About

Backseat Lip Dub Dancing is a choreographed group performance that takes place in the backseat of a moving vehicle involving a group of passengers, such as traveling sports team. On YouTube, it can be seen as a subgenre of lip dub music videos.

Origin

The earliest viral instance including group choreography in the back seat of a moving vehicle can be attributed to a sing-along tribute video to Venga Boys’ “Boom Boom Boom” uploaded via YouTube on October 19th, 2006. The video has accumulated more than 18 million views as of May 2012.

Precursors

While heavily associated with “lip dubbing”:/memes/lip-dub, group dancing and lip-synch performances on the road actually predate the history of lip dub videos on YouTube, most notably demonstrated through the “"Bohemian Rhapsody””:https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bohemian-rhapsody sing-along scene from the 1992 comedy film Wayne’s World or the “”What is Love””:/memes/what-is-love head-bobbing dance from the 1998 comedy film A Night at the Roxbury.

Spread

Through the late 2000s, the trend of backseat lip dub performances continued to grow with the rising popularity of lip dub videos on a broader scale. In November 2008, the same group behind the 2006 Vengaboys lip dub uploaded another tribute to “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” by The Darkness, in which he lip synchs and dances to the song with his friend.

In October 2009, YouTuber DancinginCars posted a video of himself and his friends dancing in the car to "Le Disko" by Shiny Toy Guns.

Throughout 2010, dozens of backseat lip dub videos were uploaded via YouTube, many of them in tribute to Justin Bieber’s “Baby” or Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA." The next year, YouTuber Spencer Jensen began a series titled "In My Car"^[6], in which he films himself and sometimes friends singing and dancing while driving.

School Sports Teams

Backseat lip dub dance videos have become especially popular with traveling sports teams on the road. As early as 2010, sports teams from Louisana State University, Lafayette College, University of Washington: Oshkosh, and California State began posting videos of themselves lip dubbing and dancing to well-known pop songs.

The combination of lip dubbing and dancing in the car went through its highest growth period in early 2012 with cover renditions of Carly Jepsen’s "Call Me Maybe", which led to an impromptu challenge among college sports teams.

The fad began on May 6th, 2012, the members of Harvard’s baseball team uploaded a video of the team dancing to “Call Me Maybe” by Canadian singer-songwriter Carly Rae Jepsen. In just over two weeks, the video accumulated 9,006,506 views and 365,661 Facebook shares.^[1] The video was featured on a variety of news outlets and internet culture blogs including the New York Daily News^[2], Neatorama^[3] and the Huffington Post^[4], as well as being renacted by the hosts of the TODAY Show on May 17th.^[5]

The first parody of the Harvard video was uploaded on May 9th, 2012. It was not done in a car or by a sports team, but featured two teenage girls dancing alone in a bedroom. The first sports team to re-enact it on a bus featured two members of the Saint Viator High School located in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Neither of these videos broke 1000 views. A handful of other interpretations of the original video were made, both in and out of vehicles. On March 14th, 2012 Christian Pilola uploaded a rendition done by the Texas State baseball team, which garnered more than 391,000 views in eight days.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References