about her “horrible” New Year’s Eve performance in Times Square, in which the singer lip-synced her way through two songs as audio issues plagued her set.
“All I can say is Dick Clark was an incredible person and I was lucky enough to work with him when I first started in the music business,” Carey said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I’m of the opinion that Dick Clark would not have let an artist go through that and he would have been as mortified as I was in real time.”
The Grammy-winning singer faced myriad technical difficulties Saturday while headlining Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve live from Times Square. The audio issues quickly turned Carey’s performance into a cringeworthy lip-sync nightmare seen by millions and which subsequently went viral online.
The “Emotions” singer’s management team blamed the debacle on Dick Clark Productions, which produces the annual event.
Carey’s manager Stella Bulochnikov called the incident a “huge mechanical glitch” that was purposely used to create a “viral moment” at the singer’s expense.
“And that’s not a company with integrity for 50-something years,” Bulochnikov told EW. “That’s not who Dick Clark was. He loved artists.”
Carey says Saturday’s mishap was part of “an incredible holiday season that turned into a horrible New Year’s Eve.”
In the hours after the on-air fiasco, Carey shrugged it off. “Sh*t happens,” she tweeted, adding “Have a happy and healthy new year everybody! Here’s to making more headlines in 2017.”
Now, the 46-year-old star says she’s ready to move on. Carey is currently executive producing her own reality TV series, Mariah’s World, which airs Sundays on E!.
“I hope that fans love it as much as I do and are having a good time watching it,” she said. “And that they can see that we really went there and gave them a candid look into Mariah’s World. We held nothing back.”
Mariah’s World premiered Sunday, December 4 with an impressive 2.2 million viewers tuning in across E! and Bravo. The show’s ratings have dropped considerably in the following weeks.
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