8 Unforgettable Lip-Sync Incidents

It only takes one episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race (or a rewatch of Tom Holland’s rendition of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” on Lip Sync Battle) to prove that lip-syncing is an art form of its own. It’s also par for the course in tricky performance circumstances like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. And while lip-syncing is specific to singing or talking, the practice of pretending to make music is not: Musicians are said to “finger-sync” when they aren’t actually playing their instruments.

In short, syncing is all over the entertainment industry. But if viewers pick up on it when they expected a live show—or musicians openly rebel against a directive to partake in fakery—it can make for some pretty memorable pop culture moments. Here are eight times that lip- or finger-syncing caused shock and awe.

1. Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Night Live
2. Mariah Carey on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve
3. The Milli Vanilli hoax
4. Martha Wash’s uncredited dance hits
5. Luciano Pavarotti’s BBC fake-out
6. Beyoncé at Barack Obama’s 2013 Inauguration
7. Red Hot Chili Peppers at the 2014 Super Bowl
8. Nirvana on Top of the Pops
9. The Mamas and the Papas on The Ed Sullivan Show

Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Night Live

Ashlee Simpson’s second of two musical performances on an October 2004 Saturday Night Live episode was supposed to be “Autobiography,” the title number of her debut album. But when the vocals for “Pieces of Me” kicked in—with Simpson clearly not singing them—it was obvious that she had planned to lip-sync. Not to mention that she had already performed “Pieces of Me” earlier in the show. Simpson did a goofy little jig and left the stage, and producers eventually cut to commercial. 

The snafu is considered one of SNL’s most embarrassing musical moments, and Simpson has been candid about how it happened: She lost her voice that day due to vocal nodules, and though she tried to cancel the appearance, her label pressured her to lip-sync instead. “It was a humbling moment for me. I had the No. 1 song and everything was about to go somewhere,” she said on the podcast Broad Ideas With Rachel Bilson & Olivia Allen in 2024. She had a tough time weathering the “awful awful things” people said in the aftermath. “It was so hard to learn how to tune that out, to find my strength, to get up and go again.”

Mariah Carey on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve

Mariah Carey’s performance on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve in 2016 didn’t go as planned, to say the least. Due to an earpiece malfunction, she couldn’t hear herself or the music, so she pretty much just walked around the stage while commenting on the situation. “I’m trying to be a good sport here,” she said at one point. Her manager, Stella Bulochnikov, later told Entertainment Weekly that Carey had always intended to sing along to a backing track, which isn’t uncommon when the performance takes place in less-than-ideal circumstances (say, outside on a frigid night with lots of noise interference from the crowd). “It’s not lip-syncing. Lip-syncing is when people don’t sing at all,” Bulochnikov said. But it sure looked like a lip-syncing fail when Carey wasn’t moving her lips at all and “We Belong Together” still sounded just like it does on the album.

The Milli Vanilli hoax

After going platinum with their 1989 album Girl You Know It’s True, Milli Vanilli’s Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan were first exposed as lip-syncers when the track for “Girl You Know It’s True” started skipping during a concert in Connecticut in July 1989. What fans didn’t know at the time was that Pilatus and Morvan hadn’t even been faking it to their own voices—they hadn’t sung on the album at all, which their producer, Frank Farian, revealed at a press conference in November 1990. Morvan would later claim that he and Pilatus didn’t realize their vocals would be dubbed when they signed a contract to make music with Farian, and it was too late to reverse course by the time they found out. Whatever the case, Milli Vanilli’s career never recovered, and the hoax has gone down in history as the father of all lip-sync scandals.

Martha Wash’s uncredited dance hits

The woman who sings the now-ubiquitous “Everybody dance now!” on C+C Music Factory’s 1990 hit “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” is Martha Wash of The Weather Girls (most famous for “It’s Raining Men”). Initially, though, you wouldn’t know it—because not only was Wash uncredited for her work on the track, but the group enlisted Zelma Davis to lip-sync that part in the music video. Wash had only been contracted to record demo vocals for the song. When she realized her contributions had been used as lead vocals with no additional compensation—or even acknowledgement—she sued C+C and their label for half a million dollars. The suit was settled out of court.

