The fallout from 2016 just won't go away.
Mariah Carey's explanation for her disastrous New Year's Eve performance has been slammed by actress and television host Jenny McCarthy, who says the pop star's voice is not what it used to be.
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Mariah Carey's troubled NYE performance
On New Year's Eve Mariah Carey performed live in Times Square but the singer's routine was plagued by technical problems during the show.
McCarthy, who was co-hosting the New Year's Eve special prior to Carey taking the stage, has said it's "bullshit" for the self-proclaimed diva to blame technical difficulties.
McCarthy labelled the performance a "complete trainwreck" on her radio show on Tuesday.
The television host admitted she initially felt sympathy for Carey, but that all evaporated the moment her team blamed Dick Clark Productions for sabotaging her performance.
"For her to defame them was so incredibly insulting for a group of people who work their balls off preparing and rehearsing for their musical guests," she said.
"The truth of the matter is, Mariah didn't do a soundcheck. She said it there [on stage]."
McCarthy also pointed out that the autocue would have been on. Mariah's dancers, meanwhile, were able to hear the music perfectly and didn't miss a beat.
"I think Mariah was nervous as hell," she said.
"I think she chose really tough songs to try to sing along with. That song, Emotions, her voice is not there anymore.
"I don't believe there was a problem with her inner ears, I think she used it as an excuse."
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
However, the pop star's team aren't backing down. Instead, they're ramping up their claims Carey was sabotaged by producers hungry for eyeballs.
Carey's manager, Stella Bulochnikov, has gone as far as to say producers intended for the disastrous performance to go viral.
"They should have cut to commercial," she told Entertainment Weekly.
"That says to me they wanted a viral moment at any expense. That's not a company with integrity for 50-something years."
Dick Clark Productions has, of course, denied these allegations – labelling them "defamatory, outrageous and frankly absurd".
Carey has since spoken to a reporter for Entertainment Weekly late Tuesday (US time), three days after the fiasco and only one day after Carey's team, including her manager, exchanged fire with Dick Clark Productions.
So, she was asked, now that you've had a few days to think about it, "What are your feelings" about the mess seen live on TV by millions, and the over-the-top reaction on social media and regular media ever since?
Carey's response: An artful dodge that nevertheless mentioned the word "mortified."
"All I can say is Dick Clark was an incredible person and I was lucky enough to work with him when I first started in the music business," she said. "I'm of the opinion that Dick Clark would not have let an artist go through that and he would have been as mortified as I was in real time."
This was a shift from Carey's early shrug-it-off attitude, expressed in a tweet she posted early Sunday morning, blithely dismissing the debacle as "shit happens."
The lesson learned, according to Carey? "It's not going to stop me from doing a live event in the future," she said. "But it will make me less trusting of using anyone outside of my own team."
So why, after staying silent for three days, was Carey suddenly chatty?
It might have something to do with her desire to publicise her reality series on E!, Mariah's World, not to mention her upcoming All the Hits tour with Lionel Richie starting in March, her first North American tour in seven years.
That's how a savvy self-promoter salvages some measure of victory from humiliating defeat.
- with USA Today