Turn Around Bright Eyes

by Rob Sheffield

  But watching J.J. also makes me wonder about the amateur aesthetic in general. That’s the essence of karaoke if anything is: never for money, always for love. In the many years I’ve been interviewing performers for Rolling Stone, one of my go-to questions is “What’s your karaoke jam?” Nobody ever has to think about it. They name a song right away, or start singing it, or confess they get too shy—that seems to be surprisingly common for actors and comedians, which is fascinating in itself. (Bill Hader, one of the funniest people on earth, told me he can’t do it at all because of his circle of friends. He gets too intimidated by how good Will Arnett and Jason Sudeikis are. All I could think was “Amazing. You do the Stefon routine on TV in front of millions of people, but karaoke is where you get the bashfuls?”)

  It’s a useful interview question, not because the subjects give me a quotable answer—it never makes it into the article, since my editors really don’t give a crap how much everybody loves the same Bon Jovi songs. But somehow it makes them relax, slaps them out of interview mode. It gets their enthusiasm flowing. It has nothing to do with their job, or with the project they’re promoting, but everything to do with why they started doing their job in the first place. It taps into the most innocent kind of enthusiasm. For some of these showbiz troupers, karaoke must be one of the few times they’re off the clock.

  When I watch J.J. shill, I know he’s doing songs he’s done before; I know he planned all this; I know what he’s going to do in an hour or so; he has the tricks in his stash. I know I’m just a sucker. But it works because whether he’s in the mood or not, he convinces me he loves it. He makes me believe he’d do it for free. They say you have to fake it till you make it, but maybe you also have to make it to fake it. It’s like the old country song says—a lap dance is better when the stripper is crying. I feel certain the same must be true of karaoke.

  SO WHAT MAKES A GOOD karaoke shill? Clearly, you have to have the performer thing. The showgirl thing. The frontman thing. The flair that separates a star from the rest of us. You have to be able to turn it on at will.

  I’ve always been fascinated with people who have that, not to mention jealous—musicians, dancers, performers of any kind. A few years ago, I was at an after-party for a friend who was doing a one-man dance theater project in New York, at the Kitchen. I was making my goodbye rounds early—I had an article due the next day. He wasn’t buying my excuse. He said, “You just have to work tomorrow. I gotta be somebody!”

  And that totally nails the difference between performers and the rest of us. We need them to be somebody. And occasionally, we need to be them so we can be somebody, too.

  There’s a specific kind of personality, or maybe just some kind of genetic mutation, that these people have. People in bands call it LSD, or Lead Singer’s Disease. This pathology was perhaps best diagnosed by the noted British psychologist Dr. Frederick Mercury. An interviewer asked Freddie in 1977, “Why do you think people like David Bowie and Elvis Presley have been so successful?” Freddie replied, “Because they give their audiences champagne for breakfasts. ’Coz they’re what the people want. They want to see you rush off in the limousines. They get a buzz.”

  That buzz separates performers from the rest of the human race. It’s a special mentality that requires you to give yourself to the audience, in a theatrically overstated way, despite the fact that they know it’s a performance. The mechanical manipulation has to be part of the charm. Even when you’re feeling the same emotions every night in the same order, hitting your marks and reciting your rehearsed patter, the glamour is real for you and the audience, converting artificial tricks into human tears and blood. I always envy performers who can do this; whether or not I like their music is secondary to my envy for the fact that they can actually do it.

  For the rest of us, karaoke is as close as we get. We have much to learn from these people, even if we can be grateful we do not share whatever psychosexual quiddities drive them to crave this much attention. I wouldn’t want to be Beyoncé full-time. I couldn’t handle it. Even Beyoncé has her hands full trying to be Beyoncé full-time. I’m only Beyoncé for about ten minutes a month, when I pick up the mike to sing “Crazy in Love” or “Halo” or “Countdown” or “Say My Name.” I don’t know if I could take a solid hour of being Beyoncé, not without doing serious damage to my halo. She was Destiny’s Child—I am Density’s Child. But she has that charisma that inspires the rest of us to fake it. I fake it so real, I am Beyoncé.

