Mariah Carey Responds to Social Media Meltdown Over Her New Year's Eve Performance: 'Shit Happens'

Mariah Carey struggled through a rather severe audio malfunction during her performance for Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest (can the title of this show get a sound check?) in Times Square on Saturday night. The worst of the problems occurred during Carey’s performance of “Emotions”, when the track played Carey’s vocals only intermittently and thew off her lip-syncing.

Carey told the audience that she was, “trying to be a good sport here,” and she was doing an excellent job of it too. She was awkward about the incident, to be sure (nervous laughter and jokes mixed with uncontrollable grimaces), but stuck it out until the audio continued to be screwy during later tracks and she walked off stage saying, “It just doesn’t get any better.”

The incident upset some people on the Internet, who I suppose expect performers to mask their lip-syncing better. What was weird and not surprising about the reaction was that there was an initial consensus that Carey had somehow messed up, though Carey told the audience at one point during the show that she didn’t have a soundcheck beforehand. (A source told Billboard later that Carey had not been given sufficient time to prepare her performance in order to deliver peak “Mariah-ness”.)