If you’re familiar with the Internet phenomenon Bad Lip Reading, you’ve probably spent a few giddy moments laughing until you cried as a politician spouted absurd non-sequiturs in a mock campaign video, like a schizophrenic man with amazing comedic timing. And I’m right there with you. Who can resist Herman Cain staring at a camera, uncomfortably close, saying, “nachos and hogwash! This is my juice, and I’m hungry. McDonald’s special. Give me a large plate, and I’ll sing, sing, sing about it!” Or Mitt Romney, driving in his car, looking tormented as he stares out the windshield: “Boy, these rappers and their beautiful Mexicans…I gotta keep my mind free.”
Of course, these aren’t the real words of Herman Cain or Mitt Romney. They’re the brainchild of the genius behind Bad Lip Reading, a site that overdubs canned audio on real video to make these politicos speak their strange gibberish. By interpreting the shapes their mouths form, Bad Lip Reading makes the inane chatter look real. The Herman Cain video has done almost two million hits on YouTube, and another featuring Rick Perry (“then I suspended Marsha off this bridge and took a virgin heifer night riding for a while. We never got a dead spirit.”) recently topped the three million mark.
As you’re watching the videos, in the odd moments between gasps for breath, it’s hard to imagine that such a brilliant, simple concept has never been done before. After all, humans form words with their mouths. If you cut off the volume, it looks like they’re forming different words. With the aid of a good impressionist, whole lines of thought and speech can be created from nowhere, distorting reality and creating comedy from scratch.
The man behind Bad Lip Reading remains anonymous. All we know about him, from interviews with the Village Voice and the Washington Post, is that he lives in Texas, produces songs, and writes music. And it took a sad bit of inspiration for the idea to materialize. A few years ago, his mother went deaf and was forced to learn how to read lips. He tried too, impressed by her progress, but the words he saw on the muted television couldn’t possibly have come from the people on screen. They were too strange, too discordant. That’s not how people spoke, and so the seed of the idea was born. Soon he was making videos featuring a radio broadcaster with an odd habit of mouthing words when his partner spoke. His friends loved it, and he made more.
By any amateur online standard, the political videos have been wildly successful. But Bad Lip Reading’s presence on YouTube began with a song. The Bad Lip Reader’s (‘The BLR,’ as I’ll call him for the rest of this article) viral career began when he happened upon the bizarrely popular video for “Friday” by Rebecca Black. Instead of the grating chorus, he saw something totally different. The new interpretation, “Gang Fight,” came out in March 2011. It’s still the most popular of all his videos, with more than four million hits. And no wonder—watching Rebecca Black and her friends shout “gang fight!” like bloodthirsty suburbanites doesn’t get old.
It’s a rudimentary effort, a funny idea with good execution that only hinted at the depth and ambition to come. And that’s the paradox of Bad Lip Reading—while most of the millions of viewers know “Gang Fight” and the political videos, the true creative brilliance comes in the later songs.
Let’s take an example. “Morning Dew,” uploaded last August, features Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga, and Jay-Z. And stay with me for a second while I try to blow your mind, because here are the facets of its creation. At which point would you be overwhelmed?
1. The BLR has to take bits of music videos featuring the three artists, and put them together in some semblance of a larger narrative.
2. He has to come up with lyrics for each part based on the real words mouthed by the singers. They have to be funny, too, which isn’t a given. The conceit alone isn’t enough to produce comedy, as his failed imitators have shown.
3. He has to arrange the videos and the lyrics so that they form a verse-bridge-chorus structure. Which means that the tempo has to match the video editing.
4. He has to write an entire song that fits the timing and bad lip reading of the video.
5. The song has to have a verse-bridge-chorus melodic structure to match the video.
6. It can sound nothing like any of the original three songs, or what would be the point?
7. It has to be a good song, or it will just be annoying.
8. He has to do the vocal impressions of each singer—Gaga, Jay-Z, and Bruno Mars.
Looking at it like that, the task seems utterly impossible and laughably ambitious. But he pulls it off, and the incredible part is that the songs stand as quality tracks on their own. People buy them on iTunes, and they have an insinuating way of getting stuck in your head. I highly suggest you watch the attached video for “Morning Dew” to get a sense of the accomplishment, but for now it’s worth a look at a lyrical excerpt. Bruno Mars sings the verse with his team of monkeys from “The Lazy Song,” Jay-Z takes the bridge with footage from “Empire State of Mind,” and the chorus belongs to Lady Gaga from “Alejandro.” This part comes from the middle of the song:
Bruno Mars
You got a trophy when you won that thing
Aunt Sharona hates a puppet
Don’t freak if your X-Box ain’t a pay phone
Don’t ever make a sick child thick toast
Tonight after wine, I’mma knock you in the head
And then…Grande Taco. Knock that out.
Jay-Z
If I had furry pet monkey
Right here
Then I’d take him out to Shady Pine
And buy a cold beer
Lady Gaga
Keep wanting your morning dew
You’re my pizza man, my pizza man
I like spastic golden toys
Keep wanting your morning dew
This huge pizza’s made with cheese and broccoli
I find myself drawn to it roughly once every couple weeks, and once I’m there I have to listen at least five times before I’ve had my fix. And on every visit, it blows my mind that the voices sound so accurate and the melody so strong, considering the self-imposed limitations of the form. How can an achievement like that be anything other than high pop art?
The effect of Bad Lip Reading is to reveal something inherent about an individual that we may notice at first glance, but gets whitewashed by the way they present themselves to society. Ron Paul gives off the aura of a cranky old man, but watching him in the BLR videos, you have an epiphany; yes, he’s a whiny little kid! Mitt Romney is a phony! Barack Obama is ludicrously serious! Rick Perry is insecure!
And maybe none of that is fair. Maybe interpreting those men by their body language is counterintuitive, like judging a book by its cover. But it feels right, and whether we like it or not, BLR captured something of their essence. It reminds me of Will Ferrell’s original impressions of George Bush and Janet Reno. He didn’t try to mimic their voices or movements, but let their inner personas come out through his instinct for the truth of these people. And that’s why it was better than any pitch-perfect replica impression Darrell Hammond pulled off in that same SNL era. That’s just mimicry; what Ferrell did, and what Bad Lip Reading does, is essential.
There’s also something undeniably dark about Bad Lip Reading, and I mean that literally and metaphorically. In most of the music videos, the shots are saturated to become gray and overcast. The music itself is full of minor chords dotting a bleak electronic landscape. And there’s something melancholic and even a little tragic about an anonymous artist making great music through the (wrong) lyrics and (imitated) voices of other people. It’s constricting and magnificent all at once, and whoever he is, working at a desk somewhere in Texas, he’s done us the service of finding a bruised meaning amid the comedy. Nameless, like so many of us in our second online incarnations, he’s a perfect symbol for the Internet generation.