  I don’t have the frontman chromosome. Whatever the frontman is in front of, I am more comfortable lurking somewhere in the back of that. That has to be part of why I’m drawn to karaoke, the way it lets me sparkle with a little shabby secondhand glamour stolen from these true stars. No lurkers allowed, no parking on the dance floor. “If you can’t fix it, flaunt it” is a motto that’s built right into the mentality.

  SO MUCH OF IT COMES right down to the microphone. So let’s talk about that for a minute. The thing itself. The electrical instrument. The magic wand that turns those who clutch it into gods and goddesses.

  Everybody loves microphones. As soon as they were invented, singers loved them. Frank Sinatra and those forties crooner guys used to bend the mike over tenderly like a dame they were kissing on V.J. Day. As Old Blue Eyes told Life magazine, “It’s like a geisha girl uses her fan.” That has never changed. Singers love microphones. Rappers love microphones. I’ve seen indie guys press their lips up and slobber on the microphone so they get electrical shocks and I’ve seen rock stars bear-hug stage-rushing fans as they all crowd around the mike stand.

  Microphones are outdated technology, in a sense; if you want to, you can mike a performer so the audience doesn’t see the equipment. Singers only flaunt the microphone because they want to. In the nineties, people from Madonna to Garth Brooks began using the wireless headset mike thingaroo, which creates a whole different iconography. The headset is businesslike, above all. It says, “I’m not some pop floozy up here, I’m the CEO of an entertainment enterprise, I’m a brand, I’m working my ass off,” etc. But you can’t become a star that way. You have to already be a star to wear the headset, because it does not in itself confer star status. The microphone does. That’s why little girls learn to sing into the hairbrush before they even learn to brush their hair with it.

  The air guitar makes sense on a pragmatic level because a guitar does things. When you play air guitar, or beat out a drum solo on the dashboard, you’re miming a mechanical operation. But the air mike, that’s a different statement. And it usually is the trusty hairbrush. In the excellent 2002 Britney Spears film Crossroads, she uses a spoon while she’s in her room belting Madonna’s “Open Your Heart,” which is interesting for a number of reasons, the two toppermost being 1) WTF? They didn’t have a hairbrush? They’re not hard to find and teenage girls have them in their rooms, always, and boys usually do, too, whereas teenagers generally do not stash the silverware in their sleeping chamber unless their “cry for attention” game has reached condition red, and 2) Britney always used a headset, not a handheld mike, so rocking the mike like this must be a long-standing fantasy that she could never satisfy in her actual day job as a singer, only in the movies when she plays an amateur fan who can only dream of being a singer, which could be the whole karaoke ethic in a nutshell.

  Stars love to put pictures of themselves holding the mike on their albums, whether it makes them look cool or ridiculous or so far past ridiculous it’s magfriggenificent. (Like Morrissey on the inner sleeve of the first Smiths album, where he’s making microphone love so intently, he practically pins and mounts it like a butterfly.) The best had to be George Clinton of Funkadelic, on the cover of his 1979 classic, Uncle Jam Wants You. George is some kind of dictator-king sitting on his wicker throne in his red beret, military fatigues, and white platform go-go boots, with a giant microphone next to him as if it’s the royal scepter, except it’s bigger than the throne.

  From the earliest days of hip-hop, holding the mi
c was a sacred responsibility. No MC has ever worshipped it like Rakim, who boasted “I hold the microphone like a grudge” and used it to move-move-move the crowd. He was the original microphone fiend, and in his hand it was the third rail on the subway line into the cosmos; he made the mic smoke and then slammed it down to make sure it’s broke. (Hip-hop was the first culture I know of to spell it “mic,” to signify that a rapper’s mic was a different instrument from anybody else’s mike.)

  Biggie has that great song “Mo Money Mo Problems” about being onstage, looking out at the crowd, with all the girls sitting on the guys’ shoulders, screaming his name. In the song, all the girls look like microphones to him. The ladies watching him amplify his voice, make it mean something. The thrill of looking out into an audience of those girls, so many rock stars have written poetry about that from Chuck Berry to Patti Smith, but I think Biggie was the first to recognize those girls as microphones. “Mere mics to me”—I think about that line every time I go to a show and see the singer bask in the screams.

