If Alicia Keys's voice cracks at the Super Bowl, but it's edited out, did it even happen?
CBC
It's a momentary glitch that singers everywhere fear: the dreaded voice crack.
So when Alicia Keys belted out the opening notes to her iconic anthem If I Ain't Got You during Sunday's Super Bowl halftime show — and warbled, ever so slightly, before recovering — it was a vulnerable, but for many, relatable moment about the realities of live performances.
But if you watch the NFL's official YouTube video or Apple Music's video of the same performance, the crack never happened.
"No hate to Alicia Keys, but I remember that voice cracking last night," one TikTok user said in a video with 9.5 million views.
The NFL video, viewed over 17 million times on YouTube as of Wednesday afternoon, was seemingly edited to smooth out the note. And that divided a lot of people online, with some saying the NFL showed Keys grace by editing out the mistake, and others saying it's the mistake that makes her performance real.
"Cracking happens, because artists are humans," a vocal coach said in a TikTok video, just one of many on the platform who defended Keys.
But what concerned Robert Komaniecki, a music theory and music history lecturer at the University of British Columbia, wasn't just this specific example of vocal editing, but how easy it has become to revise the official record of a live event.
This sort of edit is simple, he said, and probably took less than five minutes to do, whether they used pre-recorded rehearsal audio, or an editing software that can smooth out glitches and tuning.
"I think some people are a little bit freaked out by that. That millions and millions of people can witness something happen, and then the official record will just carry no evidence that it happened, and there will be no acknowledgement that it changed," Komaniecki told CBC News.
The NFL has not publicly addressed the seeming edit. CBC News has reached out for comment.
Keys hasn't addressed it yet, either, although in a video posted on X just before the performance, she did comment on how "chilly" it was in Las Vegas.
On Instagram, her husband, record producer and rapper Swizz Beatz, praised her performance, writing, "Y'all talking about the wrong damn thing!!! ... Tonight's performance was nothing but amazing."
It's common for little flaws to be buffed out of live performances when they're uploaded or turned into albums — audience noises are turned down; cheering is turned up; swear words are edited out by the tech crew.
And live performances often aren't all that live at all, especially when it comes to the U.S. national anthem, arguably one of the most difficult songs to sing. In fact, some of the most memorable "live" performances of the U.S. anthem in history were pre-recorded.
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