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1.

Why Karaoke,

and What’s Culture

Got To Do with It?

It needs to be said upfront: I’m not a karaoke fan. This essay was not only conceived, but also half-finished, when it occurred to me to go and catch a bit of real karaoke. They say Casablanca is the most popular karaoke bar in Amsterdam. My companion and I, both neophytes, arrived at eight on the dot, as if we were going to the theatre and not a bar. Casablanca was empty. We took a walk down Zeedijk, a narrow street packed with bars whose barmen look like they spend all day at the gym and all night in the bar. Muscles and baggy eyelids—that pretty well describes our barman at Casablanca, to which we soon returned. On a little stage, two tall, slender young women were squawking a Dutch pop song into a couple of upright microphones. A concert featuring Dutch pop stars played on the bar’s TV screens but was drowned out by the evening’s young karaoke stars. The girls sang with more heart than the guys, and for a second I thought there must be an invisible policeman standing over them. The whole thing was a deaf collective caterwaul: deaf insofar as nobody actually listened to anyone. Amsterdam is definitely not the place for a karaoke initiation. I’m not sure why I even thought of going to see karaoke in Amsterdam—maybe because of the paradox that sometimes turns out to be true, that worlds open up where we least expect.

I was watching the film Lost in Translation for the third time and had stopped at the part where Bill Murray, with fatalistic forbearance, does his karaoke number. I sat down at the computer and opened YouTube. Trailing a few words behind and holding out little hope that I’d ever catch up, I gave singing “I Will Survive” a go. It was an invigorating experience. I had a go at opera too. I managed to warble along with a popular aria from The Phantom of the Opera, but on Andrea Bocelli’s “Con Te Partirò” I could only get my tongue around the first line of the chorus. That song definitely has too many unpronounceable words.

I thought about buying the karaoke version of “Ti Voglio Tanto Bene” for $2.99, but gave it a pass. I didn’t buy Cantolopera either, which would have let me sing operatic arias accompanied by a whole orchestra. I didn’t even buy a teach-yourself pack, a virtual coach for classical singers. But when I saw an Internet ad for a karaoke program that promised to recreate the joys, sorrows, ecstasy and anguish of opera—while I was having my morning shower—I very nearly caved. It’s not that I like warbling in the shower; it’s just that I’m a sucker for emotionally charged ads with rich vocabularies. And I almost forgot, I also listened to a few karaoke singers on a site called Singer’s Showcase. My favorite was the sad Mr. Sandy and his bear-like growl through “Georgia On My Mind.”

What is karaoke in actual fact? Karaoke (Japanese for “empty orchestra”) is entertainment for people who would like to be Madonna or Sinatra. The karaoke machine was invented in the early seventies by the Japanese musician Daisuke Inoue—who forgot to patent his invention, and so others cashed in. A few years ago Inoue apparently won the alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Ig Nobel), awarded by The Annals of Improbable Research. They praised him for “providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.”

Cultural critics are people who are prepared to see more in the craze for tattoos than just a passing fashion fad. I’m a member of this dubious guild. In karaoke I’m ready to see more than just desperate squawking to the backing track of “I Will Survive.” Karaoke supports less the democratic idea that everyone can have a shot if they want one and more the democratic practice that everyone wants a shot if there’s one on offer. The inventor of karaoke, Daisuke Inoue, is a humble man, most proud of having helped the Japanese, emotionally reticent as they are said to be, change for the better. As Pico Iyer wrote: “As much as Mao Zedong or Mohandas Gandhi changed Asian days, Inoue transformed its nights.”[1]

What is the attraction of karaoke, which having first taken off in Japan (apparently it’s still going strong) then made its way around the world? I suspect it is firstly its simplicity and stupidity, and secondly, the ambivalent position of the participant. Singing a song that someone else made famous, the amateur publicly declares his or her love for his or her idol (Sinatra or Madonna), while the inevitably flaky performance simultaneously devalues this same idol. This theft of the star’s aura, or inadvertent subversion of a hierarchy of values, remains in the sphere of the innocent, empowering, and transformative. It’s just a bit of fun. The performer is anonymous, and most often remains so.

Letting one’s imagination run wild, it’s not difficult to imagine various other forms of karaoke-like fun. Someone with a bit of cash, for example, might hit upon the idea of hiring the ballet ensemble of the Bolshoi Theatre, commission a performance of Swan Lake, and insert his wife, mother-in-law, or even himself in the main dance section. The variants are endless. But the bottom line, it seems, is anonymity. Why? If we signed our first and last names, our gesture would have a completely different message. Our squawking along to “Mamma Mia” wouldn’t be interpreted as a submissive imitation of the original, but as subversion, homage, parody, and so forth. An authorial gesture, as opposed to an anonymous one, sends a rather different message out into the world—Marcel Duchamp painting a mustache and beard on the Mona Lisa or Andy Warhol and his giant celebrity portraits come to mind. Were it not for an authorial signature, and general agreement that this signature be respected, much contemporary art—the product of an inseparable symbiosis between someone else’s original model and an interventionist authorial gesture—could easily be filed under less flattering labels such as symbiotic art, appropriation art, or karaoke art. Because karaoke is an activity that belongs to those who don’t sign their names—or don’t do so for now. For the time being, karaoke-people stick within their communities, their fandoms.

