Unsolicited Advice

Pointless rumor refutation for the day: Beyoncé was not lip synching the entire halftime show. Why we actually care about this is beyond me -- seriously, guys, the stage was a giant video screen, did you really think they were going to be production-free otherwise? -- but there were multiple points in the show where I can definitively say the lady's voice channel was in fact faded up. She could have gotten away with lip synching the initial acapella bars, but when she starts into the proper vocals to "Crazy In Love" and when she's doing all the random yodeling with the guitarist, there are multiple points where the sound is cut off early or comes in too quiet, when she's moving her handheld mic around too much. It may be back to synched while they're dancing to "Till The End of Time" and "Baby Boy", but she's live for the segments of both where she's asking for shoutouts from the audience. The vocals are also live for at least t...

I don't watch football, but I am reliably informed that Beyoncé motherfucking killed  at the Super Bowl. (I'm also reliably informed that the power went out right after her halftime show. The idea of NOLA's major stadium in the dark is infinitely funnier when it's because of random circuit breaker fail instead of a natural disaster.) I have not paid as much attention to her as perhaps I should have. She is one of several pop artists who first hit while I was a teenager, all of whom are literally within months of my own age -- in Beyoncé's case, it's a matter of less than a week -- and there was a point in my early twenties when so many of them were disintegrating into total trainwrecks that I had to just forget that they existed in order to stop the urge to apologize to basically everyone else on Earth for my generation. Most of them turned out reasonably all right in the end, although God knows nobody expected Xtina to be the one who didn't end up with a se...