Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/MTV
Gay people love to sit in front of their televisions and scream, “‘DRAG RACE’ LIP SYNC…BEST” into their Apple TV remotes.
In fact, they say that if you stand in front of your mirror on a Friday night and utter the words “Shut Up and Drive” three times in a row, five queer people will appear in your living room to queue up Alyssa Edwards and Tatianna’s All-Stars 2 battle royale. Nia DaCosta was due to write a movie depicting this phenomenon—a sequel to her Candyman remake called Sugar Walls—but production halted when RuPaul’s Drag Race began airing an annual Lip Sync tournament known as the “Lip Sync Lalaparuza Smackdown.” Attention had to be paid elsewhere!
All jokes aside, Drag Race lip syncs’ popularity and rewatch value are unparalleled. It’s why the show’s idea to simply make a lip sync tournament a recurring event was a stroke of genius. But until now, the Lip Sync Lalaparuza Smackdown (easier to say five times in a row than you might think) has only been implemented in the franchise as a twist. In Season 14, the queens all performed so abysmally in the Snatch Game that Ru co-opted an entire episode to make them fight against each on the mainstage as punishment.