The first episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race season 16 featured seven queens doing their respective Variety Show numbers. Four of those queens – Amanda Tori Meating, Dawn, Mirage, and Xunami Muse – lip synced to original tracks of their own.
Lip syncing to an original song has been a winning strategy for a long time now. Ever since the Variety Show challenge was introduced to flagship seasons of Drag Race, Kornbread “The Snack” Jeté, Angeria Paris VanMicheals, and Anetra all won that maxi challenge by lip syncing to their original songs. This has also happened multiple times on different seasons of All Stars.
For some freaking reason, Drag Race fans started a discourse on social media centered on the idea that “lip syncing to your own song is not a talent.” Yup, you read that right.
Thankfully, a few Drag Race legends have now come to the defense of queens who had lip-syncing numbers in season 16, and criticized this weird general statement that a performer lip syncing their own original songs is “not a talent.”
“People say Taylor [Swift] is a TALENTED SONG WRITER all the time. People say that Pharrell is a TALENTED PRODUCER all the time,” Drag Race season 15 finalist Luxx Noir London wrote. “No most of the songs are not on that level (I’m an exception) but still… Songwriting is a talent. Performing is a talent. Lipsyncing is a talent. GET OVER IT.”
She added, “I don’t know why we weigh the talents of drag queens on a different scale than pop stars when we’re practically doing the same thing. Most times we’re actually doing more lol.”
In an interview with PRIDE’s sister publication Out, Luxx further elaborated on her point. “I do think that an original song is a talent. I would be completely wrong if I said that there is not a lot of it happening, but that’s what drag queens do,” Luxx noted. “Drag queens perform to music, and most of the time you can’t perform to somebody else’s music on the show… so you have to make your own.”
Luxx continued, “And I think that people saying that original song and performing is not a talent, basically you’re saying that Beyoncé isn’t talented or Lady Gaga isn’t talented or Christina Aguilera] isn’t talented or Britney [Spears] isn’t talented, because they’re all performing original music and they’re dancing and performing to it. That’s just as much a talent as anything else.”
“Some of these [f***ots] on here complaining and giving voice to what they deem as talent or drag have blackheads that have grown their own spinal cords which has grown another nose to spout another aggressive blackhead,” Drag Race superstar Detox wrote. “Give them no credence. Give them a Bioré strip and no mind.”
All Stars 1 winner Chad Michaels replied to Detox, “Also we are about to lose our democracy but let’s give oxygen to the idiots who are going to willingly give it away because they are too stupid to realize WTF is going on.”
And that's the tea.
