It seems that the quartet that performed at the recent presidential inauguration was as phony as, um, a really big phony thing.  Yes, apparently the illustrious Yo-Yo Ma and the other guys (I kid, but it seems that these people are actually all huge in the classical music world, which really does not intersect with my world) decided that it was too cold to play the event live, so they actually played along to a tape, Milli Vanilli style.  The reason given was the cold would have caused their incredibly expensive instruments to go out of tune and the piece would have sounded like garbage.  Fair enough I suppose, but it really takes the class out of having those guys out there in suits, looking impossibly elite, eyes closed, bleeding the music out of their fingers, wrought with thousands of hours of painstaking practice at their art.  Instead, we heard David the IT guy click “play” on the MP3 on his laptop, or perhaps somebody put the tape into the presidential boombox and slid it a bit closer to the mic on the table.  It’s just not very presidential, and it’s certainly not genuine for those musicians to pretend to play the thing, is it?  The best part is the spokesperson insists “This isn’t Milli Vanilli” but, it really really really is.

This is just slightly better than the whole Olympic thing with the cute-but-terrible-sounding little girl lip-synching to the tape of the only-slightly-less-cute-but-great-sounding little girl.  At least these musicians were playing to a tape of their own performances (or so we were told).