Presenting a brief history of lip-syncing, from early filmed musical numbers to RuPaul’s DragRace
Photo: Loew’s Inc. Some queens become legends over a lifetime and some become legends in the space of a minute.
A good lip sync isn’t merely about artifice, however. A talented lip- sync artist will find and express their own truth, separate from the original vocal artist’s intent. A truly masterful lip-sync artist will remix the emotions of a song, filter them through their own character and life experiences, punctuate them with exaggerated flourishes that almost act like a conductor’s movements, and play with the audience’s emotions and expectations like a virtuoso.
But anger and maternal love aren’t the only emotions available to interpret, and sometimes a lip sync on Drag Race becomes elevated simply through the sheer joy of watching a queen really nail the hell out of a song, like DiDa Ritz firing off the nearly impossible lyrics of “This Will Be ” right in front of its singer, Natalie Cole, who was brought to cheers and YAASes at the sight because she was so swept up in the emotion of watching a queen interpret her song with such life and precision.
But before we talk about how lip-syncing became a tradition in drag, we have to take a moment to look at how it developed in mainstream culture. Why? Say it with us now: Also because the story of lip-syncing in all its forms makes a perfect jumping-off point to discuss issues of artifice and realness as they’re defined in both the queer world and the mainstream one, and to point out the bigotry, classism, homophobia, and transphobia underlying lip sync’s elevation as a drag art form.
In 1981, MTV was launched and the slow normalization of lip-syncing popular music in staged settings or in front of a televised audience achieved full saturation. Music videos indulged in the artifice of lip-syncing in a way previous forms didn’t try, sometimes making the artificial aspect of the performance the entire point of the music video.
After World War II, drag performing spaces and revues like Finocchio’s in San Francisco, the Garden of Allah in Seattle, and the traveling Jewel Box Revue offered high-end female impersonation entertainment to largely straight audiences who were willing to loosen up just a little, what with having survived a Great Depression and a World War.
Second, even before musicians guilds and the cops made it harder to mount live drag shows in more glamorous big-city venues, the tiny underground gay bars and queer house parties in a small town somewhere in the first half of the twentieth century weren’t going to be providing their local drag artisans any musical accompaniment even if they wanted it.
Within the field of pantomime, there has sprung into some prominence a type of comedian known as the record comic. As the name implies, phonograph or taped recordings form the basis of his work. A popular comical recording is played offstage while the impersonator silently mouths the lyrics, accompanying them with a pantomime burlesquing of their meaning. This may be a satisfactory means by which a budding comic may make his first venture.
A lip-syncing queen is performing her art, which is the art of being a lip-syncing queen. Some drag queens chose lip-syncing as part of their act not because they can’t do anything else but because it was the form of drag that most inspired them. Providing the illusion of a woman’s vocals coming out of a man’s mouth is, to many queens, no different than contouring her face and putting on a wig to provide the illusion.
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