Wash filed other lawsuits around the same time for similar offenses. Dance music groups Seduction and Black Box had both used the vocals from Wash’s demos in the final cut of songs—Seduction’s “(You’re My One and Only) True Love” and Black Box’s “I Don’t Know Anybody Else” and “Everybody Everybody”—without accurately crediting or compensating her. Black Box took it a step further by hiring French model Katrin Quinol to lip-sync for Wash in music videos and even during concerts. Those suits were settled, too, and Wash went on to achieve success with her own dance hits.

Luciano Pavarotti’s BBC fake-out

In 1992, the BBC paid Luciano Pavarotti $40,000 to perform a two-hour concert for a radio program broadcast from Modena, Italy. Producers were told in advance that Pavarotti planned to lip-sync for the live audience, but they still decided to proceed with the program. Afterward, they sued him for $20,000. Pavarotti, for his part, readily admitted it was “wrong” to fake the performance. “We had only 24 hours to put together this concert, so we decided to lip-sync,” he said at a press conference. “If they (the BBC) want their money back, I am willing to do it.”

Beyoncé at Barack Obama’s 2013 Inauguration

Beyoncé took an innovative approach to addressing rumors that she had lip-synced the national anthem at Barack Obama’s 2013 Inauguration. Later that month, she kicked off an NFL press conference for her Super Bowl halftime show by singing it again—this time a cappella, and definitely live—just to prove that she could. But she didn’t deny that she had sung along to a pre-recorded backing track at the Inauguration, and she stood by the decision.

“I am a perfectionist,” she said. “I practice until my feet bleed, and I did not have time to rehearse with the orchestra. It was a live television show and a very, very important, emotional show for me, one of my proudest moments. And due to the weather, due to the delay, due to no proper sound check, I did not feel comfortable taking a risk. It was about the president and the inauguration, and I wanted to make him and my country proud.”

The United States Marine Band used pre-recorded instrumentals for the number, too (though the rest of their inauguration performances were live). The decision seemed to come from Beyoncé, but conductor Michael J. Colburn supported it. “She wasn’t comfortable performing without a rehearsal, and I wasn’t comfortable with that either,” he told the Washingtonian.

Red Hot Chili Peppers at the 2014 Super Bowl

Beyoncé reassured everyone at that press conference that she’d be singing live for the halftime show, and she kept her promise. But not all elements of Super Bowl halftime acts are live. The very next year, some viewers noticed that the Red Hot Chili Peppers didn’t even have their instruments plugged in.

Bassist Flea published a statement on the band’s website explaining that the NFL had been transparent about wanting the band to finger-sync to a pre-recorded track while front man Anthony Kiedis sang live. “I understand the NFL’s stance on this, given they only have a few minutes to set up the stage, there {are} a zillion things that could go wrong and ruin the sound,” he wrote. “There was not any room for argument on this, the NFL does not want to risk their show being botched by bad sound, period.” Flea also revealed that it wasn’t an oversight that their instruments weren’t plugged in: “We thought it better not to pretend. It seemed like the realest thing to do in the circumstance.” Their priority was to put on as dynamic a show as possible, not to convince the audience that they were really playing music.

Nirvana on Top of the Pops

Flea also mentioned in his statement that the Red Hot Chili Peppers usually had a no-miming rule that dated back to the late 1980s, when they were asked to fake a performance for the BBC’s Top of the Pops. During rehearsals, he recalled, “I played bass with my shoe, John {Frusciante} played guitar atop Anthony’s shoulders, and we basically had a wrestling match onstage, making a mockery of the idea that it was a real live performance.” Producers didn’t let them perform on the actual show.

Nirvana had better luck on Top of the Pops in November 1991 apparently by not revealing their plans ahead of time. Tasked with finger-syncing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to live vocals by Kurt Cobain, band members protested by making it abundantly clear during the show that they weren’t actually playing. Cobain robotically strummed his guitar with flattened fingers and further mocked the song by singing “a slowed-down, almost Vegas-like lounge version … attempting, he later claimed, to sound like Morrissey,” biographer Charles Cross wrote in Heavier Than Heaven. “The producers were furious, but Nirvana escaped their wrath by quickly departing for a gig in Sheffield.”

The Mamas and the Papas on The Ed Sullivan Show

Top of the Pops wasn’t the only program whose musical guests occasionally rebelled against a miming mandate. When the Mamas and the Papas performed “California Dreamin’ ” on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1967, vocalist Michelle Phillips clued audiences in to the deceit by eating a banana throughout the number. The song sounded no different whenever she took a break to chew.

Discover More About Music: