Is lip-synching to a recording a form of music? It’s definitely dance, of a specific kind. But is it music, or just mime? I feel instinctively that Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” routine on the Motown 25th Anniversary is a musical performance, one of the all-time great ones. So I guess I consider lip-synching to be music.
Listen to that crowd. Lip-synching might be fake, but Michael’s audience knows they’re witnessing something real. The band in the back is just sitting there, since all the music is pre-recorded. But they’re feeling it, you can see dudes clapping. What makes this music, even though no one is singing or playing any instruments?
Michael is pretending to sing a song that he did sing for real, on the recording. The recording is the platonic ideal of the “Billie Jean” vocal. Michael sang it for real, probably live from top to bottom as was his usual method. But that take was selected out of who knows how many, and who knows how many tape edits and punch-ins were performed. The vocal was recorded on the most expensive microphone through the most expensive mixing desk by the most expensive engineer in the most expensive studio. There would be no possible way to have a live vocal sound like that. By playing back the platonically ideal vocal and lip-synching to it, Michael is free to commit his attention to the rest of his delivery: his facial expression, his gaze, his body language, and of course, the famous choreography.
Lil Wayne closes shows by jokily lip-synching to Whitney Houston singing “I Will Always Love You” which I wish I had thought of first and have every intention of imitating next time I get to plan a live show.
Musical purists do not generally approve of lip-synching. There was a while there when I considered it to be cheating. But now I feel like, if the performer is telling the truth and is committed, that’s all the realness I need. The problem with a lesser artist like Ashlee Simpson isn’t the fact of her lip-synching. The problem is that she’s doing it with less than total commitment, accompanied by uninteresting choreography to a lame track. It’s still music, just not good music like Michael Jackson’s.