…she did sing along with a pre-recorded backing.
The video above clearly shows Beyonce singing live at President Obama’s inauguration, despite the fact that many news outlets are claiming she mimed.
You can also clearly hear the pre-recorded backing in the video, made earlier in case of technical problems. (Thanks to Daniel Holter for posting a heads-up on this video.) But the live vocal is the one most people heard.
The evidence
You can tell by listening carefully to the two performances audible in the video above and comparing them to this live feed:
For more clues that she sang live, listen for these points:
When she starts singing, her voice is hard to hear – the microphone gain is too low. The sound-man quickly corrects this – but if we were listening to a recording this wouldn’t happen – in fact back-up recordings are used to solve exactly this kind of problem.
At 1’16″ in the video above, she tilts her head slightly closer to the mic and the sound gets suddenly more bassy. This is because of an acoustic effect known as the “proximity effect”.
At 1’52″ she takes out one of her earpieces. Some people are citing this as more evidence she was lip-syncing, but in fact it’s what singers do when they’re having trouble hearing the pitch of their own voice through the earpiece. By taking it out, she can hear her own voice more clearly and sing in tune more easily. (In fact, if the pre-recorded vocal was going to her earpiece, she may well have been finding it distracting.)
At 2’17″ she smiles slightly, and you can hear this “smile” in her voice.
None of these clues are conclusive, but to fake all of them, plus the details of the performance itself, would make Beyonce the best lip-sync artist in the world !
And anyone who has heard her sing live knows that’s not where her true talents lie…
So why are people saying Beyonce mimed ?
Because the banddid mime.
Why ? Probably because it can be next to impossible for a large group of musicians to play in tune in extremely hot or cold temperatures – and it was cold at the inauguration.
The original “reports” were confirmed by players in the band, who said that Beyonce asked for the pre-recorded backing, and that’s almost certainly true. (The band has since issued a formal statement saying that “no one in the Marine Band is in a position to assess whether it was live or pre-recorded.”)
Any singer would find it seriously difficult to put on a great performance to a band that was struggling to play in tune, and for something this high-profile it’s understandable that you’d want the best chance to get it right.
But the video at the top of this post uses both audio feeds, probably by mistake, and combined with the other clues leaves me in no doubt that Beyonce sang live – and that her live performance is what most people heard.
Beyoncé performs the national anthem during the public ceremonial inauguration for Barack Obama. Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
And now the freshly-inaugurated President Obama goes off into the Captiol to sign the official nominations of John Kerry as secretary of state, Jack Lew as treasury secretary, and Chuck Hagel as defence secretary, among others.
As he does so, Obama jests that he is declaring "Peace on earth and goodwill towards men."
Official confirmation of Beyoncé's awesomeness, from Barack Obama's presidential election-winning strategist:
By word count, Pres. Obama's 2nd inaugural was longer than Bush's 2nd and shorter than Clinton's 2nd
Beyoncé is awesome. End of story.
The effect is broken – about three seconds after Beyoncé finishes – by the Marine band playing some Souza ompah stuff.
On C-Span's feed, Obama lingered on stage to take a long look out at the Mall. "I want to look out one more time because I'll never see this again," he can be heard saying. (Not true of course, I'm sure Malia will invite him to her inauguration in 2037.)
President Obama greets Beyonce after she performed the National Anthem Photograph: Win McNamee/Pool/Reuters
Updated
Beyoncé sings the national anthem
Now the moment we've all been waiting for: the first lady of music sings one of the hardest songs to pull off, the Star Spangled Banner.
It's almost impossible to do well but if anyone can it's Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter.
Singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” this time, she still inevitably stopped the show.
Whether at Glastonbury or her nation’s capital, Beyoncé’s performances are designed to be projected through big screens, allowing close-up shows of physicality and emotion. From the actorly glance of stern pensiveness before her muffled beginning, to the triumphantly tossed-back head as she bellowed her big finish, her gaze on the camera never faltered.
Preceding her, James Taylor’s “America the Beautiful” had a wandering, folk frailty – it could have been the veteran left-wing patriot Pete Seeger up there. Kelly Clarkson’s “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” was blowsily overblown in TV talent-show style, missing every mark of emotion.
They were all just warm-up acts for Beyoncé.
As her bold vocal surge subsided, Mr Obama must momentarily have felt like one too.
Beyoncé performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" at President Obama's second inauguration this afternoon, and it seems fair to take VP Joe Biden's delighted reaction as a measure of how well she nailed it. She earned her sister's respect anyhow: "I couldn't be more proud on this day," Solange tweeted.
But Beyoncé was the big name, and Beyoncé had the big, difficult song — which, being Beyoncé, she nailed, even as her earpiece malfunctioned halfway through.
