Making it by faking it

For years now, we’ve been railing against the occasional practice of lazy singers to lip-synch their way through a vocal performance on TV or in live shows.

All the while, we’ve been waiting for professional singers themselves to weigh in on the issue, but most of them have timorously not been heard from in this regard.

Recently, however, a few singers have finally castigated their colleagues for fooling or trying to fool the viewing public by lazily pretending to sing when all they’re actually doing is mouthing lyrics to their own prerecorded voices.

Quite instructively, this has been observed to also be done by actors who don’t really know how to sing, but have even come up with “hit” albums that are bought by their many fans just because they’re popular.

The albums aren’t completely the product of lip-synching, but the nonsinging actors’ voices have been so “enhanced” by the new vocal special effects and techniques available these days that they are still held to be questionable and suspect.

In the past, singers kept quiet on the issue, perhaps because they sometimes resorted to the lazy practice themselves—or didn’t want to get on the bad side of their erring colleagues.

But, now that the yowling cat is out of the bag, we hope that other singers demand that the practice be stopped, because it’s unprofessional, and encourages others to fool the listening public, as well.

When we first started writing about local attempts at lip-synching a long time ago, we interviewed a number of singing stars on the then hush-hush practice, and some of them admitted that they would “sometimes” resort to it—especially when they were indisposed and sounded really bad.

We thanked them for their honesty, but we pointed out that it still constituted as misleading the public, who expects singers to sing live, unless it’s told otherwise.

In our own directing career, we have come up with a way to handle the problem, whenever one of the singers we’ve handled said he or she would “have” to resort to lip-synching—for whatever “legitimate” or lazy reason:

OK, we told them, you can lip-synch this song on our show—provided you aren’t holding a mic.

That way, we said, you’re not fooling the public anymore and making it believe that you’re singing so beautifully and powerfully without technical intervention.

At first, some of the stars couldn’t see the light in this regard, but they eventually did, and realized that, as professionals, they had to deliver—as promised.

Perhaps other singers, nonsingers and “enhanced nonsingers” can do the same from here on in?

A promise is a promise!