Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Some queens become legends over a lifetime and some become legends in the space of a minute.
The point is to lean into the artifice while still making it appear seamlessly real.
A good lip sync isnt merely about artifice, however.
Its like a remix without actually remixing.
It was how the performance represented the end point of drags evolution over the past century.
Here was a plus-size black man mimicking a pregnant woman and lip-syncing a popular song.
Well show you those receipts in a minute.
For now, we want to highlight some more high-drama moments inDrag Racelip-syncing herstory.
Alyssa had been crowned Miss Gay America and Coco was her first runner-up.
Its the very definition of slaying the lip sync.
Say it with us now:
Drag is all about repurposing mainstream culture into something uniquely queer.
The film was calledThe Broadway Melodyand it was historic in a whole bunch of other ways as well.
In other words, he invented the lip-synced musical performance.
But first, lets have a cocktail.
Gay singer George Michael may have taken the form to its lip-syncing heights withhis 1990 video for Freedom!
90,which featured a string of the most iconic supermodels of the era lip-syncing to his voice.
So Why Did Drag Queens Start Lip-Syncing?
We can tell roughly when the practice started on a professional level.
Theres the queen who put on a dress and a record and called it an act first.
Working queens and their establishments had to figure out ways around the police raids and harassment.
It was in this atmosphere that lip-syncing acts became much more prominent in the drag world.
For many years, record acts were seen as the lowest, most amateur form of drag there is.
This wasnt mere drag classism on display although its safe to say thats part of it.
They werent lip-syncing to Elvis and the Beatles, after all.
They just werent professionals or well known outside their social circles.
Comedy Lip Syncs
But not all early professional lip-syncing was set to music.
As the name implies, phonograph or taped recordings form the basis of his work.
This may be a satisfactory means by which a budding comic may make his first venture.
However, it should not continue into his professional career as live entertaining puts him in the professional bracket.
There have been drag jugglers, magicians, strippers, and fire breathers.
From that perspective, it might be understandable why lip-syncing was looked down on by performing queens.
No, the difference is that those queens of previous generations didnt necessarily focus ondrag itselfas an art form.
A lip-syncing queen is performing her art, which is the art of being a lip-syncing queen.
Before Lypsinka, lip-syncing was viewed as a cheap form of drag.
He spoke of being spanked for mimicking Natalie Wood in the filmGypsyas a child.
Both channeled and performed rage through the art of drag but came about it in such different ways.
Epperson has called his performances artificial and distancing to the audience.
She did all these things while elevating and centering the art of lip-syncing.
Sasha Velour has credited Lypsinka with inventing modern drag, and thats not hyperbole on her part.
Lypsinka encompassed all the parts of modern drag in her work and then elevated them to a higher status.
We were wrong to say earlier that there were no pioneers of lip-syncing.
Copyright 2020 by Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez.