Beyoncé was among those honoring Barack Obama's second term at today's 57th Presidential Inauguration, delivering a graceful version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the Inaugural Ceremony. The singer kept it airy and soothing for most of the song before bursting open for a powerful finish. Beyoncé dealt with some sort of technical difficulty, removing her earpiece, though she recovered nicely.
As much as we’d like to pretend that we were tuning into President Barack Obama‘s Inauguration Ceremony for the pageantry and the historical significance…well, we’re gonna be honest. We probably would’ve slept in and missed the whole thing if it weren’t for the fact that Beyonce was scheduled to sing the National Anthem.
But after Bey gave such a walloping performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” we felt OK about our lowbrow tendencies. She struck that delicate balance between restraint and runs, and you could appreciate the power of her performance from the faces of VP Joe Biden and others seated behind her. Clearly, we weren’t the only ones who loved it. Head below to see how the rest of the web reacted.
:: Rolling Stone lauded the unflappable B: “The singer kept it airy and soothing for most of the song before bursting open for a powerful finish. Beyoncé dealt with some sort of technical difficulty, removing her earpiece, though she recovered nicely.”
:: Vulture thinks it was a top-tier performance of the difficult song: “Beyoncé had the big, difficult song — which, being Beyoncé, she nailed, even as her earpiece malfunctioned halfway through. In the pantheon of Great National Anthem performances, it wasn’t close to Whitney (what could be?), and it wasn’t as cool as Marvin Gaye, but by the time Bey got to ‘waaaaave,’ with the melisma and the ‘I did it’ smile? And the entire National Mall cheering? And Biden making Biden faces? Yeah, this has to be top five.”
:: Spin seems to agree with Vulture: It was “a suave, evocative rendition of a notoriously difficult tune — not quite Whitney-Houston-in-1991 levels of superlativeness, perhaps, but definitely part of the same conversation.”
:: MTV called it an “emotional, diva-fied version of the national anthem.”
:: Across the pond, the Guardian said Bey “roused the Washington crowd…with a soaring performance.”
:: BuzzFeed summed it up thusly: “Wow, just wow.”
:: And, finally, we have TMZ. The site facetiously asked “Did Beyonce Butcher the National Anthem?” To which they answered, “NO. OF COURSE NOT. IT WAS F**KING AWESOME.”
After President Obama was sworn in for a second term, Beyonce showed why she’s Queen B with a flawless rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Her style stunned too: She was impeccably glam in a Christian Dior coat and shoes, flowing Pucci gown and Lorraine Schwartz emerald earrings. Hubby Jay-Z, — watching proudly from the front row — wore head-to-toe Tom Ford.
The anthem was something of a repeat performance, since Beyonce sang “At Last” for the first couple at a 2008 inauguration ball.
Beyonce drew a loud cheer from the audience Monday even before her impressive rendition of the national anthem.
The applause started when she took her place with Jay-Z at the Capitol to watch President Barack Obama take the oath for his second term in office. The two stopped to chat with the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Beyonce had a definite fan in Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who applauded eagerly after she finished singing the national anthem. She offered R&B-esque vocal riffs as she sang on and the crowd seemed to love it, cheering loudly as she finished. Clarkson, too, hit high notes.
Washington’s power brokers were star struck yesterday —
not by the president or first lady but by the entertainment world’s
first couple, Beyoncé and Jay-Z.
Fawning politicians scrambled for the their cellphones to snap photos of the sexy siren and her hip-hop-mogul hubby at President Obama’s inauguration.
It was as if Obama was playing second fiddle at his own party.
Among
those swooning was Rep. Peter King, the Long Island Republican who
normally spends his time railing against terrorists. He was caught
snapping Beyoncé as she and Jay-Z strolled out of the Capitol — right
past him — to take their seats.
REUTERS
STARS & STRIPES:Jay-Z and Beyoncé steal the show yesterday while heading to their seats outside the Capitol.
PHOTOS: OBAMA'S SECOND INAUGURATION
“She’s been after me for years,” King joked.
“I was in a
good location, and just for historical record, anybody who looked
important I took a picture of,” said King, who was using his BlackBerry.
“I didn’t know the guy beside her, Jay-Z.”
Likewise, Sen.
Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California posed
for pictures with Beyoncé and Jay-Z on the dais.
But it was the crowd in the cheap seats outside the Capitol that set the tone, greeting the stars with a loud cheer as they came into sight.
And
when Beyoncé walked to the front to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,”
Vice President Joe Biden gave her an appreciative look up and down.
Behind Biden, ex-President Bill Clinton craned his neck to get a better look at her.
Twitter
exploded with Beyoncé-mania as she belted out the anthem, leaving
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas clapping vigorously and fans on
the Mall demanding an encore.
“One nation under Beyoncé,” tweeted Ronan Farrow, son of actress Mia Farrow.
“American Idol” alumnus Todrick Hall posted, “How nice of Obama to show up to the Beyoncé concert.”