There are of course inverse examples, where famous people do karaoke. The film Romance & Cigarettes (2005), a kind of karaoke-musical, stars superb actors (James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, and Steve Buscemi) who ham it up to the sound of others’ booming voices, not least that of a certain Tom Jones. Mamma Mia! (2008), the hit film based on the West End musical, features equally superb actors (Julie Waters, Meryl Streep, Colin Firth) singing the evergreens of the Swedish pop-group ABBA. Like a karaoke session, both films are propelled by the spectator’s recognition of the original hits; by the energy of the evergreen, and not, incidentally, by their poor imitations.

When did a harmless bit of anonymous fun grow into a culture? Should these two celluloid examples be considered karaoke culture, or are they simply examples of celebrity culture, a culture in which stars can do whatever they like—from clowning around in an onscreen musical to writing crappy books? Let’s not forget: Karaoke is entertainment for ordinary people, who, within given codes (shaped by technology and genre), and protected by the mask of anonymity, fulfill their suppressed desires within their own communities, or fandoms. Karaoke-people are everything but revolutionaries, innovators, or people who will change the world. They’re ordinary people, readers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, consumers and conformists. All the same, the world changes and ordinary people have their part to play.

The very foundation of karaoke culture lies in the parading of the anonymous ego with the help of simulation games. Today people are more interested in flight from themselves than discovering their authentic self. The self has become boring, and belongs to a different culture. The possibilities of transformation, teleportation, and metamorphosis hold far more promise than digging in the dirt of the self. The culture of narcissism has mutated into karaoke culture—or the latter is simply a consequence of the former.

The market on which the ego can be paraded is open to all comers, everyone and every variant is welcome. The ego, which for centuries lay buried in the subsoil, has seeped out onto the surface and, having changed its properties, become unusually strong. Metaphorically speaking, it’s lucky that Andy Warhol, the inventor of karaoke in the visual arts, died when he did. Otherwise he’d have to look on in horror as a Campbell’s Soup Can moved in to slurp him up. Today the humble Daisuke Inoue sells eco-friendly detergents and cockroach-killing insecticides, cockroaches being the very creatures that crawl down into the karaoke machine and chew on its electric wires. When we think about it a little more, everything runs on wires now. Without healthy wires, there wouldn’t be karaoke culture.

Every text is sustained by the changing relationships between Author, Work, and Recipient. Modern technology has radically altered the structure of the text, whether this be literary, visual, or cinematic. The balance of power, formerly dominated by Author and Work, has been flipped in favor of the Recipient. This tectonic shift has changed the cultural landscape and wiped out many cultural species (while, truth be told, giving birth to new ones), transforming perception, comprehension, and taste—in fact, the entire cultural system. And we’re not even conscious of it all, and neither are we in a position to articulate what has actually happened.[2]

That’s why we’re making a start with the awkward metaphor of karaoke. In the text that follows we’re interested in the human activities in which an anonymous participant, assisted by new technology, uses an existing cultural model to derive pleasure. (And it has nothing to do with sex, if that was what you were thinking!) The models are most often drawn from popular culture (television, film, pop music, comics, computer games), but some belong to what was once considered “high culture” (film, literature, painting). Most often the anonymous participant derives pleasure and gets his kicks by simply getting to be “someone else, somewhere else.” Amateur and anonymous, participants don’t go in for artistic pretension, nor are they overly concerned with the authorship of their creation or their activity, but the desire to leave their mark is beyond doubt. Their creation can’t be called plagiarism, nor can their activity be called imitation, because both terms belong to a different time and a different cultural system. Easily applicable to non-musical activities such as film, literature, and painting, karaoke is the most simple paradigm, hence the hasty and perhaps not completely apposite title of this essay, “Karaoke Culture.” This soft term is less restrictive than those which are currently in use, such as post-postmodernism, anti-modernism, pseudo-modernism, and digi-modernism. All of these terms, including mine, are inferior to the content they try to describe. The content is new, and it’s changing from one second to the next, so what we try and articulate today can disappear tomorrow, leaving no trace of its existence. We live in a liquid epoch.

Apart from “culture” this essay makes frequent reference to “wires.” I admit that I don’t know anything about “wires.” The fact that I don’t know anything about them doesn’t prevent me from writing about them. Until yesterday these two sentences were in contradiction. Today they’re not. Freedom from knowledge, from the past, from continuity, from cultural memory and cultural hierarchy, and an inconceivable speed—these are the determinants of karaoke culture and the leitmotifs of the text that tries to describe them.

[1] www.time.com/time/asia/asia/magazine/1999/990823/inoue1.html

[2]Here’s a quick anecdote. A teenager and I watched the “ancient” film The Silence of the Lambs together. There’s that terrible scene in which Buffalo Bill’s victim is trapped in an unused well. “The chick is dumb, she doesn’t have a mobile” was the teenager’s comment. “What do to you mean?” I asked. “If she had a mobile on her she could call the police.” The teenager, a child who grew up with the mobile phone, watched the film in his own way—as a story about a “dumb chick” who got into trouble because she didn’t have a mobile phone.