This Year's Super Bowl National Anthem Was Lip-Synced

I'm pretty sure this year's Super Bowl national anthem was lip-synced. This is funny, considering that Jordin Sparks was on American Idol, a show that is supposed to be about being a fearless singer. Maybe that's why the camera was rarely on her throughout the whole song. Is that better or worse than last year's Billy Joel Auto-Tune fiasco? Not sure.

The first thing that cued me to the possibility of a lip-sync was that her voice sounded like it was coming from a condenser microphone in a recording studio. This was not the sound of a hand-held wireless dynamic microphone being pumped out into a stadium PA, even it were a direct feed from the board. It was simply too crisp and too compressed to be live sound. The fact that the sound quality was too good and too tight-sounding made it very unbelievable.

Then I started looking at her lips, which was hard to do, because the cameras hardly ever actually showed her singing (her bad job of lip-syncing was probably the impetus for this production decision). When I could see her lips, they were cutting off at different times than the sound. Also, she didn't appear to be "pushing" on notes that would require extra vocal effort. I'm sure she did actually sing it, but not at the Super Bowl. Her lip-syncing was poor.

Tom Petty's halftime show, however, was definitely NOT lip-synced and was quite good. It just goes to show that when you invest in making old-guy rock your entire life, it still sounds good when you are an old guy. Dude was thinking ahead! Seriously, even while performing on top of a giant neon flying-V guitar stage at the Superbowl for a crowd of what appeared to be mostly sorority girls, it was impossible to deny that Tom Petty is an incredibly classy fellow who has recorded timeless rock songs.