It’s perhaps trite to note that the internet, once a “Web” for connecting people, has instead become an alternate plane of virtual reality. Lots of articles have appeared on this site exploring that phenomenon in the context of social media, where people have the option to construct an enhanced self (yes to pictures of my once-a-month mountain hike, no to pictures of my once-a-week triple cheeseburger) and pass it off as the real self. Of course, over time everyone came to understand the constructs were largely fictional, which coincided with a rise in cynical attitudes everywhere: deconstructing the heroes, the experts, the Establishment, etc.
But one class of person has proved resistant to all deconstruction: the professional performer. As public trust in public figures of almost all stripes plummets, the true superstars — basically Taylor Swift, at this point — are as popular (or more so) than ever. To paraphrase Tomas de Zengotita[1], performers retain their authenticity because their actions were already performances. As Zengotita puts it, “stars can be heroes because their performances fuse the real and representational on a new plane. They are, in effect, leading us into a new reality — the reality of being mediated.” Performers, in other words, are really performing, which gives them an authenticity that, while limited, is rock-solid, unassailable, within its own bounds.[2]
Still, every once in a while there’s a crack in the façade. Which brings me to … Alicia Keys at the recent Super Bowl Halftime Show. A brilliant singer and songwriter, Keys gave a characteristically great performance at the Halftime Show, with just one false note — a voice crack on “Some people want it all.”
Less interesting than the crack itself — which is liable to occasionally happen to even the best vocalists — was the reaction of the Powers that Be. It was scrubbed out of the records, and the NFL’s official YouTube video and Apple Music video of the show present a fictional version of the halftime show where Keys hit the note perfectly.
Editing reality isn’t anything new, but quietly falsifying the historical record of a performance is. The edit to Keys’s voice crack is a knee-jerk reaction from a society that simply prefers excellence to weakness and needs no justification to purge the latter from our common history.
Of course, if everyone knew the flawless perfection of Keys’s song was partly virtual, then we’d no longer be able to identify; the fiction would be too transparent. So the change is made, but made without acknowledgment, in the hope the companies can slip this one by and we can all worship the performer who perfectly executed the halftime show without any qualms about authenticity. As Zengotita writes,
“In concert, especially, these new heroes provide fans with the only experiences of transcendent social belonging most of them will ever know. Hence the undeniably religious quality of these events, when they go well, when the heroes meet the awesome expectations … These heroes discover us, tell us who we are, and who we aspire to be — which is what real heroes used to do.”
Just as the performer’s authenticity is solid because the performer is not purporting to be anything other than a performer, the performer’s excellence can be judged by the execution of the performance. And while the halftime-show viewing public embraces whimsy, quirks, all measures of intentional weirdness, it can’t abide a lapse from one of the few objective expectations: that the singer hits every note.
The irony is that Keys, arguably more than any other modern performer of her stature, firmly rejects the hope of salvation by one’s own merits. “Some people want it all,” she sings — the fame and followers and wealth and acclaim that living up the Law gets you — “But I don’t want nothing at all / If it ain’t you, baby.” Her music is utterly confident that the love of one person can redeem everything, that all the world’s treasures count as nothing next to love.
In a classic song about addiction, “Illusion of Bliss,” Keys beautifully frames the problem of being human:
What would you know? What would you do
If you had no control over what you pursue?
You talk yourself, tell yourself, “Baby, I’m better than this”
All that I’m fightin’, I don’t wanna resist
Most of us have little control over our desires, which shape what we pursue. Trying to make meaning of our lives in the wrong ways, we tell ourselves we’re better than we are but also grow tired of fighting our own selfishness. Eventually we convince ourselves we don’t need saving, don’t want it:
Live in prison of blood and flesh
An easy way out is this high, I confess
So what you lookin’ at? What you wanna say?
You can’t save me, baby
I don’t want it no way
By the end of the song, Keys’s speaker gives up on self-reliance. She lands where most of Keys’s songs do, on the necessity of love as the way out:
See, my life ain’t no easy road
I don’t know which way to go
Won’t somebody see me when I can’t see myself?
