Read our lips, we love this show
With Spike TV’s hit Lip Sync Battle, viewers make peace with musical fakery
So it has come to this: celebrities are earning raves by pretending to sing.
When it debuted this month, Lip Sync Battle (Spike, Thursdays at 10 p.m.) didn’t seem like a wise idea for a TV show. Based on a recurring segment from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the conceit is simple: two celebrities battle it out by mouthing along to popular songs as a crowd cheers the oral fakery.
Imagine watching a tennis match in which no actual balls are used.
Incredibly, Lip Sync Battle has become a sleeper hit and incubation chamber for viral videos. The premiere earned the highest ratings for a new program in Spike history, which means the NBC execs who passed on the show are now trudging to meetings with hip flasks and briefcases full of antacids.
We’ve seen Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson don a Bee Gees white suit to disco point and silently belt out “Stayin’ Alive.” He also moved his lips with laser precision to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.” For a few minutes, jarring and surreal, it was like the Rock was Taylor Swift — a bouncing, grinning Taylor Swift with bulging deltoids and biceps the size of a Boeing fuselage. It was hypnotic. Fallon, who loves to lip sync as much as Mike Duffy once loved keeping a diary, lost the battle, despite staging an elaborate version of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” that included a lip-syncing choir.
Then again, winning and losing is the least of it.
I know it’s my job to try to make sense of popular culture. But I have to warn you, I’m lost on this one, confused as to why so many people, including me, enjoy watching luminaries imitate and pantomime and do what was once reserved for showers or driving alone.
Is the appeal simply in watching famous people showcase their goofy sides? Are we drawn to untouchables doing something that we could all do in our own homes? No, that doesn’t quite explain it, or the TV airwaves would now be filled with shows such as Celebrities Clip Their Fingernails and When Superstars Nap.
Lip Sync Battle, when you overthink it, is the opposite of a karaoke bar. Instead of ordinary folks really singing in an awkward way, we have celebrities not really singing in an entertaining way, which on paper should be as unlikely as really scalding your tongue with an imaginary beverage during a tea party with your kids.
And why can’t I stop thinking about Emily Blunt’s version of “No Diggity”?
A clip of Anne Hathaway mounting a pendulous “Wrecking Ball,” in underwear homage to Miley Cyrus, has been watched more than 13 million times on YouTube since it was uploaded last week. The preview of this week’s episode, “John Krasinski vs. Anna Kendrick,” has already passed the four-million mark. Krasinski, who produces Lip Sync Battle with Fallon and Stephen Merchant, can be seen ripping off his suit like Superman to reveal a shimmering, silver dress as he launches into Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary.” Truly, there are no words. Kendrick, not to be outdone, enlists a backup singer from the block: Jennifer Lopez.
Yes, exactly a quarter-century after Milli Vanilli was stripped of its Grammys for not really singing — a fact that emerged after an MTV performance in which a skipping tape caused the lyrics “girl you know it’s” to repeat in a hellish loop until the mortified duo ran for their lives — the lip sync has come of age. It is acceptable. It is no big deal. Justin Bieber does it with friends. Garth Brooks shrugs at the possibility he may have to do it at the Academy of Music Country Awards. Unlike the past, whether it was Whitney Houston doing it while singing the U.S. national anthem at the Super Bowl in 1991 or Ashlee Simpson doing it on Saturday Night Live in 2004, there is no residual shame in doing it. We’ve made our peace with the lip sync. It’s part of a larger fake industry: from Auto-Tuned lead vocals to international air guitar competitions, music has opened its doors to the bogus and the counterfeit.
Now I’m really overthinking this. If you want to discuss further, I’ll be in my office recalling an ’80s lip sync show while analyzing more celebrity battles. Honestly, it’s like they’re really singing. vmenon@thestar.ca