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Nila Priyambodo
Managing Editor
Last weekend viewers tuning in to watch “Saturday Night Live” had the opportunity to watch the infamous lip-syncher Ashlee Simpson get a second chance to redeem herself.
For those of you who live in a cave let me explain.
Around the same time last year, Simpson was the musical guest on the show. For her first performance, Simpson sang her single, “Pieces of Me.” Later in the night, Simpson was supposed to sing a different song, but as she was getting ready to sing it, a musical track of “Pieces of Me” was playing in the background. Instead of singing the song, she started to do a “hoe down.”
At the end of the show, she blamed it on her band for playing the wrong song. But when everyone began accusing her for lip-synching, she pointed her finger toward “acid reflux.”
Anyways, SNL invited her back last weekend to let her sing her latest songs. It might have been a smart move for the show to get higher ratings because, after all, the American public loves to watch train wrecks and people make fools out of themselves on television.
But the decision isn’t fair to the real musicians, who can actually sing. Yeah, we saw her sing two new songs. But how do we know she’s actually singing?
Maybe she’s just smart enough to learn her songs and learn how to move her mouth at the same time the track is playing. Since last year, maybe the band was smart enough to play the right track at the right time and not repeat tracks.
SNL shouldn’t have invited her again. She was given one chance to prove herself as an artist, and she blew it. After all, it is Saturday Night “Live.” Not Saturday Night “Lip-Synch.”
So in her latest SNL performances, Simpson sang two songs, one of which is her latest single “Boyfriend.” This brings me to my next pet peeve: the war of words in the world of pop music. Many of today’s pop “singers” (if you can call them that) bash their rival pop singers with their lyrics.
Forget about the 1990s rivalry between the East and the West in hip-hop/rap, between Death Row Records and Bad Boy Records. Nope, this generation is all about the stupid rivalry between “tween queens,” Hilary Duff, Lindsay Lohan and Simpson. Over what? A boy.
It all began when Duff and Lohan were dating the same pop singer loser Aaron Carter simultaneously. Since then, Duff has been bad mouthing Lohan in her single “Haters,” saying that Lohan is “spinning a web that’s hard to see/of envy, greed and jealousy,” and “you say your boyfriend is sweet and kind/but you’ve still got your eyes on mine.”
Lohan would counter Duff in her song, “First,” saying “Is that someone you use to date/why is she hanging around/what’s her story…because you’re mine.”
Now Simpson is in the same sinking boat by writing her single “Boyfriend,” which happens to be about Lohan. Lohan dated actor Wilmer Valderrama, but after the two split Lohan accused Simpson of stealing him away from her.
Simpson retaliated by writing “Boyfriend” saying “All that s**t about me/being with him/can’t believe/all the lies that you told…I didn’t steal your boyfriend.”
This pop rivalry is as bad if not worse than the whole Simpson lip-synching fiasco. What’s next? A rivalry in a child’s world between Barney, the purple dinosaur, and Blue’s Clues?
Nila Priyambodo, a junior journalism major, is managing editor of the Campus Times. She can be reached by e-mail at npriyambodo@ulv.edu. |
