If you Google the word lip-syncing right now you'll be flooded with hundreds of articles about Jimmy Fallon's "lip sync battle" with Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart. Shown on Feb. 1st on an episode of the Tonight Show, the video clip has been clogging up our News Feeds for days.
For those uninitiated, Jimmy Fallon's "lip sync battles" are exactly what they sound like: a competition where celebrities face off against each other to see who can pantomime popular songs the best. The segment has become such a success that it is getting its own spinoff show in April. Fallon will be a producer for the new series on Spike called Lip Sync Battle, according to Entertainment Weekly. Set to debut in April and hosted by everyone's favorite host LL Cool J, the show will presumably be an extended version of the popular late night segment.
The original "lip sync battle" game first debuted on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon after it was created by Stephen Merchant and husband and wife duo John Krasinski and Emily Blunt. The fact that it was created for fun probably in someone's living room and then debuted on a late night show as a ridiculous game seems fitting.
Lip-syncing is kind of weird pastime, because unlike something like karaoke, you're not really doing anything. You're wordlessly miming someone's else's words, taking on someone else's vocal talent and indulging in someone else's emotional aerobics. And we've all either experienced or witnessed that scene before, a person singing into a hairbrush prancing around the privacy of their own bedroom as they embody someone else's persona. The medium of lip-syncing offers fans a way to connect with their favorite artists in a very unique way. Because what if you have a passion for music but are tone deaf? Lip-syncing lets an ardent fan slip into their favorite artist's skin. It also allows fans to create their own dialogue with the artists, the same way fan fiction does, just without as much effort.
But lip-syncing isn't always used as a sort of tribute. In films, lip-syncing is a device often used as a way for a character to show a different side of their personality and completely lose themselves in the moment while not totally veering off the plot line.
Who can forget when Jon Cryer's character Duck performs a rendition of Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness" during a scene in Pretty in Pink. If you already thought Molly Ringwald's character Andie was dumb for liking basic Blaine over Duck, you thought she was real dumb after seeing his transformative lip-syncing performance. Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig's lip-sync of Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" in Skeleton Twins is funny but also heartbreakingly sad as it shows how a childhood pastime is now met with such resistance, underlining how strained their sibling relationship has become.
Whether it's a celebrity lip-syncing fail (Mariah Carey's recent singing mishap comes to mind) or a YouTube video of Delaware policeman lip-syncing to Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off", or Taylor Swift lip-syncing to her own song, pantomiming has become something of a constant in the viral world of the Internet.
Keenan Cahill, a YouTube personality with over 465 million views, rose to Internet fame by lip-syncing popular songs and uploading them to YouTube. And the medium of lip-syncing has evolved into a genre of its own. Take Cinderonce for instance, a drag interpretation of the story of Cinderella featuring Beyoncé songs. It is one of the most well-produced and expensive YouTube lip-sync videos out there, not to mention a thoughtful interpretation of the traditional story.
On the other end of the spectrum is the super low-budget 2005 video that may have kicked off the YouTube trend, a lip-sync video of the Backstreet Boys song "I Want It That Way" by the Back Dorm Boys. After the video became a hit in Asia and the U.S., the Back Dorm Boys appeared in ads for Motorola and Pepsi, were featured on the Ellen Degeneres Show and achieved meme-worthy status. The video is funny and inherently watchable but also points out how silly the lyrics are in the first place, and how strange it is that as an audience we buy into boy bands hawking us love songs. And as Sam Anderson of Slate points out, at its best, that is what lip-syncing is, a reappropriation of art that is both a homage and critique at the same time. Because when you really think about it, most lip-syncing performances are a labor of love. In order to lip-sync something you have to memorize all the words, and replay the song in your mind over and over again. Lip-syncing not only offers the performer a way to discover and display new facets of themselves, it offers a new place for cultural commentary in an entirely unexpected place.
