As the excitement for this year’s lip dub settles down, online searches for “Redwood Lib Dub” continue to suggest a video that has taken on a life of its own. The searches surface a video that was uploaded more than a decade ago and is still pulling in viewers from across the world.
Redwood High School’s 2014 lip dub, posted to YouTube 11 years ago, has accumulated over 545,000 views, nearly 5,000 likes and more than 705 comments. The numbers alone are impressive for a high school lib dub, but the most surprising detail isn’t the popularity;it’s where the audience is located.
While scrolling through the video’s comment section, a pattern stands out quickly. The majority of the comments are not in English; they are in Turkish.
One of the few English comments explains the anomaly. Posted by Youtube user @youngmanlogan5812:
“If you are looking for an English comment and wondering in what language all these comments are, let me tell you: This video got popular in Turkey because it is so different than our high schools. Basically, we looked at what the American Dream is and got jealous.”
The comment has become a guide for English-speaking viewers stumbling across it for the first time. When the rest of the Turkish comments are translated, the picture they paint is hard to ignore.
Many comments focused on the physical aspects shown in the lip dub. They commented on Redwood’s environment, open hallways, campus and the overall scale of the production. Other viewers focused on the energy of the students, the sense of participation and school spirit on display throughout the video, leaving many impressed with what they saw. Commenter @mrgezgin, writing seven years ago, put it bluntly:
“La yıllarca cezaevinde okumuşum da haberim yokmuş..”
Translated to English, it says: “It turns out I’d been studying in prison for years without even realizing it…”
The comparison to a prison comes up more than once across the comment section. For many Turkish viewers, the contrast between their own school experience and what they saw in the video was enough to spark vocalized comparisons. @oguz_koc, who identified themselves as a vocational high school graduate, wrote:
“Meslek lisesi okumuş birisi olarak kudurarak izlediğim klip oldu. allah kahretsin hayatta neler kaçırıyoruz.”
Translated to English, it says: “As someone who went to a vocational high school, this music video was one I watched with great interest. Damn it, what are we missing out on in life?”
Some comments shared other details. Seven years ago, @timelapset wrote:
“Ne kadar güzel eğleniyorlar bizde okul çıkışı döner bıçaklarıyla kavga olurdu.”
Translated to English, it says: “They’re having so much fun! Back home, we used to have fights with butcher knives after school.”
In this comment, @furkanucak1998 wasn’t comparing Redwood to their high school, but to their university:
“Ulan bizim üniversiteden 15 kat daha güzel yemin ederim zılgıt çekerek ağlıyorum şuan”
Translated, the comment reads: “Damn, it’s 15 times better than our university, I swear I’m crying my eyes out right now,” in English.
The comments throughout the section seem to consistently highlight the same idea: most viewers in Turkey don’t seem to be watching the video as entertainment, but as a look into what life seems like in America. Turkish viewers are watching it to witness what they don’t have the same access to: school with resources, space and culture that made room for something like a lip dub.
The 2014 lip dub by Redwood High School standards is a typical production. From students lip-syncing through the school campus and teachers making special appearances, to the choreography and clips of Redwood extracurriculars doing their lip-syncing, the lib dub wraps up in the amphitheater and shows the entire student body.
For students involved in the lib dub, it may have felt like just another obligation for a Redwood High School tradition. However, for the hundreds of people watching from Turkey, it was something else. Based on the comment section, it seemed to be a version of high school that looked nothing like their own.
According to California Demographics by Cubit, Marin County is the wealthiest county in California. Redwood High School sits in the middle of it. The campus, programs, community and the resources that made a production like the 2014 lip dub possible are not things most high schools anywhere in the world have access to. The comment section is a reminder of that, not through statistics or rankings, but through the reactions of real people seeing it for the first time.
Of course, no school is perfect, and Redwood students still feel their own academic pressures, stress and challenges. The response to the video highlights how a particular school environment can be interpreted in different ways depending on who is watching.
11years later, the 2014 lip dub’s comments section is still active. New comments still come in, though mostly in Turkish and continue drawing the same comparisons. What started as a tradition has quietly become, for a corner of the internet far from Marin, a reference point for what school could look like.
