Last night I happened to stumble on VH1's airing of the 100 Best Songs of the 2000s. The decade, to be quite frank, was terrible for music.
Case in point: today's entry in the Jukebox from Hell. This is Ashlee Simpson. She's an actress. She's better known as the younger sister of singer Jessica Simpson, and unfortunately, Jessica got the singing voice (even if, in my opinion, she doesn't use it consistently enough) and Ashlee didn't. That, of course, didn't stop her. She released a couple of songs in fall 2004, which were relatively successful, and the record company decided to promote them on
Saturday Night Live. Unfortunately, she developed what she called "acid reflux" the week of the show and couldn't sing... but instead of canceling, she decided to fake it: lip sync to a pre-recorded studio backing track. It worked fine for song one, but then on live TV, instead of playing song two, the backing track repeated... exposing the fraud.
Her reputation severely damaged, Simpson nonetheless decided she would go forward with a performance at the 2005 Orange Bowl a few months later. In order to restore her reputation, she decided to pick one of the hardest driving songs in her repertoire and overcompensate. The resulting off-key, off-beat screaming-- well, let's just say the subsequent boos were legendary.
Simpson's career never recovered. She eventually married Pete Wentz, frontman for another 2000s drop-in-the-bucket band, Fall Out Boy (and coincidentally, the host of the special I was watching yesterday). Amazingly, Simpson still has a recording contract and was last heard working on her fourth album.
Here's Ashlee Simpson with her live performance at the 2005 Orange Bowl, "La La."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amrbR68A260