Mariah Carey says she was "victimised" over her disastrous New Year's Eve performance. Photo / Getty Images
Mariah Carey says she was "victimised" over her disastrous New Year's Eve performance. Photo / Getty Images
Almost two months after the fact, Mariah Carey is clearly still smarting from her disastrous New Year's Eve Times Square performance.
For those who didn't catch it - or have blocked it from their memory - Carey had been assigned to perform two of her hit songs, Emotions and We Belong Together, on TV just before the clock ticked over to 2017.
But the singer appeared unable to hear her own songs, ultimately giving up and standing on the stage mute while the music played out around her.
Now, Carey has addressed the performance and subsequent public debate in a new interview, explaining what was going on behind the scenes on the evening - and blaming her earpieces, the positioning of her back-up singers and even her dancers.
"I didn't obsess over the New Year's Eve thing. I was upset that people didn't understand," she said.
"You understand what it's like to wear an earpiece and have someone talking to you? Imagine that's no longer there and you can't hear the music. If you can't hear it, how can you sing to it? If your microphone is also f-ed up, all you can hear is the audience screaming.
"What am I supposed to do? My back-up singers weren't even on stage, somebody moved them, so I couldn't even go over to their mic or any of that," she said.
"If my ears were in, maybe I could've done a few ad-libs and the show would've gone on. I don't know, with all those dancers around who didn't stop and dance me off the stage. I don't know what THEY were thinking. God bless them, but it just caused me a wreck of a New Year's Eve."
Carey said she felt viewers and critics were especially hard on her, arguing that other singers wouldn't have been subjected to such an intense backlash in similar circumstances.
"What do they want me to do? It's like I'm the only one who has to make five million comebacks, while everyone else is just like...you did some little thing, and then you stripped, you did this, and you're fine, you're great.
"But for me, there's different rules, I don't know why. I don't know why it's OK that I was victimised and vilified by the situation."
