Lucian Piane

Lucian Piane was born on October 4, 1980, in Kansas City, Missouri. In a 2009 LA Weekly profile he described a happy childhood there. His mother was a dancer and singer and his father was a computer programmer, and Piane said his own work combining music and computers was "a marriage of both" of their interests. As a child he loved the Bingo Boys' 1991 novelty dance hit "How to Dance," whose sampled instructional voice later inspired his first remix. The names of his parents have not been made public.

Piane studied at New York University and graduated in 2003 with a Bachelor of Music in musical composition. According to his official biography, he won Alan Menken's scholarship for composition while at NYU.

After NYU, Piane became an assistant to composer and songwriter Marc Shaiman and moved to Los Angeles to work on Shaiman's Hollywood projects. Their collaborations included the films Team America: World Police (2004), Rumor Has It (2005) and Hairspray (2007), the Broadway show Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me and the 76th Academy Awards. Piane received an RIAA Platinum Album Award for his production work on New Line Records' Hairspray soundtrack, which was nominated for a Grammy Award. His official biography says he also co-produced songs for the West End production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Shaiman.

As a composer he scored the 2006 musical In Your Dreams, written by Zeke Farrow, the HBO documentary An Omar Broadway Film, the film Pretty Ugly People, the documentary Making the Boys and the 2009 horror film Sorority Row. He wrote "Year End Rap" for Perez Hilton's VH1 special What Perez Sez and "Stunning" for Calpernia Addams's Logo series Transamerican Love Story.

His longest partnership was with RuPaul. Piane wrote and produced the albums Champion (2009), Glamazon (2011) and Born Naked (2014), and his biography credits him with the theme music for RuPaul's Drag Race and RuPaul's Drag U. He appeared on Drag Race from its first season in 2009, writing and producing music for the musical challenges and serving as a guest judge. Entertainment Weekly counted 23 episode appearances, while Metro reported judging appearances in seasons four, six, seven and eight. He also wrote songs recorded by Katherine Jenkins, Martha Wash, Frankmusik, Conway, Audra Mae, Clairy Browne and Aimee Allen, and wrote for Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus touring productions, PBS's Sid the Science Kid and Nickelodeon's WallyKazam!.

Under the name RevoLucian, Piane made comic dance remixes from celebrity outbursts. His first, "STFU," was built from Barbra Streisand scolding a heckler at Madison Square Garden in October 2006, and the New York Post called it a "dance-tastic song." Remixes of Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin and Andrew Meyer followed, and Salon featured the O'Reilly track in its Critics' Picks.

In February 2009, while producing RuPaul's Champion album, he heard leaked audio of Christian Bale berating cinematographer Shane Hurlbut on the set of Terminator Salvation. He made "Bale Out" in about three hours and posted it on MySpace and YouTube on February 2, 2009. It drew more than 200,000 views in a day and 700,000 by February 4, and was played on CNN. Bale told E! "It was a good remix. They did a good job," and director McG kept a copy on his iPod. Piane said he hoped people would remember the remix rather than the outburst, and that he refused to remix clips he found purely vicious, such as Michael Richards's racist tirade.

Piane was openly gay and lived in Los Angeles from the mid-2000s. He did not publicly share details of any long-term partner. From 2016 onward he spoke publicly about mental health and substance problems. In January 2017 he said doctors at UCLA had diagnosed him with marijuana psychosis after he took large doses of cannabis edibles to treat full-body pain and fatigue, and that the illness had kept him from working for almost a year. In the weeks before his death he posted videos to Instagram that appeared to show him spending much of his time on the street, prompting fans to urge him to seek help.

In 2009 Piane described himself as sensitive to how his remixes portrayed their subjects, saying "We're all people in this world" and that he wanted his tracks to celebrate rather than mock. In November 2016 PinkNews reported that he had come out as a supporter of Donald Trump and was posting conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton, posts he later attributed to an episode of psychosis.

"Bale Out" is remembered as one of the defining viral remixes of the late 2000s, part of an early wave of internet music that turned news clips into dance tracks. Through his work with Marc Shaiman, Piane contributed to the Platinum-certified Hairspray soundtrack. His songs and productions for RuPaul and for Drag Race's musical challenges helped give the series much of its musical identity during its rise from a Logo cable show to a global franchise.

Piane received an RIAA Platinum Album Award for his production work on Hairspray: Soundtrack to the Motion Picture, which was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album. "Bale Out" was nominated for Best Remix of the Year in AOL Urlesque's 2009 Urlies, was a finalist in Clicker's 2009 Latest Favorite Viral Video category, and was nominated for a 2010 Webby Award in Best Video Remixes/Mashups. LA Weekly named him one of its LA People of 2009.

Piane appeared on RuPaul's Drag Race and its companion web content, including WOWPresents' RuPaul Drives and the podcast What's the Tee with Michelle Visage. He featured as a vocalist on RuPaul's track "Geronimo" and on Pearl's "Sleepwalker." His RevoLucian YouTube channel hosted Bale Out and his other remixes.

In late 2016 Piane posted a series of racist, antisemitic and offensive tweets, including slurs aimed at RuPaul. RuPaul responded by urging fans to "show some compassion," writing that "we ALL walk a fine line when it comes to mental health." In January 2017 Piane apologized on Instagram, blamed the posts on marijuana psychosis and wrote, "I am sorry to have hurt anyone along the way."

In August 2019 he was reportedly arrested at gunpoint after refusing to leave a Chase bank on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, one of several arrests that month, and his Twitter account was suspended after further offensive posts. In August 2021 he was arrested in Oceanside, California, for public intoxication after repeated calls to 911, and in September 2021 he was detained on suspicion of felony vandalism after a bank window in the San Fernando Valley was broken. Perez Hilton criticized coverage that mocked him, writing that he wanted to see Piane heal.

Lucian Piane died on Monday, October 12, 2026, in Glendale, California, aged 46. Law enforcement sources told TMZ he was hit by a car early that morning. The Glendale Fire Department said crews worked on him before pronouncing him dead at the scene, and Los Angeles County Medical Examiner records list his place of death as the street. He reportedly had no identification on him and was identified later. TMZ reported that Glendale police had cited him on the two days before his death and that he had a court date set for the day he died. Entertainment Weekly reported that an official cause of death was not immediately available, and it had not been made public. His death was reported on October 13, 2026.