7 Actually Great Singles By ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Contestants

Published On February 27, 2015 » By »

rupaul The competing queens on RuPaul’s Drag Race are known for lip-synching for their lives, but sometimes, when they try to sing live, they #$%& it up, to semi-quote Ru. Many Drag Race alums have released aggressively Auto-Tuned singles after sashaying away from the show, but only a few of them have proven to have the charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent to become real-life pop stars. But interestingly, two of this last season’s Drag Race finalists, Courtney Act and Adore Delano, are talented live singers — in fact, before making it to the Drag Race top three, they competed on Australian Idol and American Idol, respectively. So to celebrate this week’s RuPaul’s Drag Race Battle of the Seasons live stream concert on Yahoo Live, here’s a party playlist of actually decent singles by actually musically talented Drag Race alumni. You betta werk! 7. Alaska 5000, “Your Makeup Is Terrible” Alaska’s makeup is always perfect, of course… but even betetr than her makeup is her shade. Enjoy Sharon Needle’s former better half’s unRuPaulogetically bitchy video here.

 6. Jinkx Monsoon, “Coffee and Wine” Let’s raise a toast to the Season 5 Drag Race queen and starlet of the traveling cabaret show “The Vaudevillians,” who keeps it old-school with this charming burlesque number. That Jinkx is always such a class act! Her full-length debut, The Inevitable Album, features contributions from B-52′s frontman Fred Schneider.

4 – 5. Willam Belli, “Chow Down at Chic-Fil-A” / “RuPaulogize” (tie) The infamously disqualified troublemaker of Season 4 got her musical start in a dragtastic L.A. punk/glam band, whose X-rated name cannot be printed here. And post-Drag Race, Willam is still raising (perfectly stenciled) eyebrows with her music parodies, sometimes as part of DWV, a group with fellow comedy queens Detox (Drag Race Season 5) and Vicky Vox. All of Willam’s NSFW singles are hilarious, but “Chow Down,” a bizarre ode to anti-gay fast food joint Chic-Fil-A set to the tune of Wilson Phillips’s “Hold On,” and the OneRepublic sendup “RuPaulogize” are the funniest of the lot. Willam is well on her way to becoming the Weird Al of drag — and I mean that as the highest compliment. Watch the gut-bustingly funny, completely offensive videos HERE and HERE. 3. Raja, “Diamond Crowned Queen” The Season 3 runway-ruling champion’s debut single is a deliciously trashy track, reminiscent of ’70s sleazefests like “Warm Leatherette,” ’80s industrial, and mid-’90s house music — with a whole lot of groaning straight out of a Berlin or Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder remix thrown in. As a bonus, the song’s steamy video stars the other fiercest femme fatale in Drag Race herstory, Raven. (Why didn’t Raven ever put out a single, huh?)

2. Sharon Needles, “Dressed to Kill” The winning Goth-glam goddess of Season 4 spent the majority of her Drag Race $100,000 booty financing the recording and promotion of her original album, PG-13. Was this money that would have been better spent at Party City? That’s up for debate, but PG-13 (which features cameos by RuPaul, Jayne County, Scissor Sisters’ Ana Matronic, and Amanda Lepore, plus a cover of Ministry’s “Every Day Is Halloween”) did debut respectably at No. 186 on the Billboard 200. It even got all the way to No. 4 on iTunes’ Pop chart! It also spawned two of the best Drag Race contestant singles ever. “Dressed to Kill” is a particularly Blondie-esque pop-punk romp. 1. Adore Delano, “I Adore U” It’s been two decades since a drag queen really broke through to the pop-music mainstream: That was RuPaul, with the 1993 smash single “Supermodel (You Better Work).” But now Ru’s torch is being passed, in a way, to Adore Delano, a top three finalist on the most recent season of the hit talent show RuPaul’s Drag Race. The best-selling album by any Drag Race contestant, Adore’s full-length debut Till Death Do Us Party hit No. 59 on the Billboard albums chart, and even went top 10 on Billboard’s Dance/Electronic Albums chart and iTunes’ pop chart. But of course, Adore honed her skills on an even more popular talent show, American Idol, back in Season 7— as Danny Noriega — so of course she knows how to do more than just lip-synch for her life. Follow Lyndsey on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+, Amazon, Tumblr, Vine, Spotify This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

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