At Least Daniel Radcliffe Made a Good Impression

Even though I haven't watched Saturday Night Live on a regular basis since high school, I always seem to be watching when one of their musical guests bombs big time -- I was watching in 2004 when Ashlee Simpson had her lip synching disaster, despite not having watched the show for months prior to that episode, and I was watching this past Saturday's Daniel-Radcliffe-hosted episode when Lana Del Rey made a pretty terrible impression in her first stateside television performance since releasing various singles online last year.

I'll admit that when I watched the show this Saturday, I flipped back to her first performance halfway through and thought she sounded horrible, which in turn made me not even bother watching her second performance. Since Saturday, however, since the Internet has exploded with the consensus that she is the worst thing to happen to music, ever, I've watched the first performance again, and...I don't know, it's still pretty bad, but maybe not as bad as everyone is saying. I agree with Daniel Radcliffe that a lot of the criticism of her has more to do with her image as a whole (apparently she's the daughter of prominent music executive who many people feel has had her entire quirky/indie persona manufactured for her in the most cynical way possible) than it does with her actual singing on Saturday night, and I think a big part of her problem on SNL was how she presented herself; if she had been playing the piano or even just sitting down, and had styled herself a little differently, dressing in something other than an evening gown, people might have been more forgiving of her pitch problems. As it is, she looks really awkward holding her microphone and wandering in place on the stage, and the way she mumbles through the lyrics was part of why I thought she sounded so bad when I tuned in halfway through the song; watching the video from the beginning, I can actually find the melody, and the song itself isn't all that bad. Then again, her second performance was pretty much just bad through and through, so who knows.

At any rate, I'm always iffy on judging people on their performances on SNL, because even established artists who I know can sing often sound bad on that stage. Every now and again you'll get a good performance, but in general the acoustics are terrible, regardless of whether the studio was designed with singers in mind, and whoever does the sound mixing for the show just does not do a good job. Compare a typical SNL performance with a performance on a show like Letterman or Craig Ferguson, which both have awesome sound mixing, and you'll see what I mean. Bands usually fare better on SNL than solo singers because they're used to balancing out their own sounds, whereas solo singers are often not microphoned properly and end up way out of sync with the music, either singing above it or drowning in it, or both.

What made this past Saturday's episode of SNL really disappointing, though, was that the show itself was bad -- Daniel Radcliffe was a game host, and I liked the last sketch (the exit polling sketch), but otherwise the writing was horrible and some of the sketches painfully unfunny. I think it's time for Seth Meyers to move on as head writer; when two former cast members make me laugh harder in the course of five seconds on an awards show than anything I see on a show that's supposed to make me laugh for an hour and a half, it's time to bring in some fresh blood.