While listening to Sweet Child O’ Mine in the car yesterday, I found myself reminiscing about a sliver of time in my life when public lip-syncing contests were popular and people – myself included – lip-synced competitively.
I was 17 years old when my illustrious career began. I was still in high school, working for a McDonald’s in Milford, Massachusetts. In an effort to build morale, McDonald’s management decided to sponsor a lip-sync contest, complete with a cash prize.
The competition took place in a meeting room inside the Milford Public Library.
A lip-sync contest in a library.
There were four acts competing in the contest. I was in three of them.
Bengi, a guy named Eric, a now-forgotten participant, and I lip-synced Guns & Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” Bengi was on vocals and I was on drums.
I sat in a folding metal chair and pretended to play the drums. Without any sticks. I just swung my arms around to the beat and pretended to harmonize during the chorus.
Bengi and I followed up this performance with a two-man tribute to Tesla’s classic “Gettin’ Better.”
The third act was me and a forgotten pair of girls who performed a favorite song of mine at the time, “Under the Boardwalk.”
The fourth and final act was six older ladies singing and dancing to “Heard it Through the Grapevine.” They wore enormous trash bags to give the impression that they were raisins. A musical group called The California Raisins, consisting of animated, anthropomorphized raisins, was popular at the time and famously sang that song.
That sentence alone deserves some future exploration.
The “Sweet Child O’ Mine” act won first prize that night. The prize was $25, split four ways.
Thank God the video camera was not as ubiquitous as it is today. The whole scene must have been utterly ridiculous.
A year later, Bengi, Coog, and I went north to Salisbury Beach to record our own lip-sync video at a booth along the boardwalk. We performed a Dokken song (In My Dreams) and a Skid Row song (Youth Gone Wild).
That tape still exists.
One year later, Bengi, Coog, and I lip-synced to Bon Jovi’s Raise Your Hands in a New Hampshire under-21 dance club.
We were not received well.
People were dancing to actual dance music by bands like Dee-Lite, C + C Music Factory, and Blackbox. We lip-synced to a deep cut on a Bon Jovi album from seven years ago. Our routine featured a moment when Coog, a blackbelt who we referred to as a “scaggy bearded ninja,” leaped onto my shoulders and raised his hands.
We were universally despised, but to our credit, we owned that song, giving it our all despite the palpable loathing in the room.
So ended my lip sync career.
I’d like to add that despite our failure to impress our audience that night, I managed to hook up with a girl who thought that our performance was “terrible but gutsy.”
I dated that girl off and on for about a year.
Confidence has always been more important than competence.
This isn’t to say I won’t lip-sync in the future. Many students have attempted to convince me to lip-sync on TikTok, and though I have resisted so far, I wouldn’t close the door on the possibility. And if Jimmy Fallon of The Tonight Show asked me to participate in one of his famous lip sync battles, I’d be hard-pressed to pass.
Looking ridiculous in order to make others laugh is very much on brand for me.
