Remember when Rascal Flatts were still a thing?
Well not only were they a thing back in 2014, they were one of the biggest things in country music.
Of course that’s not saying much, because country music really wasn’t in a great place at the time. I mean, just look at the 2014 ACM Awards. Two of the nominees for Album of the Year were Here’s To the Good Times by Florida Georgia Line and Crash My Party by Luke Bryan. Oh, and “Cruise” was also nominated for Single of the Year.
Yeah, not country music’s finest moment.
And at that year’s ACM Awards, Rascal Flatts also had another embarrassing moment for the genre when fans began to suspect that the group was lip-syncing during their performance of their then-current single “Rewind.”
Even fellow country artist Granger Smith took a shot at the performance – without calling the band out by name:
Well the next day they decided to address the controversy, admitting that yes, they were lip-syncing, and blaming it on their lead singer Gary LeVox losing his voice prior to the performance:
“After having performed several shows earlier in the week, Gary lost his voice. So, instead of canceling our commitment to do the show, we made a last minute decision to lip-sync. We’ve never done it before, and we’re obviously not very good at it. We look forward to singing live again in the very near future!”
There’s not any great video of the performance online (I guess they didn’t want that one out there for people to “rewind”), but in the video that’s out there, you can see what they mean when they say they’re not very good at the whole lip-syncing thing.
Yeah, it was pretty bad.
But despite getting publicly skewered for the lip-syncing flap, that didn’t stop fellow artist Garth Brooks from trying to get away with the same thing a few years later at the 2017 CMA Awards, when he admitted to lip-syncing during his performance of “Ask Me How I Know.”
Like Rascal Flatts, Garth blamed it on losing his voice ahead of the performance, but he was called out by fellow artist Eric Church who called lip-syncing a “red line” that artists should never cross:
“We don’t use machines. We use instruments. So the winner of the biggest category of the night lip-synced in the biggest moment on the show?
Fuck that! And I didn’t like his excuse at all.
It is and always will be a red line. It’s fabricated. I don’t want young artists thinking it’s OK, because it’s not.”
Apparently Rascal Flatts didn’t feel the same back in 2014…
