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With RuPaul’s Drag Race bringing back their Rate-a-Queen system for season 17, Billboard decided to rate each of the new queens every week based on their performance. Below, we take a look at the iconic Snatch Game to see which queens nailed their celebrity impressions. Spoilers ahead for episode 7.
Even in a time when chaos reigns, some things are constants: the sky is blue; the grass is green; and the queens on RuPaul’s Drag Race will have to perform in the Snatch Game.
On Friday’s episode (aired Feb. 14) of Drag Race, the iconic challenge finally arrived as the 11 remaining queens were asked to deliver their best celebrity impersonations in the Match Game riff. Some queens — namely Suzie Toot — were confident in their abilities to deliver on the task at hand. Others rightly feared the expectations of the show’s longest-standing challenge.
Before we go any further, let’s make one thing clear — of all the Drag Race challenges, Snatch Game is famously the hardest. Not only do you need to create a semi-accurate recreation of a beloved star, but you also need to stay in that character for an extended period of time, with no script, making RuPaul laugh while there is no audience there to let you know how you’re doing. As Jinkx Monsoon, a two-time Snatch Game winner, told Billboard after season 14’s disastrous iteration of the challenge: “It’s one of situations where two things can be true at once – yes, Snatch Game happens every season, but also it’s either in your skill set or it’s not, and I don’t think it should really be held against queens for whom this is not their thing.”
With that being said … this was not a successful Snatch Game. While a few queens managed to get their laughs here (more on them later), most of the contestants were either forgettable or catastrophically bad. The two worst performers of the bunch, Crystal Envy and Lana Ja’Rae, wound up in the bottom — but with a lot of these performances, any number of the other girls could have easily wound up in their shoes.
Yet when it came time for a lip sync to Selena Gomez’s “Hands to Myself,” both Crystal and Lana turned it back on, delivering one of the most high-octane face-offs of the season. Ultimately, the judges decided to give Lana another shot in the competition, sending former frontrunner Crystal Envy home.
Below, Billboard takes a look back at episode 7 and ranks where our remaining contestants lie based on this episode and the season as a whole:
ELIMINATED: Crystal Envy
Image Credit: Courtesy of MTV
02/10/2025
The queens offered served up sea-inspired looks with the season’s first ball challenge. See who reeled in a win, and who was thrown overboard.
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With RuPaul’s Drag Race bringing back their Rate-a-Queen system for season 17, Billboard decided to rate each of the new queens every week based on their performance. Below, we take a look at the show’s compilation album challenge to see how the queens performed in the first group challenge of the season. Spoilers ahead for […]
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The contestants offered their best compilation album commercial impressions in this week’s challenge. See which queens reached the top of the charts, and which ones fizzled out.
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01/21/2025
The judges tasked the queens with showcasing their “Monopulence” with a sewing challenge. See which queens raked in the Monopoly money, and which ones went directly to jail.
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01/15/2025
With Rate-a-Queen back for the double premiere, Billboard will be rating the queens from season 17 every week.
01/15/2025
After Carrie Underwood made headlines Monday (Jan. 13) for announcing she would play at Donald Trump’s inauguration, a former RuPaul’s Drag Race star decided to mock the country star online. In a post to her Instagram Stories on Monday evening, Drag Race season 14 contestant Kornbread “The Snack” Jeté shared a recent post from the […]
With so much at stake in the upcoming U.S. election, five queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race season 16 are urging their fans to make their voices heard by voting.
In a PSA shared on Drag Race’s X account, the five queens — Amanda Tori Meating, Dawn, Megami, Plasma and Xunami Muse — shared what issues felt most important to them in the upcoming election, with every queen stating that they were worried about the status of rights for the trans community in the U.S.
“I am very, very concerned about making sure that my trans family are protected, and that we have someone in office who actually sees them as human beings and will fight for their rights to healthcare and to just exist as humans,” Megami said in the video. Plasma added that it was “hard to fathom” that trans people’s “right to be who they are, intrinsically [and] autonomously, is at stake in this election.”
