..
I'm real.
Sexy yet Modest,
Confident yet Insecure,
Jaded yet Naive
and also Adventurous yet Skittish.
Baisically a walking contradiction.
I find it a little hard to explain why I love karaoke, but I do. More, by far, of my favorite memories from nights out listening to music come from karaoke than from any other kind of performance. The girl who wanted to be a country star out practicing at Kirin, the guy with the GIANT Viet Namese accent singing the 8-minute version of “I’m Sailing Away,†the KJ with the Turgenyev-esque tale of woe at Ridgeway’s, and most recently, the woman taking a header off the stage while singing “I Wanna Be Sedated†at Cowboy Monkey–and still finishing the song.
Recently I was at a party, trying to put into words what it is that I find compelling about it, and was thrown back to a fairly basic statement: it makes me love people. Makes me love the singers and the people listening, and by extension, humanity writ large. Karaoke is like church to me, I suppose. But that’s not much of an answer–that is, it doesn’t really explain why I feel that way. I have thought more on it, and I’ve come to this: I love karaoke, at least as it is practiced in the U.S., because it presents life’s rich pageant, the Ridiculous and the Sublime. It is a place for laughing at ourselves, and being moved by the intensity of feeling we can bring to experiences; a place for suprisingly beautiful renditions of songs, and for truly awful ones. It makes the mass-marketed commodity into a thing we take hold of and force to serve our needs, personal and communal. It can also be tragic, of course, but that, too, is moving, if only because it points us to our own tragedies, big and small.
