The Most Embarrassing Dick Clark's New Year’s Rockin' Eve Performances Of All Time

Table of Contents

• How One Direction welcomed the band's worst year
• Cyndi Lauper's hopes were dashed
• Mariah Carey suggested she'd been sabotaged
• The cold did bother Idina Menzel after all
• Lady Gaga and Mayor Mike Bloomberg kissed
• Taylor Swift rang in an awkward 2009
• Jenny McCarthy, generally speaking
• Macklemore's poncho didn't age well
• Britney Spears had gum in her mouth
• Jennifer Lopez sang an Aerosmith song

How One Direction welcomed the band's worst year

When One Direction appeared on "Dick Clark's New Year’s Rockin’ Eve" to ring in 2015, little did the boys know it would end up being the worst year of the band’s all-too-brief existence. By that March, Zayn Malik would stun the fandom with an announcement that he would be going solo. That August, the rest of the group would reveal that they would be going on an extended hiatus after releasing one last album as a foursome, "Made in the A.M.," which came out that November. And then... 1D was over.

But back on New Year’s Eve, their performance of fan-favorite single "Steal My Girl" unfortunately failed to impress. The boys, usually beloved for their on-stage goofiness, were curiously low-energy. Malik appeared particularly uninterested in what they were performing, even though "Steal My Girl" is often listed as one of the band’s songs that shows off his vocals best: PopCrush, for example, wrote, "We knew it was a hit as soon as Zayn started hitting notes only dogs can hear."

However, this performance of the hit seemed so lackluster that fans complained about it on social media, especially since Malik didn’t go for his iconic high note at the end of the song. "I was soo upset ... because I couldn’t hear Zayn’s high notes," one fan tweeted, before concluding in all caps, "THEY’RE NECESSARY."

Cyndi Lauper's hopes were dashed

At the end of 2020, Cyndi Lauper was one of the few performers who appeared live in Times Square on a more somber, COVID-19-restricted edition of "Dick Clark's New Year’s Rockin’ Eve." After a duet of her classic song "Time After Time" featuring Billy Porter, things seemed to fall apart. Her team came on stage to make sure she was looking her best before she continued, but as the New York Post reported, Lauper was surprised by the intrusion, awkwardly shouting, "I’m on camera! I’m on camera!"

As NME noted, her speech before her next song "Hope" was inspiring, at least. "This has been a year of great loss," Lauper said. "But in my heart, I feel that if we stick together, we just stick together and help each other, we can make it through. I have hope."

However, while it may have been in theory an admirable attempt to rouse the spirits of a nation left flagging after a tumultuous year, the new song did not translate well to television. To put it charitably, Lauper's performance sounded awkward and hollow in a Times Square left mostly empty by the pandemic. A less-charitable reaction would be one that notes that Lauper's dance moves appeared so awkward, one fan on YouTube edited the clip to extend her strange choreography.

Mariah Carey suggested she'd been sabotaged

By far the most infamous embarrassing NYE performance of all time was Mariah Carey’s flub in the final hours of 2016. She claimed not to be able to hear her in-ear monitors and, rather than just going for it, she instead spent most of her time wandering around the stage complaining. While the backing track for hits like "Emotion" played unheeded, Carey’s interjections — such as, "Just let the audience sing" and "Get these monitors on, please!" — went viral instantly.

Carey released a statement on Twitter a week later. "It’s a shame that we were put into the hands of a production team with technical issues who chose to capitalize on circumstances beyond our control," she said, before suggesting that they were intentionally sabotaged. Her manager told Rolling Stone that she’d asked for the performance to be removed from the West Coast feed, but it aired unedited anyway, allowing those who hadn’t already seen every cringeworthy moment on social media to catch it all. Dick Clark Productions disputed the accusation that they tried to capitalize on Carey’s failure in their own statement: "To suggest that DCP ... would ever intentionally compromise the success of any artist is defamatory, outrageous and frankly absurd."

When Mimi returned to ring in 2018, she sounded better, but she still couldn’t resist being her usual and self-proclaimed diva self: Between songs, Carey called for a hot tea she was promised, before moaning that it was a "disaster" when the tea didn’t materialize.

The cold did bother Idina Menzel after all

Perhaps no movie had more of a grip on popular culture in 2014 than "Frozen," so it was only fitting that "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve" invited Idina Menzel — Elsa herself — to their telecast celebrating the arrival of 2015. Though Menzel is a seasoned Broadway star used to showing off her powerhouse live vocals, she really seemed to struggle during the appearance, and her performance of instant-classic Disney song "Let It Go" was rough, to say the least. The song famously includes some gravity-defying notes in the final chorus that Menzel couldn’t reach, and everything sounded raw instead of the more polished sounds that parents of soundtrack replay-happy children were used to hearing.

Time magazine noted that fans on social media were quick to joke about the cold, indeed, bothering her anyway, suggesting that low temperatures were to blame for Menzel’s struggling vocal cords. After the criticism, and probably growing tired of everyone online making the exact same joke we’ve made in the title of this section here, Menzel shared an interview excerpt on Twitter the following morning, pointing to an answer where she had spoken about allowing herself space to make mistakes.

"I am more than the notes I hit," Menzel had said. "And that’s how I try to approach my life."

Lady Gaga and Mayor Mike Bloomberg kissed

Hometown girl Lady Gaga helped ring in the New Year in Times Square as 2011 became 2012, hot off the success of her album "Born this Way." However, it wasn’t her performance of a