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defrogITEM: Two Chinese singers are fined 50,000 yuan each under a new law in China banning lip-synching.
The law was passed after organisers of the 2008 Olympics caught heat for having a nine-year-old girl lip-synch a song during the opening ceremony because the real singer wasn’t photogenic enough.
This interests me because it’s a classic “We Fixed It” law – a law that was enacted to punish something no one thought was a crime until it made enough international headlines to make yr country look bad – and will henceforth be selectively enforced to make an example of people to prove it’s a real law.
Also, it’s not clear if the singers who got busted were synching their own voices or someone else’s (which was the real problem with the Olympics girl, not the fact that she was lip-synching – which just goes to show how laws like this often miss the point).
That said ... the artistic-integrity side of me can see the value in a law insisting that singers have actual talent, and that lip-synching could be considered a form of fraud.
Of course, that wouldn’t always be the case – for example, bands used to lip-synch all the time on TV shows like American Bandstand and Top Of The Pops, primarily to simplify sound mixing and cut down on rehearsal time. Admittedly, I never cared for bands lip-synching on TV either, but I can understand the production requirements.
But for live shows – the Warped Tour, say – I do think Elton John has a point. (And it’s not often you’ll hear me say that.)
Sing like you mean it,
This is dF
The law was passed after organisers of the 2008 Olympics caught heat for having a nine-year-old girl lip-synch a song during the opening ceremony because the real singer wasn’t photogenic enough.
This interests me because it’s a classic “We Fixed It” law – a law that was enacted to punish something no one thought was a crime until it made enough international headlines to make yr country look bad – and will henceforth be selectively enforced to make an example of people to prove it’s a real law.
Also, it’s not clear if the singers who got busted were synching their own voices or someone else’s (which was the real problem with the Olympics girl, not the fact that she was lip-synching – which just goes to show how laws like this often miss the point).
That said ... the artistic-integrity side of me can see the value in a law insisting that singers have actual talent, and that lip-synching could be considered a form of fraud.
Of course, that wouldn’t always be the case – for example, bands used to lip-synch all the time on TV shows like American Bandstand and Top Of The Pops, primarily to simplify sound mixing and cut down on rehearsal time. Admittedly, I never cared for bands lip-synching on TV either, but I can understand the production requirements.
But for live shows – the Warped Tour, say – I do think Elton John has a point. (And it’s not often you’ll hear me say that.)
Sing like you mean it,
This is dF
