Who Can Dance and Sing – At Once?

Sir Elton John’s live reputation is second to none. Even when he’s not actually performing.His off-the-cuff remarks at the Q magazine awards ceremony this week, when he reacted with undisguised horror to the very notion of Madonna being nominated for Best Live Act, surely represented the great singer-songwriter at his extemporaneous best. “Madonna, best – live act? – off! Since when has lip synching been live?”Elton’s tendency to engage his mouth before his brain may be one reason he has never taken to the dubious art of miming. Yet when he so rudely questioned Madonna’s live reputation, he was only publicly stating something that is one of the music industry’s worstkept secrets. At many of today’s big live music events, the only thing that can really qualify as live is the dancing.I once saw Madonna drop her microphone without it affecting her vocal performance one whit. She plays with a small band of musicians who could not possibly be creating the vast and complex tracks that fill the arenas. All they are doing is adding flourishes to pre-sequenced, prerecorded backing tracks.If you come away from a modern gig thinking the band sounded exactly the same as the record, chances are it is because you were listening to the record, just through bigger speakers than you might be used to at home, and with a tiny speck that might be the singer (it is hard to tell without binoculars) leaping athletically around on stage.In fact, it is all that leaping around that gives the game away. It doesn’t matter whether you have the pyrotechnic vocal skills of Michael Jackson or the somewhat more limited range of Kylie Minogue, you cannot throw yourself about like an aerobics instructor on fast forward while delivering a perfectly honed, exquisitely phrased vocal. If it makes you breathless just watching it, chances are they are gasping for air on stage.Not being privy to her production secrets, I cannot discuss the specifics of whether Madonna sings or mimes, but it is worth noting that at one point on her recent tour, she and her band leave the stage altogether while a giant video of the singer performs an entire track in her absence, without any discernible change in sound or style.Indeed, since the video screens are pretty much all that is visible from the back of the arena, most of the audience probably think their idol is still on stage. This is the modern live experience: just like staying at home and watching MTV, only bigger.Elton, of course, is a real singer. But then, with a body like that, we really don’t want to see him in a tight-fitting costume executing upside-down yoga positions on his piano.Elton, who first emerged at the tail end of the 1960s, harks back to another era, when musical authenticity was still a watchword of live performance. Madonna is a product of the 1980s, an era of glitz and glamour, all glittering surfaces and lack of substance.And while Elton has his roots in rock and soul, Madonna emerged from the dance world, an area of music that, ever since the disco-jiving 1970s, has increasingly been about the record rather than live performance.But most significantly of all, Madonna is pop. And, as everyone knows, you don’t have to be able to sing to be a pop star. Indeed, sometimes it might even be considered a drawback. Pop is about looks, ideas, and attitude. As for musical ability and vocal skill, well, as they say in recording studios: “Don’t worry. We can fix it in the mix.”There was a time when singers could sing.You could say it was a prerequisite of the trade.You had to be able to deliver live because that was the main selling point of the music business. But since the 1960s,when recorded music became pre-eminent, the quality of vocals has deteriorated in almost direct correlation to advances in studio technology.In multi-track studios, you can endlessly rerecord vocals until even the most average of vocalists can achieve technical perfection. Probably the majority of modern recordings are made up of what is known as “comps,” a composition vocal in which every phrase has been taken from a separate take and stitched together into a flawless whole, then doubled up with a matching backing vocal just slightly out of synch, which gives it a kind of sensual echo.But there is one particularly sinister invention that has been putting extra shine on pop vocals since the 1990s. It is a piece of software called Autotune. Essentially, it takes a poorly sung note and transposes it, placing it dead-center of where it was meant to be.Autotune is the reason why you will never hear flat singing on a modern record (not unless it’s a rock record, anyway, where vocal authenticity and flawed passion still count for more than ersatz perfection, giving us the gloriously ragged mess of this year’s big thing, the Libertines).And Autotune is ubiquitous, so widely misused that Country chanteuse Alison Moorer’s recent album included the proud disclaimer: “No Autotune was used during the making of this record.” Who cares whether animals were harmed; at least we know she sang it all herself.Autotune, however, works by adjusting a prerecorded vocal. Which isn’t much use live. Hence lip-synching remains a popular fallback position for today’s vocally challenged pop star. As a rule of thumb: If someone is spinning on their head, executing back-flips or adopting complex yoga positions while singing their heart out,you might as well stay at home and listen to the records.

Who Can Dance and Sing – At Once?

Who Can Dance and Sing – At Once?

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