Red Box: Morning Crap in Defense of Karaoke

Sound check one-two-one-two……

Yesterday morning, while taking an excruciatingly long dump in the loo  (dammit, time to introduce more fiber to my diet), I flipped through a June 09 issue of Word Magazine to ease the boredom of bodily functions. A shirtless, 62-year old Iggy Pop was featured on the cover. Six decades of putting up with gravity had dragged his face down to his navel. He had his arms, with all its loose and wrinkly, grandpa-skin glory, defiantly crossed over his chest and the headlines read: IGGY POP WANTS TO HAVE A WORD WITH YOU. Ah, Iggy, the grandaddy of Punk who has now become the face of Swiftcover car insurance. How lovely. That’s what happens when you let rock stars live past the age of 27. They get old and start selling insurance to you..

In the far right corner of the magazine cover, is a small picture of good ol’ Morrissey, his face looking like an off-pitch note, in a quarter-smile more constipated than my bowel movements were. Beneath his picture were the words: “Morrissey: I don’t want to go on much longer.” And I’m sure he didn’t. Not with the trying to smile bit, at least.

Page 8 - 9 features Mickey Rourke, post-The Wrestler glory, with the headlines: MICKEY ROURKE WON’T FIRE a STAPLE-GUN INTO HIS OWN FOREHEAD. Funny, I thought, seeing that his FACE sure looks like he did. And the little cat in my soul went “MRRRRRIIIIIAAAAOW”.

Anyway, this is all besides the point. What really got me shitting was an opinion piece by David Hepworth about how he doesn’t do karaoke because he loves pop music too much. Bah! Hepworth writes:

“….there’s something about karaoke, whether participating or spectating, that withers my purist soul. This is because it seems a mockery of much that I hold dear.”

And so I found myself thinking; so what if karaoke is a mockery of all that you hold dear? Marcel Duchamp made a mockery of all that was previously regarded as “art”  and now anyone who has been made to study at least 1 art subject at Uni has been forced to stroke their beards over  Fountain, as one of “the most influential artworks of the 20^th century”. Discuss.  Fellow Dadaist, Hans Richter wrote of Duchamp’s work: “You threw the bottle-rack and the urinal in their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.”   

And thus, I throw this bloody, butchered, violated version of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and Search’s Fantasia Bulan Madu in your ear and you may see it as a challenge my friend, or better yet, think that I am somewhat mentally challenged, but years down the line, you will grow to admire them for their aesthetic beauty and I will pooh-pooh at you for it. For I am ARTIST! Hear me sneer derisively at you!

If Dadaism is anti-art as art, then, my friend, Karaoke, the lovely Japanese phrase for “empty orchestra”, is anti-music as music, yes?

No.

Alright then, the world’s best jokes make a mockery of all that we hold sacred - religion, racial identity, your momma, and uh….. Tiger Woods - shall we then reject the notion of humour in our lives? Shall we never laugh again, Mr. Hepworth, never?

Hepworth further describes karaoke as “….one of those things you do to show that you haven’t got a poker up your ass..”. No, Dave,  I karaoke because you can’t read my, can’t read my Poker Face, P-p-p-oker m-m-my poker face, p-p-p-poker m-m-my poker face.

Uh…No, not really.  

David Hepworth did write one thing however, that I agreed with (oh, other than the bit about how “Only goats don’t like Abba.”): “I despise the arbitrary division between music that is allegedly fluff and that which is supposedly substantial. I firmly believe that all music has to be entertainment, because if it isn’t entertaining first, it’s unlikely to be anything else second.”

Karaoke is highly entertaining, provided you are the one participating and not spectating. Come on, everybody, loves the sound of their own voice best.  You go to a gig to watch someone else put on a great show; you don’t go to Red Box Karaoke Lounge to listen to your friend vocally butt-fuck a Whitney ballad. You go so you can be the one stripping Black Sabbath’s Paranoid out of all dignity that Ozzy Osbourne hasn’t done away with. That or the Somewhere over the Rainbow song from Wizard of Oz.

What the masses don’t understand is that karaoke is not about singing pretty although it remains, about the worship of beauty or more particularly, beautiful songs. Those who worship beauty, do not worship it simply because mon dieu, it is beautiful - we worship beauty because it is so hard to achieve, so delicate, so fragile, so easily lost and transformed into the opposite. How many words do you know that can be easily transformed into its opposite? When one looks down from the edge of a 50ft cliff; there’s that moment of vertigo; there’s that sick temptation to throw oneself off said cliff, not in spite but precisely because you know that such action would only result in a tragic outcome. It’s the same when you look upon something beautiful; there’s always that sick temptation deep down, to stab it in the eye and claw it to shreds.

Uh….No

If the 200 spin-off series of CSI has taught us anything, is that as righteous as you are, or how much some deserve it, you can’t murder people and have some stupid Ginger actor as Miami police lieutenant come after you. But you can easily murder songs. You can slash and rip them and splatter their insides all over the padded walls of the karaoke room.  You can tear out its intestines and wear it around your neck like a feather boa. And then you can leave.  .

In his article, David Hepworth mentioned some record that he “respects too much to do violence to them.” It has naught to do with respect, Mr. Hepworth! Karaoke enthusiasts mean no disrespect when we try to bash the face in of a beloved classic.

In Hindu religion, creation and destruction is one and the same thing - Shiva is both creator and destroyer. What the musician creates, the karaoke enthusiast destroys, thus giving people who otherwise don’t have an ounce of ability or pop star potential, a chance to be an active participant in the world of music. As a long-time music journalist, Mr Hepworth has had the opportunity to be a part of the industry eco-system, albeit as some kind of scavenging creature - a vulture or hyena, maybe - to the pop star’s proud lion. We are not part of the eco system, we are not able to roam freely in the Great Savannah of music, watching the animals tear eachother apart the way one would a documentary on National Geographic. Karaoke, however, changes that. For about RM 50 for 6 hours (plus an all you can eat dinner buffet spread!), we can destroy and with that, we have created! One and the same! One and the same!

Karaoke gives me, and many others, a space for our primal side to breathe and destroy freely, at least for 4 hours, so that the rest of the time, we can maintain a civilized façade and safely function in corporate society.  We can resume our usual routine of gritting our teeth in the office while fantasizing about bashing our boss’ head in with a loaded stapler…… without actually following through.

Just as the internet has democratized journalism and information, and placed it in the hands of the inept masses; karaoke, my friend, democratizes music. Takes it out of the hands of the talented, the skilled, the well-marketed elite and into  the open arms of people who probably need the healing, expressive powers of trying to hit a High C note the most - the repressed suits, the budding American Psychos. I feel, if Patrick Bateman had only lived in Asia and discovered the sheer cathartic joy of karaoke - he might not have ended up all psycho in the first place.

And with that, I wiped my ass and flush the toilet, feeling 10 pounds lighter.