Mariah Carey is finally taking responsibility for her debacle of a performance on New Year’s Eve.
Kind of. Sort of.
Okay, maybe not responsibility, exactly.
But the singer has opened up extensively about the embarrassing “concert” in Times Square over this past weekend.. and at least she isn’t supporting allegations that she was sabotaged.
By now, you probably are familiar with what transpired on Saturday night/Sunday morning:
As the featured artist on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest, Carey took to the stage and immediately experienced technical difficulties.
She messed with her earpiece. She couldn’t hear the background music.
She planned to lip sync, but had no way of matching up her mouth to the lyrics.
So she basically gave up, yammering away on stage and saying she would simply turn over the job of singing to the “audience” at one point.
As Jenny McCarthy rightly pointed out, it was a train wreck of epic proportions all around.
Watch snippets for yourself below:
Carey Tweeted “Sh-t happens” shortly after this so-called performance went viral, which likely would have been enough.
The story would have pretty much died if that had been it.
But then members of her team tried to blame the incident on Dick Clark Productions, arguing that Carey was set up to fail by producers.
Why didn’t the program cut to commercial once the technical difficulties became obvious, the singer’s rep argued?
Because it wanted to milk her breakdown for ratings, Mariah’s camp has said.
In response to this assertion, the production company fired back that it had “no involvement in the challenges associated with Ms. Carey’s New Year’s Eve performance.”
So… yeah. It’s been a pretty giant mess all around.
Even if Mariah’s boobs did look terrific during the Times Square humiliation:
Now, however, Carey has spoken to Entertainment Weekly, walking the fine line between owning up to her lack of preparation and blaming others for what happened.
“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 tells EW, adding:
“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.”
Oooookay.
That seems like quite the random point to make.
Carey is basically throwing shade at producers for not helping rescue her from the situation on stage, without going so far as to accuse them of anything under-handed.
Mariah goes on to say she’ll continue to do live events, but will be “less trusting of anyone outside my team.”
(That said, Entertainment Tonight has learned that the singer is no longer working with her longtime creative director and tour choreographer/dancer, Anthony Burrell.)
What sort of reaction has Carey received on social media and in person?
“My true fans have been so supportive and I am so appreciative of them and everybody in the media that came out to support me after the fact because it really was an incredible holiday season that turned into a horrible New Year’s Eve,” she added to EW.
Hey, at least she’s admitting that the performance was “horrible.”
But it would have been nice if, just somewhere in this interview, Carey had taken at least partial responsibility for what went down.
Then again… if she had… she wouldn’t be the super diva we’ve all come to know and quasi love for her super diva-ness, would she?