As we prepare to ring in 2011, can we all agree to retire the lip dub genre? Please?
As one who spends her full-time career working in higher education, lip dubs (“A type of video that combines lip synching and audio dubbing to make a music video”) overtook my year. Late in 2009, the genre started picking up speed, and the school I work for made their first in response to the first one to reach mainstream popularity, am I Gotta Feeling cover by the University of Quebec at Montreal.
And then, as the Christmas church reading goes: BU begat Lehigh, Lehigh begat Suffolk, Suffolk begat another BU one, BU begat Northeastern, Northeastern begat Emerson. That may not be the exact descendant line, and there were many more schools nation-wide involved, and Northeastern’s wasn’t really a lip dub but a music video for Northeastern State of Mind, but you get the gist. The lip dub took the place of a bowl game for both colleges and high schools to compete for bragging rights and muster up school spirit.
Like anything rooted in a truly noble purpose such as “a group activity made to muster up teamwork and fun,” the lip dub fad quickly went sour. The university I work for’s second lip dub elicited many an angry email from parents about its use of Kesha’s Tik Tok, a song that promotes brushing your teeth with Jack Daniels, which led to probably some of the strangest conversations those in my office have ever had with parents. (How do you truly ensure a parent that their child is indeed not brushing their teeth with alcohol that is not Listerine?)
The competition aspect of the fad then lifted to a whole new level, one exemplified by a line of Facebook commenting I witnessed recently. A few higher ed professionals and students were not just talking smack about different schools lip dubs, but claiming that some schools “missed the heart of a true lip dub,” that “a lip dub shouldn’t have xyz” and that schools should be “ashamed” of their lip dubs because they don’t follow a certain definition. I’m sorry, I think missed the memo where the lip dub was elevated to an art form we can have an academic conversation about. It is a music video. A poorly made music video. A poorly made music video made by teenagers who are lip syncing. Will we be engaging on the artistic merits of disgraced, lip syncing, early-90s pop act Milli Vinilli next?
Lip dubs do not encourage creativity and are an extremely selfish use of time. The straw that broke the camel’s back was my viewing of the Shorewood High School lip dub, which was made by a high school video production class, and took a large portion of not only the class’s time to produce, but a large portion of the entire student population’s time to particpate in. Instead of teaching teenagers to create something that is their own – their own music, writing, movement and work – the lip dub genre encourages students to use other’s work as a crutch. What happened to teaching production skills via the taped school announcements? What happened to copyright laws? What happened to teaching students to be creative on their own?
Honestly, lip dubs use resources that could be better used helping others. That high school video production class could have learned those same film and production techniques by creating a PSA for a resource-strapped non-profit. The Public Relations Event class at the university I work for could have used the semester they spent coordinating a lip dub helping coordinate an event for one of the hundreds of organizations who are on their last legs, having lost federal and state funding. Groups putting together a lip dub could better use their time encouraging real, not fleeting, school spirit – a sense of pride that lasts past however many YouTube views you receive.
But instead, educators are spending their time encouraging students to break copyright, use the work of others, and spend unneeded resources in an effort to one-up one another. As we enter a new year, please do all of us a favor and retire the lip dub.