15 Most Outrageous Faked Musical Performances

In an incident that threatened to overshadow President Barack Obama's second-term inauguration, liberals and conservatives briefly agreed on one thing: Beyoncé lip-synced her rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner."  After a social media outcry, Beyoncé finally admitted that, yes, she did use a prerecorded track, but only because the frigid Washington, D.C. temperatures in January would have affected her performance. "I am a perfectionist," Knowles said. In a press conference leading up to her Super Bowl halftime performance, Bey treated the press to a jaw-dropping rendition of the National Anthem, effectively ending this scandal. 

The 2007 MTV Video Music Awards were supposed to be Britney Spears' big comeback after taking a hiatus to have kids and marry (and divorce) Kevin Federline. Instead, Brit's listless performance of "Gimme More," with the singer unable to both dance and lip-sync along with her new single, was universally panned and perhaps triggered a series of events that led to Spears' mental breakdown early the next year. "She was extremely nervous. It's been awhile since she's done this, and she was performing in front of all her peers, on live TV," a source close to Britney said after the disastrous performance. "She just got out there and froze." 

Milli Vanilli. Perhaps the most infamous and most embarrassing lip-synch in history comes courtesy of Milli Vanilli, a German pop duo consisting of male models Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan. Hot off winning the Best New Artist Grammy, Milli Vanilli were recording a concert special for MTV when the backing track for their hit "Girl You Know It's True" kept skipping, revealing that the duo were not singing live. In fact, they weren't singing at all; it was later revealed that neither Pilatus nor Morvan actually sang on their debut LP. The duo were subsequently dropped from their label Arista and forced to vacate their Grammy win on their way to becoming one of music's biggest punch lines. 

Another Vanilli-esque career-killing incident befell Ashlee Simpson following her musical performance on an October 2004 episode of Saturday Night Live. Either Ashlee or her band missed their opening cue, but that didn't stop whoever was in charge of Simpson's prerecorded vocal track from pressing play. Knowing that her secret was exposed, Ashlee danced an awkward little jig before jetting offstage, leaving her band to perform an instrumental version of "Pieces of Me." "I'm so sorry. My band started playing the wrong song, and I didn't know what to do, so I thought I'd do a hoedown," Simpson explained. 

Nearly a decade after the Ashlee Simpson incident, Saturday Night Live was the scene of another controversial lip-sync. While Eminem's November 2013 performance didn't result in the rapper running off the stage, his renditions of "Berzerk" and "Rap God" did feature some instances where you could hear his voice even though his lips weren't moving. Countless headlines accusing Slim Shady of miming arrived on Monday, with the uproar so loud that Em's spokesperson said that the rapper "doubles his vocals live. Rhymes over a vocal track. He only does it sporadically through the songs. They're accent tracks."

For over 40 years, everyone from the Rolling Stones to Madonna to Beyoncé stopped by the BBC's weekly Top of the Pops to perform their latest single as either a lip-sync or sing along with a prerecorded backing track. It was a tradition, a rite of passage: You went on the U.K. equivalent of American Bandstand and pretended to perform live. However, not everyone was willing to play along with the charade. Notably, Morrissey "sang" into a fern instead of a microphone during the Smiths' 1984 TOTP performance of "This Charming Man." The best rebellious Top of the Pops performance goes to Nirvana, though: In 1991, using the prerecorded track, the band didn't even pretend to play their instruments while Kurt Cobain sang the track in a deep-voiced style inspired by, of all people, Morrissey. 

This is the Beatles performing on the Thank Your Lucky Stars program in 1963. Notice anything missing? Not only are the band's guitars not plugged in – à la the Chili Peppers at the Super Bowl – but the stage is also completely lacking any microphones. At the time, the rampant miming on shows like this and Top of the Pops led viewers to revolt against the programs, ultimately leading to Thank Your Lucky Stars' cancellation in 1966. 

Nicki Minaj has faced a couple of lip-syncing accusations since her career took off. The first one came at the BET Awards in 2010 after many fans complained that Minaj had simply mimed her performance. Nicki instead blamed the soundman for the mix-up, adding that one "could hear me in the auditorium but apparently not in TV land." However, similar lip-sync charges were thrown at Minaj following high-profile performances at both American Idol and the Super Bowl XVLIII halftime show.

Mariah Carey, like her fellow American Idol judge and arch-nemesis Nicki Minaj, was also accused of miming. Her controversy arose as a result of a Good Morning America performance in May 2013, but it turned out the singer was only lip-syncing on the West Coast. Carey actually sang "#Beautiful" with Miguel in Central Park for the live East Coast broadcast, but the performance was so pitchy that GMA's sound techs had to go in and replace the audio track with the studio version for the West Coast feed. While the East Coast teased Carey's poor singing, three hours later the West Coast laughed at her even-worse lip-syncing. 

After Britney Spears' nightmare "Gimme More" at the VMAs, you'd think the singer would have a little lingering PTSD about miming onstage. However, following the release of 2009's Circus, Spears embarked on her first post-breakdown tour. Britney's Circus concerts involved an elaborate stage design, intricate dancing, a career-spanning set list. . . and absolutely no live singing. For the first few dates, fans bemoaned Spears' lack of singing – she'd only have an open mic to make banter between songs – but the Circus tour was still a major success, ending its run as the fifth highest-grossing trek of the year. 

For the past half-decade, masked rapper MF Doom has perpetrated one of music's cruelest pranks. Because the Madvillain MC hides behind a Dr. Doom-style costume, nobody is entirely sure what he really looks like. As a result, Doom is notorious for sending impostors onstage to lip-sync to his tracks. "The character that I hired, he got paid for it. There's no impostor," Doom revealed on 2009. "When I go to a show, I'm going to hear the music. I'm not going to see no particular person." 

Taking a page from the MF Doom "Is this art?" playbook, Death Grips pulled a similar stunt during a Lollapalooza aftershow in 2012. Chicago's Bottom Lounge was the setting for the prank: Instead of actually performing, the duo instead  had someone project a faux suicide note while the Death Grips' studio recordings played over the club's speakers. When it became evident that the band would not be performing, the angry crowd destroyed Zack Hill's drum set. The band themselves were reportedly in Sacramento, probably laughing their asses off. The Death Grips' Lollapalooza gig the next day and their subsequent East Coast tour were swiftly canceled.

Jay Z and Kanye West's marathon in-concert renditions of "Niggas in Paris" were just a warm-up for Jigga's next endurance test: Performing "Picasso Baby" for six hours inside New York's Pace Gallery. However, those lucky enough to attend the celeb-filled event soon found out that the rapper lip-synced at various points throughout. The "performance" ended up becoming the glorified music video Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film. 

Lip-syncing has become a staple of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, soon to be The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. The late-night host and his celebrity guests turned miming into a competition. Fallon first faced off against John Krasinski, but the truly epic battle came when Fallon challenged Stephen Merchant and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. 

10 years after the Janet Jackson nipplegate incident, the powers-that-be at the NFL are still not interested in too much spontanaiety happening during their biggest event, the Super Bowl. So while Red Hot Chili Peppers' frontman Anthony Kiedis was allowed to sing live, the rest of the band was neither miked up nor plugged in, lest any unexpected glitches disrupt the spectacle.