Leaving behind your friends and family and moving to another state can be difficult in many ways, but it can also present a very positive opportunity for personal development if you let it. It’s easy to get stagnant in the comfortable environs of home, but moving forces you to be more outgoing and try new things. For example, I think there’s a very real chance that, had I not left Denver, I would have gone through my entire life without once experiencing the strange and exotic world of Karaoke (or even—ahem—wanting to, for that matter). And yet, that’s exactly where I found myself last Saturday night.
The night out had been organized by a friend of a friend (the friend being Jon Barbero—you may remember him from such posts as “The Madness”), and it took place at a strange little hole-in-the-wall called World Karaoke (in a Korean neighborhood near El Camino and Lawrence in Santa Clara). I had some initial misgivings about the whole Karaoke idea, although not as many as you might expect, since I’m secretly one of those frustrated singers who pines for any opportunity to croon in public (I often forget I’m not in my car while I’m walking to work and belt out my current favorites to my iPod’s accompaniment!). In any case, my new carpe diem attitude ensured that it didn’t take too much prodding to get me to come along.
The actual experience turned out to be very different from what I would have expected. For one thing, I was anticipating a bar-like setting, where people would build their courage with alcohol before singing their hearts out in front of total strangers. I turned out to be wrong on both counts: there was no alcohol in evidence, and the singing took place in a tiny “private” room, where it could be witnessed only by the other people in our party.
Our group’s performances covered a pretty wide swath of the musical spectrum, from classic rock to the latest K and J-Pop hits. I personally sang what Jon agrees was a spot-on John Fogerty impersonation on “Fortunate Son”, a middling Paul McCartney impression on “Hey Jude,” and a pair of enthusiastic duets with non-irate Scotsman Jamie Montgomerie (David Bowie’s “Changes” and R.E.M’s “Imitation of Life”).
I think a lot of us found the most interesting aspect of the “authentic” Karaoke experience to be the bizarre videos that accompanied the songs. Presumably, the companies that make Karaoke content are usually either unable or unwilling to gain the rights to use a song’s original video, so they make their own. The results are often so idiosyncratic that they would keep a team of cultural studies professors busy for a year!
For example, the video for U2’s “Mysterious Ways” was obviously inspired by the song’s original, Middle East-flavored promo, but it had a strange twist: in lieu of Bono, it substituted an American solider, clad in the familiar Desert Storm fatigues, stumbling through the desert, tormented by visions of an exotic belly dancer who always seems just out of his reach. Whether this was meant as an innocent homage or a subtle critique of imperialism (á la Edward Said’s Orientalism) I leave as an exercise for the reader…
