Alicia Keys hit a sour note this month during her Super Bowl halftime performance.
Everyone heard it, but good luck proving it.
Evidence of Keys’s musical misstep is nearly nonexistent: The video of the halftime show, as it appears now on the NFL’s YouTube page, has been edited to remove all traces of the Grammy Award-winner’s flub. There is no comment or explanation of the audio changes. Meanwhile, bootleg videos featuring the original, authentic halftime audio, as it aired on Feb. 11, are being scrubbed from YouTube faster than they can be uploaded.
In a few years, people will doubt that Keys fumbled a note.
The further away we get from Feb. 11, and the scarcer unofficial versions of Keys’s performance become, the more lopsided the dissonance between our memory and the “official record” will become. It’ll be 1080p HD video versus increasingly hazy personal recollections, firsthand experience against the “fact” of the record.
Who do you suppose people will believe?
The point isn’t that the audio has been edited. It has long been the standard in the musical industry for sound engineers to tidy up live performances, remixing sound levels, and even removing obvious errors. The point isn’t even that unofficial versions of Keys’s performance are being pulled down from YouTube. Like most mega-corporations, the NFL aggressively polices copyright infringements. No great conspiracy there.
The point is precisely that these types of edits and tweaks, which often happen with no acknowledgment or justification and which encompass far more now than just the odd live musical performance, are common. The point is that we are normalizing conflict between our collective experiences and the “official” record.
It’s just one musical note at a halftime show. It’s just Disney quietly changing the lyrics to an old cartoon. It’s just Pixar unexpectedly releasing different versions of the same movie. It’s just Peacock, Hulu, and Netflix discreetly removing entire episodes of your favorite television show. It’s just the Criterion Channel (or possibly Disney) censoring the French Connection. It’s just Puffin stealthily rewriting Roald Dahl’s body of work. It’s just the BBC quietly censoring its own archives.
It’s just an entire news cycle, rewritten from top to bottom and with nothing to call attention to the change except for an updated timestamp. Unannounced changes in online news reporting are so common, in fact, that we even have a term for it: “stealth-editing.”
For a nation in which trust in nearly every major institution has plummeted, it’s astonishing that anyone would place an added strain on our ability to believe the “official” versions of events, no matter how mundane. On top of undercutting trust, the constant surprise edits of books, movies, songs, and even live events, the things that once formed common social bonds and experiences, are crazy-making.
You may remember it differently. But which are you going to believe? Your memory or your eyes?
Remixes aren’t new. Director’s cuts and radio edits aren’t new. The problem is when these tweaks and edits are done without our knowledge — when the thing that we enjoyed communally is amended in such a way as to create multiple, differing experiences, as opposed to a shared one. Some won’t notice the changes. They will forget the common experience. But for those who do notice the edits, they are alone, insisting to the other half, the half with whom they previously shared an experience, that something is different, wrong even. They are alone, doubting the other half and even themselves.
It may seem like a small, insignificant tweak here or there, but taken together as a whole, they contribute to an increasing inability to discern what is true.
For it to become a matter of routine that our collective memories are put at odds with “official” records is a surefire way to accelerate the demolition of a high-trust society. If you want to strain even further our ability to believe “official” positions, normalizing unfaithful record-keeping is one way to do it.
How are we ever supposed to return to something approximating a consensual reality when even the trivial things we experience as a nation undergo stealth edits? How can we restore faith in our institutions when people can’t even trust that their halftime show was faithfully recorded?
Entertainment companies, newsrooms, or even government agencies can quietly tweak and amend the record. However, they ought to consider that such behavior may have long-term consequences.
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Keep it up, and soon, people won’t believe anything they see online.
Keep it up, and soon, we won’t believe anything.
Becket Adams is a columnist for the Washington Examiner, National Review, and the Hill. He is also the program director of the National Journalism Center.
