If you were sober enough around 11:45 p.m. to remember catch Mariah Carey's disastrous attempt at singing on Dick Clark's New Years Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest 2017, then you probably have more than a few feelings about what you saw. The performance went from awkward, to bad, to uncomfortable, to hilarious, and then back to really awkward when Carey just straight up walked off stage in the middle of a song.
Now that we've all had a few days to marinate on what we witnessed (I'm still cringing at the thought, even if Carey is over it), it's time to hear from the people who were closest to Carey at the time of the performance — one of them being the co-host of the night, Jenny McCarthy. The actress and comedian addressed the topic on her Sirius XM radio show on January 3, along with her husband, Donnie Wahlberg.
McCarthy said that when Carey started having trouble with the sound system, she felt sorry for her because she herself has had to deal with faulty prompters and technology. But then, when news broke that Carey's team was blaming the show's producers at Dick Clark Productions for purposefully sabotaging the equipment and thus Carey's performance, McCarthy switched sides.
"I literally had a visceral reaction to her saying that Dick Clark Productions did this on purpose and for ratings," she says in the episode. "I mean, let me tell you something. If Dick Clark were alive today, I guarantee he would be on air right now fighting back. He’s not, so I’m going to."
And then she dropped a major truth bomb, that only those on-set during rehearsals would know.
"The truth of the matter is Mariah didn’t do a sound check," she says. "… She did whatever you would call, like, a dance move rehearsal holding her gold microphone, and she stood off to the side of the stage while she had a stand-in do a sound check."
Wahlberg agrees with his wife, adding: "If you’re gonna be a boss or you’re gonna be a diva, then you know, again, it’s your name, your face and your legacy on the line. So you leave something to someone else, you have no one to blame but yourself. The music track, missing a vocal, that’s on her. No rehearsal, that’s on her."
Hear the full discussion below.
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