Beyonce’s
performance came after James Taylor sang “America the Beautiful,” and
Kelly Clarkson gave a rendition of “My Country ’Tis of Thee.”
“Wow
....I was incredibly nervous and cold ha! I just wanna officially thank
President Obama for opening for me haha! Just kidding :),” Clarkson
tweeted afterward.
Beyoncé is ready to receive you now. From the chair where she's sitting, in the conference room of her sleek office suite in midtown Manhattan, at a round table elegantly laden with fine china, crisp cloth napkins, and take-out sushi from Nobu, she could toss some edamame over her shoulder and hit her sixteen Grammys, each wall-mounted in its own Plexiglas box. She is luminous, with that perfect smile and smooth coffee skin that shines under a blondish topknot and bangs. Today she's showing none of the bodaciously thick, hush-your-mouth body that's on display onstage, in her videos, and on these pages. This is Business Beyoncé, hypercomposed Beyoncé—fashionable, elegant, in charge. She's wearing the handiwork of no fewer than seven designers, among them Givenchy (the golden pin at her neck), Day Birger et Mikkelsen (her dainty gray-pink petal-collar blouse), Christian Louboutin (her pink five-inch studded heels), and Isabel Marant (her floral pants). She does not get up—a video camera has already been aimed at her face and turned on—so you greet her as you sit down. You have an agreed-upon window of time. Maybe a little more, if she finds you amusing.
You're here to talk about her big post-baby comeback (Blue Ivy, her daughter with Jay-Z, is a year old), which Beyoncé is marking in classic Beyoncé fashion: with a Hydra-headed pop-cultural blitzkrieg. This month, two weeks after she headlines the halftime show at Super Bowl XLVII, she will premiere an HBO "documentary"—more like a visual autobiography—about herself and her family that she financed, directed, produced, narrated, and stars in. This is a woman, after all, who's sold 75 million albums, just signed a $50 million endorsement deal with Pepsi (her flawless visage will festoon actual cans of soda), and will soon embark on a world tour to promote her fifth solo album, as yet untitled, due out as early as April. Who wouldn't want to know how she gets the job done?
"I worked so hard during my childhood to meet this goal: By the time I was 30 years old, I could do what I want," she says. "I've reached that. I feel very fortunate to be in that position. But I've sacrificed a lot of things, and I've worked harder than probably anyone I know, at least in the music industry. So I just have to remind myself that I deserve it."
Anytime she wants to remind herself of all that work—or almost anything else that's ever happened in her life—all she has to do is walk down the hall. There, across from the narrow conference room in which you are interviewing her, is another long,narrow room that contains the official Beyoncé archive, a temperature-controlled digital-storage facility that contains virtually every existing photograph of her, starting with the very first frames taken of Destiny's Child, the '90s girl group she once fronted; every interview she's ever done; every video of every show she's ever performed; every diary entry she's ever recorded while looking into the unblinking eye of her laptop.
"Stop pretending that I have it all together," she tells herself in a particularly revealing video clip, looking straight into the camera. "If I'm scared, be scared, allow it, release it, move on. I think I need to go listen to 'Make Love to Me' and make love to my husband."
Beyoncé's inner sanctum also contains thousands of hours of private footage, compiled by a "visual director" Beyoncé employs who has shot practically her every waking moment, up to sixteen hours a day, since 2005. In this footage, Beyoncé wears her hair up, down, with bangs, and without. In full makeup and makeup-free, she can be found shaking her famous ass onstage, lounging in her dressing room, singing Coldplay's "Yellow" to Jay-Z over an intimate dinner, and rolling over sleepy-eyed in bed. This digital database, modeled loosely on NBC's library, is a work in progress—the labeling, date-stamping, and cross-referencing has been under way for two years, and it'll be several months before that process is complete. But already, blinking lights signal that the product that is Beyoncé is safe and sound and ready to be summoned— and monetized—at the push of a button.
And this room—she calls it her "crazy archive"—is a key part of that, she will explain, so, "you know, I can always say, 'I want that interview I did for GQ,' and we can find it." And indeed, she will be able to find it, because the room in which you are sitting is rigged with a camera and microphone that is capturing not just her every utterance but yours as well. These are the ground rules: Before you get to see Beyoncé, you must first agree to live forever in her archive, too.
It stands to reason that when a girl owns her every likeness, as Beyoncé does, it can make her even more determined to be perfect. (Beyoncé isn't just selling Beyoncé's music, of course; she's selling her iconic stature: a careful melding of the aspirational and the unattainable.) So when she's on tour, every night she heads back to her hotel room with a DVD of the show she's just performed. Before going to sleep, she watches that show, critiquing herself, her dancers, her cameramen. The next morning, everyone receives pages of notes.
