Why Are We So Quick to Discredit Lip Sync Performances?
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Last month, Frank Ocean sparked outrage amongst fans and critics alike following his headline performance at Coachella festival. Not only did he turn up late, omit several hits, and end the set early, he was also brave enough to commit the ultimate live performance faux-pas: lip-syncing on stage.
Frank fans were quick to express their disappointment after he openly mouthed the words to several of his songs, without even a microphone to hand. “The fans deserved a genuine show from him. What they got was abysmal and (I’ll say it) pretty disrespectful. People paid a lot of money and what they got was a lip-syncing, chaotic mess” tweeted the Frank Ocean Daily account, followed by more than 100,000 fans.
Vilifying artists for daring to lip-sync is nothing new. Popstars have long faced interrogation over the authenticity of their live performances, inciting fan and media furore if the rumours of mouthing along prove to be true. Throughout the noughties (and to this day, even) lip-syncing has been viewed as a headline-worthy scandal, throwing artists mercilessly into disrepute.
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Britney Spears was on trial for lip-syncing throughout the entirety of her prolific touring career. It didn’t matter how grand the production, how ambitious the choreography, or how many snakes were adorned around her neck; if she wasn’t singing, it wasn’t going to pass.
Spears-stans in Australia were so upset after she mimed the first two shows of her Circus Tour in 2009 that the New South Wales’ Fair Trade Minister said tickets should carry a disclaimer stating if shows are pre-recorded. ‘It is Britney’s “prerogative” to lip-sync, and it is my job to make sure consumers know what they are paying for up front,’ she retorted..
Britney’s not alone in the lip-syncing hall of fame. Beyoncé was embroiled in her own lip-sync-gate in 2013 when she dared to mouth a pre-recorded version of the US national anthem at Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration. Ashlee Simpson faced career-annihilation in 2004 when she was ‘caught in the act’ after the wrong vocal track played during a nightmarish performance on Saturday Night Live.
But while dubbed sets might still be snubbed by some music fans, lip-syncing is no longer solely thought of as pop concert sacrilege. Thanks to the proliferation of miming on TikTok making celebrities of the likes of Addison Rae, as well as the glittering success of RuPaul’s Drag Race, lip-syncing has gained merit as a subversive, well-established and arresting art form not to be looked down upon.
At the end of each Drag Race episode the competitors in the bottom two placements must ‘lip-sync for their lives’ to avoid elimination. These lip-sync battles, which are guaranteed to have you mouthing along too, are arguably the most anticipated and memorable three minutes of every episode. Drag Race, along with the US show Lip Sync Battle which ran from 2015-2019, has helped to establish lip-sync performances as a serious competitive art that requires real skill, charisma and flair.
“It’s the absolute bread and butter of what drag is,” Jacob Mallinson Bird, Lecturer in Music at Oxford University told us. “Lip-synching is considered so foundational on Drag Race that it’s the thing that saves you in the competition. If you can’t do anything else, you should at least be able to lip-sync.”
“Drag is nothing if not artifice - it’s bigger lashes, bigger lips, bigger costumes, and therefore it has to have a bigger voice as well,” Bird explained. “When you’re lip-syncing to artists you really admire, you feel like you’re inhabiting part of their strength, you’re essentially getting to be them for a little bit and take on the amazing or funny qualities you like about them.”
Lip-synching was a cornerstone of drag performance long before RuPaul graced our screens, but the show’s worldwide acclaim has undoubtedly helped to put miming on the map. TikTok only added to this credibility, as the platform became popular initially as a lip-synching app.. Homemade miming videos can quickly snowball into viral memes - with TikTokers dubbing everything from music lyrics, to film and TV quotes, to political speeches - proving just how rich the format is for parody, for dance battles, for whatever you feel like.
While many popstars’ careers have been cut short by miming ‘scandals’, some lip-syncers on TikTok have been lucky enough to make names for themselves from it. Sarah Cooper, who posted dubbed TikToks of Donald Trump speeches in 2020, rose to fame off the back of her lip-syncs, and is set to make her professional stage debut in an off-broadway drama this year.
But our enthusiasm for lip-syncing as a performance art isn’t a new phenomenon and it would be wrong to see it as such. “The interest in having someone else’s voice in your body goes back millennia, it’s part of our cultural history,” Jacob enthused. Ventriloquism was enjoyed as a form of entertainment as far back as the Roman Empire, proving how lip-synching has long appealed to the senses. And this is still true today; mouthing along to a song we like while running, or waiting for a train, or in the shower often feels like an innate and involuntary compulsion. After all, we’ve all likely indulged in a Bridget Jones ‘All by Myself’ inspired home-production at one point or another.
It’s strange, then, that we’re so quick to feel defrauded when artists mouth their words on stage - particularly when even live singing performances aren’t completely untouched or authentic. “There’s this argument that lip-syncing is somehow not live,” Jacob retorted. “It’s an obsession we have with absolute-liveness that can’t really exist. Unless you hear an artist without a microphone, what you’re hearing has gone through various mechanics to get to your ears. This idea that a performance is either live or not exists as a false binary.” Not only that, but other elements of a star’s performance - such as elaborate dance routines or visuals - are historically immediately discredited if not accompanied by a “live” singing performance. Whether it’s Frank Ocean or Britney Spears, we need to be more appreciative of how creatives choose to utilise a stage in presenting their work.
Words: Hannah Downes
