Awesome Michigan lip dubs: Four reasons to visit the ‘Great Lakes State’

Sure, we’ve been occasionally lured-in to visit a new destination due to a cheeky tourism campaign, or two — guilty as charged. There’s nothing as reassuring, though, as seeing the citizens of a city band together to proclaim to the world, ‘hey world, my city is great!’ And we can’t help but notice the chutzpah overflowing in the state of Michigan.

Over the last year Michigan‘s citizens, students and seniors have pulled out their video cameras and uploaded tourism video after tourism video to YouTube in an effort to show their pride. There are four in total so far, Grand Rapids, Traverse City, Grand Valley State University and the Clark Retirement Community, and it doesn’t exactly matter whether the videos follow the antics of a classroom full of a students, a building full of the witty elderly or an entire city, they all bring a special brand of magic you can only find in the hearts of people that truly love the place where they live and love to dance about it.

Call us gullible, but we’ve added a tour of Michigan to the bucket list, if not only to share a beer with the enthusiastic townsfolk that fill that state with so much love.

The residents of the Clark Retirement Community in Grand Rapids teamed-up with students at GVSU to create the world’s first-ever all-senior lip dub.


Over in Traverse City, townsfolk rocked out to Paul Simon’s “You can Call Me Al” and Van Halen’s “Jump.”

GVSU might have created the original Michigan lip dub last October, which a student quickly submitted to Reddit.


Grand Rapids is currently Michigan’s king of lip dubs, holding the world record of 5,000 participants in one video, parading through the closed-off streets of the Downtown area.