But Wait, What About Her Music? A few words from Beyoncé on her upcoming album, for which she's already recorded about fifty songs.—A.W
On her collaborators: "I've been working with Pharrell and Timbaland and Justin Timberlake and Dream. We all started in the '90s, when R&B was the most important genre, and we all kind of want that back: the feeling that music gave us."
On songwriting: "I used to start with lyrics and then I'd find tracks—often it was something I had in my head, and it just so happened to go with the melody. Now I write with other writers. It starts with the title or the concept of what I'm trying to say, and then I'll go into the booth and sing my idea. Then we work together to layer on."
On the album's influences: "Mostly R&B. I always have my Prince and rock/soul influences. There's a bit of D'Angelo, some '60s doo-wop. And Aretha and Diana Ross."
On her inspirations: "Even the silliest little thing that you hear on the radio, it comes from something deeper. 'Bootylicious' was funny, but it came from people saying that I had gained weight and me being like, 'I'm a southern woman, and this is how southern women are.' My motivation is always to express something or to heal from something or to laugh and rejoice about something."
"One of the reasons I connect to the Super Bowl is that I approach my shows like an athlete," she says now. "You know how they sit down and watch whoever they're going to play and study themselves? That's how I treat this. I watch my performances, and I wish I could just enjoy them, but I see the light that was late. I see, 'Oh God, that hair did not work.' Or 'I should never do that again.' I try to perfect myself. I want to grow, and I'm always eager for new information."
She loves being onstage, she says, because it is the one time her inner critic goes silent. "I love my job, but it's more than that: I need it," she says. "Because before I gave birth, it was the only time in my life, all throughout my life, that I was lost." She means this in a good way: When her brain turns off, it is, frankly, a relief. After drilling herself, repeating every move so many times, locking them in, she can then afford not to think. "It's like a blackout. When I'm onstage, I don't know what the crap happens. I am gone."
Solange, Beyoncé's little sister (and an increasingly famous singer in her own right), says it has always been this way: "I have very, very early-on memories of her rehearsing on her own in her room. I specifically remember her taking a line out of a song or a routine and just doing it over and over and over again until it was perfect and it was strong. At age 10, when everybody else was ready to say, 'Okay, I'm tired, let's take a break,' she wanted to continue—to ace it and overcome it."
It's hard to believe it, given what Beyoncé grew up to be, but as a girl she was shy. These days, she says that Sasha Fierce, the lusty alter ego—part smolder, part fury—that she invented in her first solo video (2003's "Crazy in Love") to coax herself out of her own shell, has been fully integrated into her personality. Part girl next door, part mistress of the universe, Beyoncé now exudes a hip-thrusting sensuality that can be a little...intimidating. She's hot, no doubt, but her eminence, her independence, and her ambition make some label her cool to the touch. Her allure lies in the crux of that tension—on the meridian between wanting her unabashedly curvaceous body and knowing that she's probably right when she says, to borrow from her song "Bootylicious," that you really aren't ready for all that jelly.
Back in the day, the thing that made her fiercest was protecting her younger sibling. Solange recalls how Beyoncé defended her when they were teens. "I can't tell you how many times in junior high school, how many boys and girls can say Beyoncé came and threatened to put some hands on them if they bothered me," Solange says with a laugh. Beyoncé says she harnessed that same temper to bolster her nerve and fuel her work. "I used to like when people made me mad," she says in the HBO documentary, remembering her suburban Texas childhood, which was shaped (some would say cut short) by her determination to be a star. "I'm like, 'Please piss me off before the performance.' I used to use everything." As Jay-Z rapped of Beyoncé at the beginning of her 2006 hit "Déjà Vu," "She about to steam. Stand back."
"You know, equality is a myth, and for some reason, everyone accepts the fact that women don't make as much money as men do. I don't understand that. Why do we have to take a backseat?" she says in her film, which begins with her 2011 decision to sever her business relationship with her father. "I truly believe that women should be financially independent from their men. And let's face it, money gives men the power to run the show. It gives men the power to define value. They define what's sexy. And men define what's feminine. It's ridiculous."
Now she says, "You know, when I was writing the Destiny's Child songs, it was a big thing to be that young and taking control. And the label at the time didn't know that we were going to be that successful, so they gave us all control. And I got used to it. It is my goal in life to be that example. And I think it will, hopefully, trickle down, and more artists will see that. Because it only makes sense. It's only fair."
There ain't no use being hot as fish grease, she seems to understand, if someone else wields the spatula and holds the keys to the cash register. But if you can harness your own power and put it to your own use? Well, then there are no limits. That's what the video camera is all about: owning your own brand, your own face, your own body. Only then, to borrow another Beyoncé lyric, can girls rule the world. And make no mistake, fellas: Queen Bey is comfortable on her throne.
"I now know that, yes, I am powerful," she says. "I'm more powerful than my mind can even digest and understand."
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