Omg! One of the producers of Drag Race finally revealed how lip sync songs are picked

It is actually wild how impactful the song choice for a RuPaul’s Drag Race lip sync for your life becomes once it solidifies itself in your brain. It’s hard to imagine a life before Shut Up And Drive took me to Alyssa and Tatianna in their perfectly co-ordinated black and white lewks. I can’t remember what I did before Scandalous took me to Vanity Milan and Alesha Dixon vibing, or Natural Woman sending me visuals of a pregnant Latrice Royale. Drag Race executive producer Tom Campbell has finally spilled how exactly the songs end up getting chosen for a lip sync on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Speaking in an article for World of Wonder, Tom Campbell said that the show has a dedicated a full music supervision team in charge of deciding what songs get chosen for lip syncs – describing them as “queer people obsessed with pop music and pop culture.” Honestly, sign me up!

Tom also went further and said despite the fact the team work on it, it is always RuPaul himself who has the final sign off and say and that Mama Ru is extremely hands on. RuPaul rejects songs if “They’re the wrong tempo, they don’t build, there’s all these factors he’s thinking about. Back in the iPod days, when RuPaul gave you an iPod loaded with music it was a gift from god. He is truly a PhD when it comes to pop culture – especially with music.”

RuPaul’s Drag Race hasn’t always been full of the huge guest stars from the pop world that it has now, and Tom reminisced on how hard it used to be to clear songs for a lip sync. “We were this little show that nobody knew trying to get clearances, it was really tough.” Nowadays, artists approach the music team directly to try and get their song featured on the show. Rochelle Holguin Capello at Paramount says that “the number of artists and labels that approach has grown to a weekly cadence.

“The pitches include A-list artists just as frequently as emerging acts. We’ve been told so many times that it’s an artist’s dream to have their song performed on the show.” In that case, I’m going to need every member of Girls Aloud to start spamming RuPaul to get one of their bops lip synced to. Not a want, but a need.

Watch RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars Series 7 on the streamer of all things drag, WOW Presents Plus. Subscribe here. 

Featured image courtesy of World of Wonder.

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