The whole brouhaha over the revelation that Ashlee Simpson was lip-synching her songs on SNL is hardly a surprise to anyone who has actually seen Ashlee Simpson “sing” (the only people fooled by her are the nine-year-olds who buy her albums). The real story is what this scandal says about SNL, the folks who used to expose and ridicule this kind of cheap fraud rather than committing it.
The real story was summed up very nicely in, of all places, a comment left on former-kid-actor-turned-author Wil Wheaton’s blog.
i missed the ASHLEE SIMPSON fiasco for many of the same reasons you and TONY PIERCE mentioned…it is hard to maintain your edge when you’ve been cutting with it for 35 years…when i think of SNL now…i think of bad television parodies…loud, senseless, time consuming sketches that that seem to have been made to order copies of all that have been played out on SNL before…the ASHLEE episode is the kind of pop SNL used to avoid…such candy coated pop was a favorite SNL target for derisive humor…now the humor is lost in the parody of itself that SNL has become…is this a sign post that SNL can look to as a signal that a change is needed…or will the irony of it all be lost to them…at some point you have to have different aspirations than to be the 7,462th man on the moon…too many trips to the same old place…there are other planets out there to explore…is anyone ready to make the trip?