  But mike or mic, if you’re in the audience, the microphone is what the singer has that you don’t, and some part of you wants it. Holding the mike transforms you into a star, makes you say things like “one-two, one-two” or “testing” or “testes” or “There’s gotta be some people out there who like to drink tequila.” If you’re Billy Joel, the microphone smells like a beer. If you’re Steven Tyler, it’s a place to tie your scarves. If you’re Trent Reznor, you fling it to the floor to signify your alienation. Joe Strummer was the first rock star I ever saw do the move where they hold the mike stand into the crowd so it picks up our voices rather than theirs. It was my first Clash show and we were all singing “Garageland” and it was so touching (Joe Strummer wants to listen to us?) that it’s always stayed with me, even if I’ve seen that move a thousand times since then. That machine can make anyone a star.

  But you can’t step to the mike with fear in your heart. You have to love it, the way J.J. does, and you have to make the crowd love how much you love it. It’s like Hunter S. Thompson said about politicians—“maybe the whole secret of turning a crowd on is getting turned on yourself by the crowd.” Watching J.J. turn into Beyoncé, it’s not merely that she turns him into a star—he turns her into a star. You have to grab that mike like the song is desperate for you to bring it to life and wear it like a halo.

  EIGHT

  10:16 p.m.:

  Rebel Yell

  We’ve already spent a couple of hours in Sing Sing. But I have the untamable hunger for more, like a girl in a Billy Idol song, which is only right and natural, since for a few minutes I am going to be the girl in a Billy Idol song. My rebel yell can’t be stopped: You give me the midnight hour, I’ll give you the mo-mo-mo.

  Right now I am a rock star. I am living the dream as Ted Nugent described it in the title of his live album Intensities in 10 Cities. Except in my case, it’s Intensities in 10 Shitty Versions of Other People’s Songs. But nothing can slow us down. The night is under way. In karaoke, there is no right or wrong. There is only mo, mo, and more mo.

  But here’s the big question: Where did karaoke come from? How did it get so popular so fast? How did this become acceptable behavior? Why do we do this to ourselves?

  There’s the simple historical answer: It began in Japan, where the word karaoke means “empty orchestra.” But I’m looking for bigger answers, digging into the primal aspects of the question. Where did the karaoke mind-set come from, and what does it mean that America fell madly in love with it?

  Karaoke is a relatively new development in Western culture. It might seem like it’s been around forever, but it didn’t arrive until recently, and we still don’t know its long-term effects, like some new drug that hits the market before it’s properly tested. Even in the late eighties, it was obscure in English-speaking countries. But as soon as people found out that it existed, it caught on fast. Once we got a taste, we needed more.

  It has a long history in Japan, a country I’ve never visited. Ally used to live in Tokyo, so she’s done karaoke in the motherland, with middle-aged salarymen singing Beatles and Elton John songs while consuming their weight in sake, which they’re destined to regurgitate on the train tracks. The first time I ever heard the word karaoke in the eighties was from my friend Marc, after he visited Japan; he said it was their equivalent of an American 1950s drive-in theater, a place where kids go to make out in the dark. “American karaoke is about as authentic as American sushi,” he assures me. “It’s California-roll karaoke.”

  But it’s the American ritual of karaoke that fascinates me. Of all the amateur passions that thrive in the American psyche, singing seems to be the only one that has found this kind of mass expression. Karaoke is a throwback to a time before records, where families gathered around a piano and unfolded sheet music of the latest hit song. It’s a place where no-talents and low-talents and too-low-for-zero talents tolerate each other, even enjoy each other, as we commit brutal crimes of love against music. We’re all free to turn and walk the other way at any time, yet we stay to applaud each other.

  I can’t think of any other forum like this in our culture. There’s no acting equivalent of karaoke, where an amateur thespian can get up on a public stage after shotgunning a few tall boys and perform the trial of Hermione from The Winter’s Tale. There is no restaurant karaoke where anyone can hop on the stove, burn dinner, and serve it up to the other customers. Imagine a bartending equivalent. You order a Rob Roy, and I’ll pour you a cup of Shasta Raspberry Zazz and Absolut Pepper with a shot of Four Loko plus a raw oyster. Would you drink it? No way—but this is what karaoke is. There is simply no other American ritual that rewards people for doing things they suck at doing.

