Does she?
Personally, I don’t see how any performer who dances so much can possibly be singing too; especially at a professional level.
That goes for Madonna, Britney, Janet Jackson, and their clones. I don’t have a cite, but I seem to remember reading somewhere earlier this year that just about all of these artists lip-synch their live performances.
I believe Madonna uses prerecorded backing vocals, but she does indeed sing. If you watch one of her live videos, you can tell the songs are quite different from the studio versions.
She sings live but Niki Haris and Donna Delory don’t? Doesn’t seem right, although some of the fan reviews seem to bear this out.
I read a review in Rolling Stone about ten years ago that criticized one of Madonna’s performances for its obvious lip-synching (the review was titled Like a Concert – heh-heh).
I would imagine it’s a tempting thing to do if your voice isn’t all there from a cold or overuse.
To answer all of your Madonna questions.
No, that’s not what “backing vocals” is, in this context (Also, Niki Harris wasn’t on this tour. The fan rumours are that she ate too much bacon. She was replaced by the excellent Siedah Garrett). What the term refers to is a mirror track that, normally, is being sung over by Madonna, but if for some reason she can’t keep going, continues to play to cover up the absence of singing by her. You can catch it a few times in the Drowned World Tour if you’re listening. Madonna has never lip-synched an entire concert tour performance. Even on tours when she did lip-synch a whole song (which she hasn’t done since The Girlie Show), that was reserved for numbers that involved a lot of dancing. Not even Blond Ambition’s Express Yourself, which has very involved choreography, was wholly lip-synched. You can tell that very clearly if you watch Truth Or Dare. It’s also likely that if Madonna starts having serious throat problems, she may lip-synch more difficult songs and sing others live.
To sum up: Yes, Madonna sometimes lip-synchs, but not as often as people think she has. No, she has never lip-synched an entire concert tour performance. Yes, she has lip-synched television performances, such as Top Of The Pops and probably also Rosie (except for when she was parodying Evita. That was funny).
Anyone who listens to her albums, then hears her live, can tell the difference.
In the end, the people who dropped $300 samoleans to buy tickets don’t care. She’s not a performer who sits on a stool her whole show. There is so much more to the show than just her singing, it’s very theatrical.
Love,
kfl, Who has The Straight Dope on Madonna.
A friend of mine recently went to see Madge at Slane Castle here in Ireland. He was in the VIP area and so had a very good view. He said there was no doubt that she was miming some of the time.
Oh yeah. A lot of Vogue was mimed during this tour. Don’t blame her though, that song is in a weird key, it’s hard to sing live, and nearly impossible to make it sound good without filters. She was probably doing us a favour by miming it!
Of course, they could simply be different recordings than the studio versions.
Except that they sound different in every city.
There have also been times in the concerts where she has forgotten the words, giggled, then continued, or fallen down, giggled then continued… once she got dizzy so she lay down on the stage and told everyone how dizzy and tired she was. None of these times did her “singing” continue to play while she was obviously not singing (see: Milli Vanilli).
But, I guess if people want to believe something bad about someone, they’re going to believe it no matter what the evidence is. Human nature is like that.
I truly couldn’t care less if she really sings or not, I was just pointing out that logically, the fact that she sounded different from the album does not mean it’s live. I’d have to care before I “wanted to believe something bad” about her.
If you say she really sings, fine, then she sings.
I’m sorry, Revtim. I was definitely unnecessarily snarky earlier. I was on the defensive, because I get sniped at a lot by the people on this board (and the Doper-types I know in real life).
It just seems a little convoluted, that Madonna would take the time to lay down duplicate tracks of songs she’s already recorded, just to trick concertgoers into thinking she’s really singing.
She has a family and a business to run; she does a lot of travelling for her work and she spends a lot of time exercising and on her spiritual practice. She just plain doesn’t have time to waste like that.
I don’t know that I’d call what Madonna does: “singing at a professional level”. 
Well, it’s not just a Madonna thing. Many (dare I say most, if not all) pop performers sing along with pre-recorded tracks a fair amount of the time. It’s the way they are able to give the incredible stage performances, both movement and vocal. It’s not to ‘trick’ people, and it’s not a criticism per se, it’s just the way things are done more often than not. There was a great article about lip-syncing in concerts in the NY Times this past February if anyone’s interested; the abstract is here.
The article is here.
It’s my understanding that backing tracks used in live shows are derived from the original recordings of the songs - not re-recorded versions.
Well, how does that explain Justin Timberlake?
What he does is not dancing, it’s strutting and posing. Yet he still lip sync’s.
I saw him on the Tonight Show several years ago, and it was an obvious lip sync. Along with the strutting and posing.
And then I saw him on SNL, where it was obvious he was not lip synching. But his levels were set so far below those of the backup singers, you could barely make out his voice. And he looked like he was playing the piano, but you never saw his hands.
My theory is that he can’t sing, dance, or play. He’s all packaging and marketing.
At least Madonna can sing, dance, write and choreograph… maybe she can’t do all of them at once all of the time, but at least she’s got some talent.
But just to keep this in perspective, I once saw a female impersonator do a better job of lip synching Vogue than Madonna. And he was sexier than Madonna, to boot. (And this was a guy who also played Dr. Frank N. Furter for a local Rocky Horror troupe.)
Sure gets paid enough for it, though.