Mariah Carey has spoken out about her New Year's Eve debacle in Times Square in a new video interview. The diva claims that it was impossible to sing due to a malfunctioning earpiece, and that she was "victimized and vilified" as a result of the botched performance.
Mariah Carey's New Year's Eve Disaster
2017 has managed to produce some wild news stories so far, and the very first of them came just as the ball was getting ready to drop in New York's Times Square. That's when Mariah Carey famously botched her singing performance in front of millions of live eyeballs due to what she contends was a technical malfunction.
Carey initially minimized the situation in a curt tweet, but later posted a more lengthy recorded statement on her Twitter account in which she accused the production team behind ABC's Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve with sabotaging and "foiling" her performance.
Mariah Addresses NYE Fail In New Video Interview
Now, Mariah Carey has spoken out live for the first time about the incident in a new interview. She begins by explaining that the interviewer should understand what it's like to have an earpiece that isn't working, and that without hearing the music through it, there was no way Mariah could continue to sing.
"And if your mic is also effed up, you can't hear, sing... all you can hear is the audience screaming, and a delayed musical moment and they're already a few beats behind you", she continues, even though there were no indications that anything was wrong with Carey's microphone on the night.
Carey seems to back off her prior accusations of sabotage and instead places blame on her dancers for continuing to perform rather than escorting her off mid performance, as well as whoever moved her backup singers off the stage, where she contends she could have salvaged the performance if they remained.
"What do they want me to do?" Carey sings out loud in a musical moment, arguing that she is given a much harder time than other performers when she makes mistakes. "It's like I'm the only one that has to make five million comebacks," she says. "For me, there's different rules. I don't know why, it's not okay that I was victimized and vilified by the situation."
Carey says that even though it caused her "a wreck of a New Year's Eve", she's fine as long as it didn't ruin anybody else's holiday. One person whose holiday was surely ruined as well, however, was Mariah's choreographer and head dancer Anthony Burrell, who was fired shortly after the performance, and is reportedly the "someone" that moved Carey's backup singers off the stage.
You can watch Mariah share her thoughts on the New Year's Eve performance fail in the clip below.
