Kanye West Caught Lip-Synching?

Posted Fri Dec 19, 2008 3:35pm PST by Blender Magazine in The Blender Burner
Kanye West is well-known for two things: his awesome rapping and his arrogance. The guy's music is so intensely good it (almost) justifies his God complex. Every time the rapper gets onstage at some awards show and accepts one statue by claiming he should have won another one, we usually have to agree. West has encouraged us to expect such a superhuman level of perfection from him, it was inevitable he would one day not be able to meet it.

That day was last Saturday, when West performed on Saturday Night Live. Dude did not sound good. He was more American Idol blooper reel than Grammy-winning polished performer. So what was the problem? Well, it had something to do with the Auto-Tune feature--you know the part of "Love Lockdown" where he sings about a system overload and losing control? Well, he was living it! And it was also pretty clear that when he got to the high notes, he pulled away from the mic and let an offstage singer handle the tough stuff. The bottom line is that we saw behind the curtain of Kanye West's seemingly impenetrable awesomeness. So was it satisfying to witness the world's most egocentric rapper all exposed on national television? No, no it was not. People were outraged. How dare he...sound so bad!

The outrage was so intense that it morphed into a bizarre lip-synching accusation. Instead of blaming Kanye West for putting on a sub-par performance, people attacked him for revealing that all those robotic tweaks in his songs are not, you know, organically produced. (Um, guys, there's no Santa Claus, either).

We say the scandal is not that Kanye lip-synched through a live TV performance, but that he failed to lip-synch through a live TV performance. If he'd had all the right bells and whistles on board, we would have been all like, "Wow, this rules," rather than all like, "Wow, this hurts our ears." Just sayin'.