Reality star and pop musician Brooke Hogan performed at the annual Spiede Fest in Binghamton, New York on August 7th, 2010. Someone who was up close and personal at the performance video taped her performing the song “About Us” and then posted it via YouTube. A marybob321 posted a comment that she was lip synching and that she/he had proof and in a bizarre twist Brooke herself posted a YouTube video response of her singing the song live to show that she was in fact NOT lip synching!
Before we get into what Brooke had to say on her video and a discussion on patrolling YouTube for negative comments about yourself lets take a look at the two videos in question. First up is the original post from her performance at Spiedie Fest:
Wasn’t anything there to make me think she was b00bies. Wait did I say b00bies? Sorry about that. What I meant to say is that there didn’t seem to be any reason to believe Brooke was faking it on that little clip. Here is the comment that marybob321 made about the vid:
“lol she is lip singing. I am friends with the stage director and he told me if the audio tent was unplugged you wouldn’t here a thing.”
That little comment started a YouTube throw down with Brooke herself commenting back. As of this post a few of Brooke’s comments have been removed but all of this eventually led to the following video reply from the accused to answer her accuser:
Here is a brief little transcript of what Brooke had to say before letting her pipes loose:
“Somebody said that I was lip synching and that they have proof. So just so I have proof so I can show you guys that I’m not a fake because everybody always wants to look for something wrong with somebody who is talented and yes I will say that about myself, I’m talented because I went through a lot of vocal training and a lot of piano lessons to do something like this. Here’s a piano right here (shows her piano), it’s live OK, it’s live and I’m gonna sing it for you marybob123. Good user name by the way. Horrible. Here we go, exactly what you just heard on the video.”
Now I don’t want to pile on Brooke here or be linked with the likes of an unoriginal screen name using Negative-Nelly like marybob321 (Hogan ironically got it wrong when she says marybob123) but there were a couple of disturbing things about the statement. The first is that Brooke is even responding to what folks say on a homemade YouTube clip. Take any music video from any artist and half the comments will be someone with something negative to say.
The second and more troubling aspect of her comment is that she labels herself “talented” instead of letting her music speak for itself. In addition, her defense of her talent is having had extensive vocal and piano training which doesn’t equate to having talent . Talent is just having the gift, being able to sing and play naturally. She sounded just fine and she should be extremely proud of all the dedication and passion she has put into trying to continue her music career, but I believe her response video will have an effect opposite opposite of what she was hoping for.
