9.30.12 The Voice of China

Because the "ass" edit is about the stations own interpretations of what is obscene but changing gender pronouns is a different thing entirely. For that matter if a straight singer uses alternate gender pronouns it is usually no big deal but the interpretation is different when an openly gay performers does. There have been several straight female singers who have covered the song "My Girl" without changing the lyric and it is rarely questioned however more attention is paid to pronoun choices when the performer is gay. I would be willing to bet that had a straight male covered Fever without changing the pronoun it would not even have raised an eyebrow. The whole thing is about the perception.

There were DJ's who commented on If I Had You grossing them out knowing that Adam was singing about a guy. This is why I think that with both WWFM and IIHY Adam went to great lengths during promo to ascribe a meaning to the songs that was an alternate to the straight romantic interpretation. WWFM was easy coming off the AMA performance the alternate meaning practically wrote itself. Many commented on how ingenious it was that Adam also created an alternate interpretation for IIHY by making it about community, family and friendship rather than a romantic interest.

Adam also touched on this in an interview where he was asked straight out about having a male romantic interest in a music video and he said flat out that America had shown it was not ready for him to go there. It is about picking battles. Both WWFM and IIHY lent themselves to legitimate reinterpretation. Even the alternate interpretation of BTIKM is legitimate but Fever could really not be interpreted as anything other than what it is.

Adam Lambert ‏@adamlambert

So cool that Glamberts were able to watch a live stream.... Technology is nuts.

:wub:

When you are there you are hearing the voice in the context of the environment with all the natural sounds of the room itself. The "dry" feed is picking up just the direct voice but does not pick up all the nuances of "the room".

This is also why the particular acoustics of the venues are important because a room that is designed to enhance sound such as a theater or concert hall adds to performance as opposed to sports arenas which are horrible acoustically for vocal performance. It is much harder to mix sound in a room with horrible acoustics.

Interestingly Bono hates "dry feed" also so his for all of his TV performances he insists that the vocal feed is taken from his sound engineer's mix and not directly from the mic. Benefit of being a huge superstar is that he can make those demands.