Following her unfortunate Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest performance, Mariah Carey kicked off the new year by doing damage control. Over the last few days, Carey’s team has firmly placed the blame on technical difficulties and the rigidness of Dick Clark Productions. Now, ET is reporting that a source says creative director Anthony Burrell is “not being brought back [in 2017] for a number of reasons”—a roundabout way of saying he got fired.
Burrell was reportedly let go for moving Carey’s background singers away from her during the performance without approval, which left her dead in the water when her in-ear monitors failed. Although Burrell hasn’t directly commented on his reported firing, he did respond to a fan who tweeted jabs at him over the recent news. The creative simply said, “Watch me work!”
Watch me work! 😉 https://t.co/NkZE8G1Vop
— Anthony Burrell (@anthonyburrell) January 4, 2017
Carey, who went from shade queen to the shaded within two weeks, also spoke to Entertainment Weekly in a brief interview. The singer believes things would’ve went differently if the show’s late namesake was still in charge.
“All I can say is Dick Clark was an incredible person and I was lucky enough to work with him when I first started in the music business,” she said to the publication. “I’m of the opinion that Dick Clark would not have let an artist go through that and he would have been as mortified as I was in real time.”