For decades it was scorned, hidden and denied, a symbol of a synthetic and mercantile industry that walked artists around the sets like ventriloquist dolls.
Until, from one day to the next, it began to be displayed openly, with unusual pride.
The younger ones made it a distinctive feature, just as other generations had chosen a lewd dance or ripped jeans.
The
playback
returned when no one expected it anymore.
It invaded a platform like TikTok, which triumphed during the long confinement of 2020: last December it had 689 million users worldwide, added to as many in its Chinese version, Douyin.
Before, he had already traveled the world thanks to RuPaul and his successful television contest of
drag queens
,
whose eliminatory test - and narrative climax of each program - is an epic
lipsync
duel
between two rivals (its Spanish version, promoted by Atresmedia and with the Javis on the jury, will be released this spring).
Thus, this rudimentary lip-syncing technique compared to a previous recording managed to conquer a central position in a time conducive to playfulness and humor.
Just a couple of decades ago, those who turned to it were the object of derision.
Today they have become the stars of our time.
The return of
playback
comes at a new time of change in the culture industry.
"If before it was one of the unforgivable sins of the music world, today it is often taken for granted and accepted on the condition that an ocularly intense spectacle is offered, capable of increasing sound pleasure through effects of visual enjoyment," he says. Juan Martín Prada, professor at the University of Cádiz in charge of a research group on contemporary aesthetic theory.
The humorous drive of
playback
videos
strengthens their success on the networks, since ironic distance is one of the main fuels of virality.
"TikTok has been able to take advantage of the comic potential of these videos in which someone is recorded gesturing as if saying what someone else said, a parodic reverse dubbing that is full of fine irony," adds Martín Prada.
It is no coincidence that the biggest stars of that network, such as Charli D'Amelio or Addison Rae, dedicate themselves to
playback
.
The most viewed video of 2020 was the mimicry rap of an anonymous young woman, Bella Poarch, which achieved 510 million views.
Today it is the third user with the most followers, with a total of 58 million.
"The result is imperfect but that does not matter, because it occurs within a culture where it is more important to participate than to be a virtuous"
The researcher Vanni Brusadin, professor of digital cultures at the University of Barcelona and director of The Influencers festival at the CCCB, traces a genealogy of the phenomenon that begins with the
lipdubs
and
flashmobs
of the first decade of this century.
And then it continues until the invention of applications such as Wombo, which creates
automated
lipsyncs
from a biometric recognition algorithm.
The result allows you to see Kim Jong-un dancing to the rhythm of Gloria Gaynor (his creator had the idea, according to his own confession, while smoking marijuana with his roommate).
A
festive
deepfake
within reach of any mobile.
"The technical aspect is fundamental for this return of
playback:
today we have very powerful expressive tools that were unimaginable only a few years ago," says Brusadin.
Without forgetting the very nature of social networks, with their virtual ties that replace, now more than ever, physical interactions.
"There is
a direct correlation between the absence of bodies around us and the explosion of the performative in networks" confirms the researcher, stressing that this boom in the
lip-sync
marks a break with the traditional model of authorship, with the romantic notion of originality and his cult of genius.
“None of these things exist in these videos.
Often, the result is imperfect and it does not matter that it is, because it occurs within a culture of users that is not made of masterpieces, but of collective actions in which it is more important to participate than to be a virtuoso ”, he defends.
Despite appearances,
lipsync was
not born before yesterday.
It was used in the cinema since 1929, the year of the premiere of the musical
The Broadway Melody
.
Unhappy with the audio quality of one of his musical numbers, MGM sound supervisor Douglas Shearer came up with the idea of layering a recorded version in post-production.
American cinema continued to use it to dub stars with less gifted vocal cords, from Ava Gardner in
Magnolia
to Sidney Poitier in
Porgy and Bess,
to recent examples such as Rebecca Ferguson in
The Great Showman
, whose voice double was even traced. his Swedish accent.
The
meta,
almost Cervantine
twist
of
Singing in the Rain
(1952), where the musical dubbing of one actress by another was a central element in the plot, revealed the best kept secret in Hollywood.
"We were already living in a world dominated by
playback
before it became so evident with those examples", clarifies Eloy Fernández Porta, essayist and professor at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona).
After the rise of the video clip that accompanied the creation of MTV in 1981, lip syncing went into decline towards the end of that decade.
Especially after the scandal starring Milli Vanilli, a Grammy-winning musical sensation who fell out of favor in 1989, when it was discovered that there were just two guys in shoulder pads lip-
syncing
.
"If we rewrite that chapter in the history of pop, we could say that they were precursors", ironizes Fernández Porta.
Another controversy was sparked by Whitney Houston when she sang the American anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl, 10 days after the start of the Gulf War.
An overwhelming moment of vocal excellence and patriotic fellowship that was marred when it was discovered that Houston was only miming a prerecorded version.
Without the aura of the original, the sequence fell apart.
"If we rewrite that chapter in pop history, we could say that Milli Vanilli were precursors"
There was then a massive demand for authenticity from the public.
The music industry began to emphasize the added value of direct sound and MTV itself, feeling against the ropes, created its legendary
unplugged
concerts
,
without cheating or cardboard.
The nineties marked a turning point:
playback
was the enemy of
grunge,
with its aesthetic cult of naturalness, no matter how much it was built or prefabricated.
In 1991, Nirvana wanted to show that they had been forced to lip-
synch
when they performed on the British program
Top of the Pops,
as they would do Oasis again in 1995, when Noel Gallagher pretended to sing
Roll With It,
a song that his brother Liam actually sang. .
Those 90s room controversies would be exotic today.
"They were typical of a moment of questioning the paradigms of the eighties," says Fernández Porta about that decade made of plastic.
