Can You Lip Sync?

The music of Meghan Trainor’s “All about that Bass” filled the room. I quickly turned down the volume lest my family hear me practicing. I lip-synced to this music that is anti-stick figure, anti-Barbie. It is a song that celebrates most of our imperfections. The mirror reflected back a poor attempt at pantomime. The image looked like those movie scenes with the dubbing gone bad; something like English dubbed over Tagalog words.

I switched to Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off”. I was hoping I can keep up with the lyrics “and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate…”. That was easy enough but soon my tongue tripped on the words. Darn. Even a male cop performed better than me. The viral video of that Dover cop head-bobbing, shimmying and singing along to a twenty-something female was entertaining. Should be doable, right? But I must admit the truth. I cannot sing, I cannot even lip-sync.

Just to clarify, I have no intention of posting anything on YouTube. No way would I do that now. It would have been fun twenty years ago when I was sillier, more adventurous and less proper. In my younger years, I did not care about haters. It was fortuitous that there was no You tube then. Now, it would be professional suicide and my son would probably disown me, LOL.

Lip-syncing is an art. Not everyone can pull it off. There are a few ordinary people who are just plain amazing when they channel their inner Taylor or Meghan. They get the rhythm and the words right and they make us suspend our disbelief. Then there are some epic fails. Just watch those countless videos of failed lip-syncs by some wanna-bees. Even professional singers embarrass themselves when they could not sing along believably to their own canned music.

Here are some of my favorite lip-sync moments:




Remember this from 2005? “BackDorm Boys” - Two Chinese boys lipsynced to the Backstreet Boys “I want it that way”.




Rhian Ramos with Moymoy Palaboy



Famous people love to do battles on who can move their lips along and entertain us mere mortals.




So, I would like to assure my family and friends that I am not serious in uploading anything anywhere. It is just fun to sing along to Nicki Minaj while driving through Belt Parkway. It is liberating to pretend that we can sing. But maybe some of my friends would try. Maybe Tet can do Arianna and Erwin can surprise us with his Katy Perry impersonation. I just wonder, if a cop can do it, so can a nurse.