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Dawn pointed out that LGBTQ+ people are an actively important voting block in the 2024 election. “We’re such an important demographic of people,” she said. “Because our rights are under fire right now.” As Amanda Tori Meating put it, “there are a lot of us, and they don’t think that we’ll all vote.”
In closing the video, Xunami Muse called on fans to make sure they did their civic duty in November. “There are so many policies trying to take our rights just to exist away,” she said, while a graphic directing viewers to Headcount’s voter registration website appeared on screen. “So it’s not an option … it’s a must. It’s our right. It’s our duty as an American to go out there and vote.”
RuPaul’s Drag Race has a long history with presidential elections — since the show’s fourth season in 2012, every season of the show taking place during an election year has included at least one election-themed challenge, including performances in mock debates (seasons 4 and 12), creating attack advertisements (season 8) and even writing lyrics to a political anthem (season 16).
While none of the five queens directly stated which candidate they would be voting for in the 2024 election, all of them focused on the attack on LGBTQ+ rights happening in the U.S. The ACLU is currently tracking over 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills across all 50 states, with the vast majority of those bills introduced by right-wing legislators.
Former president Donald Trump’s official platform includes promises to “keep men out of women’s sports” (a reference to ongoing attempts to ban transgender athletes from competing in school sports) and to “cut federal funding for any school pushing … radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.” Vice President Kamala Harris’ platform, meanwhile, includes a promise to pass the Equality Act into law “to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more.”
Watch the full PSA from the queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race below:
“It’s not an option. It’s a must. It’s a right. It’s a duty as an American to go out there and vote.” 🗣️ Make sure you and your friends are ready to vote by taking action at https://t.co/0wvFl34pxL and be entered for a chance to win a trip to RPDR Live in Las Vegas! pic.twitter.com/en28HiyIwi— RuPaul’s Drag Race (@RuPaulsDragRace) September 30, 2024
07/23/2024
On a scale of one to Roxxxy Andrews.
07/23/2024
With season 16 of RuPaul’s Drag Race officially over, fans finally know who won the crown. But which recording artist managed to win in terms of streaming bumps?
Throughout the latest season of the franchise, songs featured in lip syncs have earned a 28.1% increase on average in total on-demand streams, including UGC (user-generated content), according to Luminate.
The song that earned the biggest bump of the season was Cher‘s “Dark Lady,” which featured as the Lip Sync For Your Life song for episode four (aired Friday, Jan. 26). On the day the episode aired, “Dark Lady” earned 9,180 streams; the following day (Jan. 26), on-demand streams for the song spiked to 38,183, marking a 315.9% increase in on-demand streams for Cher.
Janet Jackson’s “What About” also earned a triple-digit percentage increase in streams thanks to Drag Race. After being featured as one of the lip-sync songs in April 12’s “Lalaparuza” episode, the song shot from 1,056 streams to 3,946 streams, netting Jackson a 273.7% increase.
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Meanwhile, two Donna Summer songs nabbed similarly impressive streaming bumps thanks to a pair of lip-sync showdowns on this season of Drag Race. “This Time I Know It’s for Real,” Summer’s song used in a lip sync on April 12, secured a 180.9% increase in on-demand streams the day after the episode aired. “Dim All the Lights,” used in the episode 11 lip sync on March 15, also earned a 96.4% increase in on-demand streams the day following the episode.
The finale episode of season 16 (aired Friday, April 19) saw the franchise crown Nymphia Wind as America’s Next Drag Superstar following a heart-racing lip sync to Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam,” (which earned a 56.5% bump in streams the day after being featured on the show). The queen made history with her crowning, becoming the first-ever East Asian winner of the American franchise.
Speaking to Billboard shortly after her victory, Wind said it felt “crazy to be able to live this out for my community and my country,” adding that “it really means a lot to me to be able to live this.”