Dear readers,
Let’s get one thing out of the way: I have zero interest in making you do karaoke. Like most enthusiasts (or so I assume), I don’t want to force anyone into sacramental public humiliation, nor do I want to watch from the stage while you silently ponder what kind of repressed loser is driven to sing White Town to a room full of drunk people who wandered in from an advertising convention at the Javits Center. On a Monday night.
I don’t know when my entire personality became Someone Who Does Karaoke, and by extension Someone Oddly Defensive. But as exhibitionism goes, it’s pretty harmless — and as therapy goes, pretty cheap. More than this, something magical can happen when a roomful of strangers comes together to (voluntarily) do something that has nothing to do with their real life, for no reason other than the joy of singing.
—Sadie
“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,” Sheffield writes in this, the “Walden” of karaoke memoirs. “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.”
Sheffield does karaoke for the first time, reluctantly, as a grieving young widower — and promptly finds an escape and a community. You certainly don’t need to do karaoke yourself to enjoy this moving story of love lost and found, but Sheffield does offer a testament to the hobby’s weird comforts, to say nothing of the catharsis of singing the final lines of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” with a group of people you will never see again. This is one of the rare books that reliably make me cry. It’s also the reason I first worked up the courage to perform a truly unhinged version of “I Think We’re Alone Now” to a room of alarmed French people.
Read if you like: “High Fidelity” (the Nick Hornby novel or Stephen Frears’s faithful movie adaptation); “Here After,” by Amy Lin; “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
Available from: Plenty of good bookstores will print on demand; but to my mind this is a case for Thriftbooks and its ilk. (And, of course, there’s an e-book.)
When a local institution named Dale Jepsen dies in a Canadian forest fire, the inhabitants of Crow Valley mount a memorial karaoke competition in his honor. Bryan’s dark comedy is part antic farce, part character study and altogether a thoroughly fun read — in the tradition of her prior novels “The Figgs,” “The Hill” and “Coq” — but my favorite parts are those in which she skewers the bizarre world of karaoke enthusiasts. There’s the guy who flips out when his duet partner can’t nail a harmony; the incredible irritation when someone else takes your song before you can get to it; the showboat who dominates with deep-cut show tunes. To borrow a description that’s usually applied to academia, it’s so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
Read if you like: Jami Attenberg’s “The Middlesteins,” anything by Louise Penny, “The Appeal,” by Janice Hallett
Available from: Wherever fine books are sold; why not patronize Owl’s Nest, in the author’s home of Calgary?
Why don’t you …
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Listen to someone tone-deaf? Tim Falconer can’t sing; he has what scientists call amusia and we call tone-deafness. His 2017 book “Bad Singer” starts with Falconer’s own experiences and segues into an exploration of neurology (he’s often the subject) and the evolution of the human relationship to music. Fascinating and fun.
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Justify your loathing? If you dismiss karaoke not merely as lame but as a nationalistic opiate of drones torn between forces of conformity and exceptionalism, the Yugoslav cultural critic Dubravka Ugresic has your back. Her excellent book of essays “Karaoke Culture” (which covers far more than amateurs singing in public) also demonstrates an appealing open-mindedness: “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.”
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Mix media? Hollywood’s portrayal of karaoke can be as cringe-inducing as most people think real karaoke is; I give you “Duets.” But there are notable exceptions: “Booksmart” (excellent drama-kid portrayal); “500 Days of Summer” (the scene filmed at the Redwood is by far the best thing in the movie); “My Best Friend’s Wedding” (bad-singing realism); and “Lost in Translation,” because the karaoke scene captures the randomness and ritualized, controlled madness of the whole pastime.
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