  Yet we stick around, before and after our song, cheering each other’s flaws. The only real bores in a karaoke bar are the ringers who can sing, like the eternal “Me and Bobby McGee” lady. In a karaoke bar, the closest you can come to unforgivably bad taste is competence.

  The community created around karaoke is a sacred thing. It’s a universally supportive environment—nobody goes to scoff or judge. It’s not like a pool hall or bowling alley where the regulars glare at you for taking up valuable space. It’s a temporary but intense bond between strangers, a shipboard romance, a republic we create where we gladly consent to treat the other people around us like rock stars. How does music bring all this out of us?

  Last fall I was in a crowded karaoke joint on St. Mark’s Place, waiting in line for the men’s room, surrounded by strangers with their arms around each other singing this country song I’d never heard before (Alabama’s “Dixieland Delight”) and by the time the second chorus rolled around I could sing along, too. It was a birthday party for a guy named Taylor, who was turning thirty-three. I’ll never meet you, Taylor, but judging from the friends you’ve made, and the gusto with which they sing about redtail hawks and whitetail buck deer and makin’ a little lovin’ and turtle-dovin’ on a Tennessee Saturday night, I’d wager you have spent your thirty-three years wisely. It was a grand experience. And that was just the line for the bathroom.

  It’s a totally democratic environment. We all show up, bringing our different and unequal talents, and then we start even. I think that’s why actual rock stars love karaoke. It’s one thing for nonsingers to revel in a chance to sing, but it seems to be a whole different trip for actual singers, slumming it in the trenches with the rest of us. Robert Plant told a funny story once in Rolling Stone about doing karaoke at a bar in China, where nobody recognized him. “In China it’s a big deal, so I said, ‘Let me do “It’s Now or Never,” by Elvis, so I can really bring the house down!’ But this guy from Taiwan was better than me. He did ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon,’ by Tony Orlando and Dawn. When he was done I thought, ‘Fuck me! I was outdone by a Taiwanese guy singing Tony Orlando!’”

  When I got to meet Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, after some gracious comments about my previous book, they asked what I was workin
g on next. As soon as I mentioned my karaoke book, they started telling stories about the first time they sang karaoke. “It was Malaysia in 1988,” Nick Rhodes said. “Everyone was singing Elvis songs—’Are You Ronesome Tonight?’” Simon Le Bon sang Madonna’s “Material Girl,” while Elton John’s manager danced around doing a striptease.

  As they’re telling me these stories, I’m astounded, because these are actual rock stars. They’ve had their own spotlights, on their own stages, for thirty years now. They’ve played their own songs for millions of people around the world. Why do they even remember a night of karaoke? Why did this experience make an impression on them, out of all the countless nights they’ve spent making music? Simon Le Bon never needs to sing anyone else’s songs to get applause. So why does he cherish fond memories of his night as a material girl?

  MY FRIEND TANYA, WHO GREW up in Sri Lanka during the civil war, remembers going to sing karaoke all the time with her grandmother. All the old ladies would gather in the basement of the Kalumbo Hilton to sing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” (the same Tony Orlando song that foiled Robert Plant). They never did Sri Lankan songs—only American pop chestnuts. Tanya’s song was Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto.” “Karaoke only got big when the war started,” she told me. “Karaoke and casinos. It wasn’t safe to go out on the streets anymore, so those were places to go after curfew time. It was a way of expressing joy, when people really needed one.”

  What a picture: a little kid in a war zone, with all these old ladies holed up in a hotel basement karaoke lounge, singing “In the Ghetto” to tune out the gunfire outside.

  That same power translates everywhere, all around the world, because nothing expresses joy like singing together. That’s why it inspired such fervor in America as soon as it arrived. To enter into that karaoke mind-set, you have to leave behind all your notions of good or bad, right or wrong, in tune or out of tune. The kara in the word karaoke is the same as the one in karate, which means “empty hand.” They’re both “empty” arts because you have no weapons and no musical instruments to hide behind—only your courage, your heart, and your will to inflict pain.