Mariah Carey and the Art of the Disaster

Mariah Carey and the Art of the Disaster

read-more

For all the confusion, charges, and countercharges surrounding Mariah Carey’s ill-fated New Year’s Eve performance, one thing has now become clear: Team Mariah is waging an all-out war to ensure that she does not become the next Janet Jackson.

Ms. Carey's representative could have taken the predictable route of issuing a statement defending its star and then moving on. Instead her manager has heaped blame on the producers of ABC’s “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest,” including an extraordinary, profanity-laden interview with Entertainment Weekly.

The implicit takeaway from these fireworks is that Ms. Carey’s allies are bent on protecting her reputation so that her career does not suffer like Ms. Jackson’s after her infamous “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime performance.

To understand the strategy of the Carey camp, let's walk through the events in question — including the strong denials of the show’s producers that they did anything wrong. Below is a blow-by-blow analysis that illuminates the stakes for Ms. Carey and the producers.

The night of: what happened?

In a nutshell, this:

The aftermath: Ms. Carey shrugs

By 2 a.m. on Sunday, Ms. Carey’s Twitter account posted a response to the social media maelstrom that had exploded since the just-before-midnight performance.

“Have a happy and healthy new year everybody!,” she wrote. “Here’s to making more headlines in 2017.”

The account moved on to promoting Ms. Carey’s reality series on E!, which, coincidentally, was premiering that night

And Ms. Carey’s supporters go to work

“I will never know the truth, but I do know that we told them three times that her mike pack was not working and it was a disastrous production,” Ms. Carey’s manager, Stella Bulochnikov,  told Us Weekly magazine on Sunday. “I’m certainly not calling the F.B.I. to investigate. It is what it is: New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Mariah did them a favor. She was the biggest star there, and they did not have their” act together.

A spokeswoman, Nicole Perna, told The Associated Press that Ms. Carey was not at fault for the performance.

“Unfortunately there was nothing she could do to continue with the performance given the circumstances,” she said.

Ms. Perna also told Billboard magazine that the production had “set her up to fail.” 
The company’s response:

Dick Clark Productions, which produced the show for ABC, released a statement in which strenuously and emphatically denied it was in any way at fault for the glitches on New Year’s Eve.

Which brings us to Monday, when Ms. Bulochnikov gave a detailed — some might say exhaustive — interview to Entertainment Weekly, running down the events of the night and who was at fault minute by minute.

It’s now four minutes to showtime. She says, “I hear nothing in my ears, my ears are dead.” The other stage manager says, “It will work right when we go live.” Then things start to get chaotic. They start counting her down — four minutes, three minutes. Mariah: “I can’t hear.” Them: “You’re gonna hear when it goes live — two minutes!”

So, right when it goes live, she can’t hear anything. The ears are dead. They’re dead. So she pulls them out of the ear because if the artist keeps them in their ears then all she hears is silence. Once she pulled them off her ear she was hoping to hear her music, but because of the circumstances — there’s noise from Times Square and the music is reverberating from the buildings — all she hears is chaos. She can’t hear her music. It’s a madhouse. At the point, there’s no way to recover.

She called the production company “disgusting” for not apologizing to Ms. Carey.

Why the impassioned defense of their artist? Aside from loyalty, Ms. Carey’s representatives know all too well that when a performer stumbles — or even appears to stumble — justice is delivered swiftly in the court of public opinion.

Read-moreread-more