If you spent your New Year's Eve watching Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest (or saw the plethora of memes, videos and tweets online immediately following the show), then you know that Mariah Carey's highly anticipated performance didn't go nearly as well as she hoped it would. Prior to the ball drop, Mariah took to the Times Square stage to sing three of her hits. Things took a massive turn for the worse when she experienced technical difficulties and basically gave up after a few seconds of trying to recover.
This is just a snippet of the cringe-worthy performance:
The moment everyone will be talking about. Mariah Carey's performance on NYE. pic.twitter.com/Au0I8z68Bl
— iHeartRadio (@iHeartRadio) January 1, 2017
Throughout the performance, Mariah just couldn't get it together. She appeared to be having sound issues, and at one point she pointed her microphone to the audience, encouraging them to sing instead. Needless to say, her botched performance led to a ton of memes and savage tweets, like this one:
Mariah Carey to Mariah Carey's NYE performance pic.twitter.com/tvUHaIxlaS
— Devin (@Hendrixhero987) January 1, 2017
Following the disaster, Mariah tried to brush the whole thing off.
Shit happens Have a happy and healthy new year everybody! Here's to making more headlines in 2017 pic.twitter.com/0Td8se57jr
— Mariah Carey (@MariahCarey) January 1, 2017
Though Mariah didn't say much, her manager, Stella Bulochnikov, has plenty of thoughts—and she's claiming that Mimi's NYE performance was sabotaged. Speaking to Rolling Stone, Stella said that the Dick Clark production team was notified that Mariah's in-ears weren't working properly during rehearsal (and minutes before the actual performance)—but they assured her that everything would be fine once the televised performance began.
"We told [the stage managers] that the in-ears were not working 10 minutes before the performance," Stella said. "They then changed the battery pack, and they were still not working on the frequency four minutes before the show. We let them know again, and they just kept counting her down and reassuring her that they will work as soon as they go live, which never happened."
The performance led plenty of people to point fingers at the production team, suggesting that they purposely allowed technical difficulties to occur. Even Mariah's rep went along with the conspiracy theories. In a lengthy conversation with Entertainment Weekly, Stella further elaborated on what went wrong with Mariah's performance and who she thinks should be blamed.
According to Bulochnikov, the problems persisted for the remainder of the night. When the time came for Mariah to perform on stage, she still couldn't hear anything—and it didn't help that she was in front of a loud crowd filled with two million people. As the performance continued on TV, Stella felt that the production should have immediately cut to commercial to prevent any further embarrassment. Clearly, they chose to keep the live feed airing for millions of viewers around the world.
"But even when it didn’t work [when live], when she pulled her ears out, they should have cut to commercial. That says to me they wanted a viral moment at any expense," Stella said. "And that’s not a company with integrity for 50-something years. That’s not who Dick Clark was. He loved artists."
The fact that the team hasn't owned up to their error is what appears to infuriate Bulochnikov most of all. "But to not apologize to her formally? That’s disgusting. We live in this viral world where anybody will do anything for a viral moment."