Did the Boss go Milli Vanilli at the Super Bowl?

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Lost in all the hullabaloo over Bruce Springsteen’s Super Bowl appearance, Wal-Mart apology and scathing attack on Ticketmaster is the revelation that Springsteen’s heralded E Street Band ... didn’t actually play live at the Super Bowl.

As the Chicago Tribune’s Greg Kot reveals in this interview with Grammy-winning producer Hank Neuberger (who oversees the broadcast audio at the Grammy Awards telecast), everyone at the Super Bowl prerecorded their performances, including Jennifer Hudson and Faith Hill as well. Springsteen’s vocals were live, though it’s unclear from the Kot story whether the other singers were live or not, having clearly been asked -- by Super Bowl organizers -- to tape their performances and record backing tracks. Hudson’s publicist says that ‘Hudson’s mike was on’ -- she was singing live to a backing track at the request of the Super Bowl producers.

Is this new? I guess not. Lots of singers (think Britney Spears and Ashlee Simpson) have been ridiculed for their use of backing tracks during live performances. Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma also played to a recorded track during the presidential inauguration last month. But what about the Boss? A legendarily exciting live performer, should he have made it clear ahead of time that his band wasn’t actually performing live at a mammoth media event like the Super Bowl, where everything is bound to go under the microscope? It wasn’t like everyone was just miming to a record -- the band rehearsed and then recorded the new versions of the songs Springsteen performed on Sunday.

I think what stirs up criticism is that we live in a world that is now dominated by so many examples of pseudo events (starting with all the reality TV shows that are actually as carefully cast, scripted and edited as any dramatic fiction) that it feels increasingly unsettling to discover that something so seemingly authentic -- the E Street Band for the first time at the Super Bowl -- is, while not a fake, still technologically altered and rearranged. It creates all sorts of fuzzy gray areas. If it’s bad for athletes to use chemical enhancement to improve their performance, then shouldn’t we question artists if they use technological enhancement to improve their performance?

I’d like to hear your views on the subject -- as in where should we draw the line between the real and the artificial? As an audience member, I’m slightly squeamish about the blurred lines. But when I spoke to Neuberger, who as a producer is accustomed to dealing with new technology, he viewed the issue in a very different light, saying that using backing tracks is standard operating procedure in public live performances, especially when the artist is suddenly taking the stage in the middle of a football field.

‘You’re dealing with a staging set-up that would normally take all day, and suddenly has to be done in five minutes,’ he explained. ‘You really don’t have a choice -- you’re at a football game. There’s a reliability factor that can’t be guaranteed by five minutes of set-up time. The artists have to hear themselves, the mikes and sound equipment have to be all set up -- all that would be at risk if you tried to do a live performance with so little set-up time. The artists are really doing the right thing.’

Fair enough. But does the audience have the right to know about the set-up ahead of time? Or would that spoil the illusion?