It’s looking like 18 months into the first term of Donald Trump’s presidency, when I expect we’ll decide that the continued existence of celebrities is simply too dangerous to the survival of our species, and out of an abundance of caution we exterminate them all.
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Celebrity bubble has burst. When is the last time the public was invited to watch Paris Hilton have sex?
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Of course, what were we all like at 21? Even at his cringiest, he was amazing, though.
True.
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Everybody on this show lip-synched, I believe. I don’t think Dick Clark Productions ever allowed live performances because I think they wanted to control the output and make sure there were no surprises and no equipment failures.
An interesting piece on Prince (from 2012) from Hilton Als - on Prince and queerness:
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There’s an old PiL performance where they played the record, but the band didn’t lip-sync. Evidently they still left the mics on (e.g. Jah Wobble starts playing the drums, anyway).
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Why did Dick Clark et al think having them on would be a good idea?
I’m sure their manager agreed to the terms, but I can’t believe they fell for it. Although this was before the internet, the industry was rather small and there was a pretty active grapevine.
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oh yeah, Soul Train was the same way.
it stuck in my memory for that Prince performance because the drummer kept drumming after the song faded-out and the mics were picking it up and people were sort of giving him the evil eye.
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Good article, thanks. I especially liked the part about Prince’s ability to make tough men feel for a bit that maybe it’s not so bad to be in tune with their “feminine side.” Sexuality is probably more like a spectrum, one that we can move around on if we’d only let ourselves, and it’s good to see so many young ones now seeming to feel more okay with that. Maybe that new comfort with blurred sexuality also accounts for some of the ongoing popularity of Prince? I don’t know. But there’s still so much to be said about him, or I guess, about his blurred identity performances, and how people responded to that.
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Guitars/amps/keyboards are kept unplugged (I remember watching AB in the early/mid seventies and seeing the absence of wires), but I suspect that drummers have the hardest time trying pretending while not actually making noise. I also think they leave the mics on so vocalists can say, “Thank you,” and thus continuing the deception?
A lot of musicians sound better live, so I’m thinking Dick Clark was wary of the shit (fun 
) some performers might pull? He was definitely one savvy guy.
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Prince was def. a surprisingly good player. Amazing musician and songwriter all around.
(One of the world’s top guitar players? Disagree. The Heroin to his Meth is a guitar player’s guitar player, which would be something like Paul Gilbert or the ever-second-fiddle Mike Kineally. /pedant)
ETA: A group of very bad men, shredding the hell out of Purple Rain:
I’d like to think Dick Clark knew what he was getting, and was simply up for the challenge. Maybe he was flabbergasted, after all. They were on Tom Snyder’s show, but that may have been after AB. Surely, though, Clark and/or his team knew how the Sex Pistols had behaved on UK TV.
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Not always.
Listen:
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I love Al Green so much…guess I’m going down the YouTube rabbit hole tonight!
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I love it when bands don’t even try to pretend that they’re playing their instruments 
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You’ve got good tastes; I’m not surprised.
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Mayor Reed lit up city hall for Prince last night (did you see this, @noahdjango - they mentioned that he was going to do that on WABE yesterday) :
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I love that too - as if the band is basically breaking the fourth all to say, “yeah, this is bullshit and we know that you know that this is bullshit too so let’s have a little fun.”
I remember BB posted another video like that many years back of another band doing this kind of thing in the 60s or 70s.
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On the other hand, it can be fun to watch bands try too hard to pretend that they’re actually performing live. Watch as Siouxsie gets confused about which microphone to mime into:
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