"But they do not hold up in an age like ours, where artifice is positively valued again."
There they are, for example, the dominance of
autotune
in current music or the proliferation of
lipsync
contests
beyond
queer
circles
,
which made use of this discord between body and voice to "mock the imperative of gender coherence that weighs over all of us and highlight the theatrical and artificial nature of its construction ”, according to Fernández Porta.
In 2015, six years after the
RuPaul
show
, his version suitable for all audiences appeared: the
Lip Sync Battle program,
where a star like The Rock, the ultimate emblem of hypervirility, made history by imitating Taylor Swift.
If the phenomenon has multiple roots, such as the roots of karaoke and
cosplay
in the Asian continent, its main debt could be with the
drag
culture
,
as Manuel Segade, director of CA2M (Móstoles), where he was curator, together with Sabel Gavaldón
,
suggests , from the
Elements of Vogue
exhibition
,
around the dance that proliferated in the so-called
ballrooms
.
As in the biblical parable of the man possessed by crowds, the
drag shows
allowed their protagonists to change their personalities several times a night.
“They were people reviled for wanting to become something that was forbidden to them, who found a means of expression in a counterculture that allowed them to make their fantasies come true in front of everyone and to be applauded for it.
The
lipsync
is, in that sense, a tool of political battle ,
"says Segade.
The origins of these transvestite numbers, always between artifice and truth, are imprecise.
They existed, in all likelihood, in thousands of closed-door parties, before the Stonewall revolt caused them to occupy gay bars and clubs through
record acts,
whose performers moved their lips to the rhythm of recorded songs and dialogue.
They were comical and deliberately vulgar pantomimes that became more sophisticated over time, reaching a higher aesthetic category, as evidenced by the work of Lypsinka - who refused to be called a
drag queen,
preferring the term
drag artist
- and her main spiritual successor, Sasha Velor, winner of
RuPaul's Drag Race
in 2017 and star of the first
lipsync
opera
,
The Island We Made
,
a work by Puerto Rican composer Angélica Negrón who has just premiered at the Philadelphia Opera.
The videos of Wu Tsang, a
trans
artist
who stages and embodies other people's speeches, have been exhibited at MoMA since 2019. And the latest work by Thomas Ostermeier, great star of European text theater, was a succession of
playbacks
interpreted by the writer French Édouard Louis, who performed the songs he used to sing as a child, with a bottle of shampoo acting as a microphone, in front of the mirror in his room.
“The original 'lipsync' lie is over.
Today we already know that all reality starts from a prop "
Concepts such as authentic or fake cease to make sense in this time of post-truths, which may have allowed the rehabilitation of
playback
as a form of expression as valid as any other.
“The original
lipsync
lie
is over.
Today we already know that all reality starts from a prop, from a first layer of falsehood.
There is a general awareness that the truth is not what it appears to us at first sight.
The fear of working has been lost since that initial lie ”, argues María Revuelta, artistic director and curator of the Telaraña cycle at CentroCentro (Madrid).
“At this social moment we no longer ask ourselves who brings the greatest truth or who has the greatest talent, but who puts on the entertainment.
In this age of content saturation, the winner is the one who is capable of entertaining more and better ”.
Other predominant notions in the cultural climate, such as identity fluidity or the vindication of discourses and supposedly minor genres, have also participated in this breeding ground.
"I do not think that
playback
is inferior to knowing how to sing well: they are two different modes of mastery", Segade relativizes.
“After all, if something defines the 21st century, it is the triumph of fiction, as it already happened in the Baroque.
For decades contemporary art has renounced the virtuous hand in favor of a level of conceptualization in which the idea is above its material execution ”.
The
playback
is Duchampian?
"Why not understand it within that framework?
We have been preparing for this turn for more than a century.
It may be time to accept it ”, concludes the director of CA2M.
Let's ban the applause, as the sixty-year-olds have already demanded.
The spectacle is, now more than ever, everywhere.
Timeline: a century of 'lipsync'
1929. Hollywood discovers the 'playback'
The Broadway Melody
, an MGM musical, was the first to use
playback
to correct a sound error in a sequence.
1952. Premiere of 'Singing in the Rain'
One actress dubbed another in full swing to talkies.
Hollywood revealed its secret: that's how it happened in hundreds of films.
1960. Canned music comes to television
The technique became widespread in variety shows around the world to avoid the difficulties of live sound.
1989. The Milli Vanilli Scandal
The creation of MTV expanded its use, but its golden age ended when this group admitted that they did not sing their songs.
1995. Oasis, against the 'playback'
The Gallaghers swapped roles in a performance on
Top of the Pops
to protest the imposition of pre-recording.
In 1991 they already did Nirvana on the same show.
2008. Beijing Olympic Games
The Chinese government sparked controversy by replacing the girl who sang the national anthem with a more photogenic one who played
back
.
2009. The phenomenon 'RuPaul's Drag Race'
The successful
drag queen
contest
, now in its 13th season, propelled this technique with an elimination test called Lipsync For Your Life.
This spring the Spanish version is released, promoted by Atresmedia and with the Javis in the jury.
2015. 'Lip Sync Battle': the stars 'lip sync'
The
playback
returned to the
mainstream
with this program, in which Hollywood stars sing simulate hits.
For example, Tom Holland made history playing Rihanna.
2020. TikTok and confinement
The Chinese social network, created in 2016 and in which
lipsync
took root
, triumphed during the collective confinement.
At the end of the year it had 689 million users.
2021. 'The Island We Made', the delayed opera
Premiere of the first
playback
opera
, by the Puerto Rican Angélica Negrón who stars in the
drag
Sasha Velor, which emerged from the RuPaul factory.
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