Won’t somebody listen before I need help?
I’m sick of being judged, sick of being sick
Tell me, where’s the love?
Tired of bein’ tricked
Sick of bein’ high, sick of being low
Sick of all the lies, puttin’ on a show
And so it persists, and so it persists
Like a bottomless kiss
An illusion of bliss, an illusion of bliss
The lies and the show — pretending to be perfect, proffering an edited version of the self for public adoration — is just an illusion of bliss. Like a high from a drug, it’s living in an alternate reality where everything’s okay.
The virtual world presents more options than ever, as the constraints of physical reality weaken further. Celebrities now don’t just have to compete with other celebrities and how they present themselves in person, but also they must compete with virtually enhanced celebrities — to outdo singers with all the benefits of makeup and photoshop and autotune and everything else. As our tools for editing reality become more advanced, we can create increasingly perfect versions of celebrities on-screen. Alicia Keys is no longer good enough; we’d rather have an Alicia Keys who’s been purged of the human imperfection of an occasional voice-crack. So that is what the market delivers, to the extent it can. Our options for the illusory bliss of being worthy — or pretending to be, or trying to emulate those flawless people in the virtual[3] plane — proliferate.
Even as she puts on the show, though, Keys powerfully witnesses to the hope of deliverance from outside — deliverance from the lies, the sickness, the illusions she sings about. The hope of redeeming love shines through her work, even as we increasingly demand that she and other artists conform to our worldly ideals of perfection.
As our culture’s reality-altering technologies get more powerful and more available every day, especially with the explosive advance of AI, the public standard for Good Performance will continue getting more and more unattainable. The twelve-year old whose voice wavers during a major recital will no longer be able to see a superstar’s voice crack on the world stage. And the virtual world puts a sort of competitive pressure on the real one: one day you will have the tools to cheaply and easily edit your twelve-year old’s pitchiness of the recording, and if all the other parents are doing it, the reality will seem more and more monstrous, as the public standard of a quality recital gets higher and higher and mistakes become less frequent and less tolerated. In some ways that competitive pressure seems the root of the phenomenon of acceleration — that a few people embrace the fancier party or the photoshopped images or the perfect Valentine’s day presents for your kid’s classmates, then it seems worse not to do it, so more people do it, and more, until it’s basically required. The virtual world and virtual editing technologies supercharge acceleration, where the bar of the Law continues to rise.
But the perfect realization of virtue in the virtual world will also accelerate the exhaustion of human attempts to fulfill the Law by making it more and more unattainable and, dare we hope, make Christianity increasingly attractive as a genuinely countercultural means of addressing human weakness.
I love Keys’s music because it is so firmly fixed on the hope of transcendent love, rather than merit, as the hope for the human condition. And even if neither Keys nor anyone else can love as perfectly as the speaker in her songs, there is someone who can: a personal God who redeems those of us sick of being judged and sick of being sick. Who fulfills the transcendent ideal of love expressed in Keys’s most popular songs by coming down to be with us and dying on a cross to bring us to him. The God who “want[s] nothing at all if it ain’t you” and who died on a cross to make you his. The one who stays together with us through the days and nights (Ps 42:8). The one who makes us righteous, not just in a virtual world, but in fact. The one who tells us with perfect assurance that no one, not even ourselves, can get in the way of what he feels for us and that, because of his love for us, everything’s gonna be alright. Even when our voice cracks on the world’s biggest stage.
COMMENTS
5 responses to “Voice Cracks, Edited Realities, and Alicia Keys’s Antidote to Acceleration”
Leave a Reply
This is so so good (and unexpected!), Will. Thank you x 100. Also can’t express how much joy it brings me to see your name back here.
I love this so much thanks!! WILL!!!
A much needed read! Thank you, Will!
Sir, can we please have more?
Great focus as we approach Easter. We cannot even fathom the love our God has for us. Keep writing the Truth!