Watch John Legend and Stevie Wonder disrespectfully perform “Hey Ya!”

John Legend and Stevie Wonder’s Recreation of the “Hey Ya!” Video Is a National Disgrace

John Legend and Stevie Wonder’s Recreation of the “Hey Ya!” Video Is a National Disgrace

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Slate's Culture Blog
Sept. 14 2016 1:07 AM

John Legend and Stevie Wonder’s Recreation of the “Hey Ya!” Video Is a National Disgrace

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A nation that cannot faithfully reproduce OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” video on Lip Sync Battle must surely fall.

Kena Betancur/Getty Images

There are a couple of legitimate approaches to take when appearing on Lip Sync Battle. You can be goofy, like Zachary Quinto’s transcendently weird “Freedom! ’90” performance, which got Cindy Crawford back in the clawfoot tub after 26 years but made no attempt to duplicate the look of David Fincher’s landmark video. Or you can do an anti-performance, like Michael Shannon’s “Here Comes Your Man.” Maybe the button-up shirt and jeans are taken from the original music video—a video built around the joke that the Pixies don’t even try to lip sync—but really what’s going on there is just Michael Shannon being Michael Shannon. What you can’t do is try to actually recreate a music video in earnest, unless you’ve got the time and commitment to pull it off. Regrettably—and more in sorrow than in anger—we must report that John Legend and Stevie Wonder’s performance of OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” makes promises it simply can’t keep. The evidence speaks for itself. Here’s OutKast’s original music video, directed by Bryan Barber a riff on the Beatles’ performance on The Ed Sullivan Show in which all of the performers are André 3000:

And here is the wan imitation John Legend and Stevie Wonder served up to the American public on Lip Sync Battle:

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Look: there’s no easy way to stage the “Hey Ya!” video live, even if it’s designed to suggest live TV. For starters, there’s no way to get computer-generated duplicate André 3000s. And even a cursory look at the camera angles Barber uses means it’ll have to be a simplified visually. Neither obstacle should be insurmountable: Different actors can play different Andrés, and the Beatles managed to make a pretty simple setup work out ok. But Legend and Wonder fall into a sort of OutKast uncanny valley: Their version is too much like the original to be a parody and yet gets so many small details wrong it’s just creepy. The problems start immediately, with Stephen Merchant’s cameo as the variety show host. Use the slider to compare their version with the original:

legend1blegend1a

OutKast/Spike

Here’s an exhaustive list of the things Legend and Wonder got right here:

  • They found a British man.
  • They made him wear a hat.

Why is Merchant in a two-piece suit instead of a three-piece? Where is his pocket square? Why are there giant crowns on the curtain? Why is the photography crisp black-and-white instead of 1960s-era telecine? And what on earth is going on with that anachronistic microphone? From the very first shot, this version of “Hey Ya!” is so wildly off base that it can only be a deliberate act of disrespect to the original. It’s not hard to get this look right: Check out these examples from 1992 and 1964:

legend3blegend3a

Nirvana/CBS

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Then there’s the matter of the rest of the set, which shows the same cavalier disregard for truth. Compare:

legend2blegend2a

OutKast/Spike

Give John Legend his due: He has the basic look right here (though his cravat should have stripes and not polka dots). The equestrian-clothed backup singers are nearly correct—their sleeves are too short, but given how flawed the rest of the setup is, that’s hardly noticeable. The set is way too small, but that’s probably an unavoidable limitation of Lip Sync Battle. But the use of crowns instead of hearts is harder to forgive—if anything, those must have been more difficult for the prop department to create than hearts. Why go to extra effort to get things wrong?

The answer, unfortunately, is all too obvious: There’s a weak link here, and you don’t have to study the picture too closely to see who it is. What is going on with Stevie Wonder? He’s got one keyboard instead of three, that single keyboard is facing the wrong direction, and he’s not even a little bit in costume. It’s true that on most occasions, it’s completely acceptable to coast by on “Hey, look at me, everybody, I’m Stevie Wonder!” But recreating the “Hey Ya!” video on Lip Sync Battle is not one of those times. In fact, it appears that Mr. Wonder’s reluctance to commit to the project caused a cascading series of failures that doomed the entire enterprise. Look closely at the tambourine player:

tambourine

Spike

Her costume is clearly based loosely on the keyboard player—aka Stevie Wonder if he’d chosen to put any effort in—but her clothes seems more thrown together than the other outfits, even in the context of this half-assed recreation. Here’s the original:

keyboards

OutKast

Now look closely at the Lip Sync Battle version. Don’t the tambourine player’s hat and jacket look suspiciously large? Almost as if they were meant to be worn by a much larger man? A much larger man who is standing right there with no hat and a ridiculously out-of-place checkerboard jacket instead? And what’s with the hair? The keyboard player should have a ponytail. I wonder if anyone suspiciously missing from the recreation has center-parted hair like this dancer, who clearly was demoted to tambourine player at the last minute?

guitar

OutKast

The evidence all points to one conclusion: Stevie Wonder’s poor costume decisions steered the entire ship into the iceberg. A tambourine player had to be invented at the last minute, which left no guitarist and a horribly unbalanced stage. That meant the bass player had to be moved stage-right, into the empty spot created when the guitarist vanished. The delicate blocking and stagecraft that defined the original video was thus replaced with a crude approximation, and all of Mr. Legend’s enthusiastic dancing does nothing to hide the fact that the entire affair is a travesty.

There’s an argument to be made, of course, that meticulous attention to detail is not really crucial for what is, after all, a performance on Lip Sync Battle. People who make this argument are slackers and has-beens bent on leading our once-great nation further into ruin. Mr. Wonder and Mr. Legend could learn a thing or two from Jimmy Fallon and Paul Rudd, whose meticulous shot-for-shot recreation of Styx’s “Too Much Time on my Hands” demonstrates all that’s best and brightest about our national character. Because you know what’s really cooler than being cool? Being detail-oriented.