“It’s like a crushing hangover in a crowded bus terminal, except that everyone insists that you REALLY ought to enjoy yourself”

I hate karaoke.

Searchlight Pictures. he’s so young here!

You can love music and loathe karaoke. It’s okay! I’ve sampled a lot of karaoke scenes, and each time, my tolerance drops. I’m done with the drunk warbling, the people who don’t know what “Zombie” is about, the rare rando who has apparently waited years to dust off their high school theater chops. You’re how old and you still wanna roleplay Glee? Okay. Not to mention the terrible sonic experience: the more familiar the original song, the more irritating the imitation, for one thing. And no karaoke room ever sounds like the backing track: all that off-key, off-tempo singing, conflicting crosstalk, and drink ordering. The worst karaoke is the loudest, usually in a bar where glass, ice, hard surfaces, and unaffiliated social groups combine for teeth-grinding chaos. It’s like a crushing hangover in a crowded bus terminal, except that everyone insists that you really ought to enjoy yourself.

It has to be said: Karaoke fans get awfully personal about it. Among bar pastimes, no activity comes close. Giant Jenga may foster conversation, but nothing privileges the individual experience like a song. Though it’s typically public or semi-public, karaoke feels like sharing something intimate. It carries emotional resonance, though I’m rarely in any condition to receive it. And it fulfills the irresistible urge to grasp the aux: One’s choice of song speaks to one’s taste, one’s ability to read the room. One imagines this is what it feels like to be a rock star, to DJ to a packed house, provided that house always wants to hear “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

I genuinely wanted to understand the counterpoint to my karaoke allergy, so I read Brian Raftery’s book Don’t Stop Believin’: How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life. There’s no question Raferty loves karaoke — at one point he confesses that he no longer much enjoys live concerts, because he’d rather be singing. But I’m not a frustrated rock star; I’ve never heard a song I loved, a vocal performance I admired, and thought, “What a great reference track.” I sang karaoke once, more than a decade ago, an experience that left only a dull impression of confusion and panic. It was a Dusty Springfield song, a duet with a onetime acquaintance whose name and face I no longer recall, at a bar I hope never to visit again. I don’t think there was a stage. I don’t know what the reaction was like. The sole redeeming quality of this experience is that I can barely remember it.

I’m not a talented singer either, though karaoke fans will rush to tell you that you don’t have to be. The only way to lose is not to play, meaning that non-singers are losers, cowards. After reading Raferty’s book, which was published in 2008, I kinda get it: Karaoke was invented in Japan in the early ’70s and imported to the U.S. in the ’80s, where for some time it remained a technologically clunky niche hobby and a frequent butt of jokes. Most Americans didn’t start to think of karaoke as potentially cool until the new millennium, a groundswell inspired in part by the popularity of American Idol and legitimized with the Bill Murray/Scarlett Johansson karaoke scene in Lost in Translation. Pop culture doesn’t get much more recognizable than that, but as with video games and comic books, the insularity of a once-derided obsession can have a long echo. Superfans still feel like they have something to defend, even though these days practically every new live television concept includes a riff on karaoke. Today’s most visible karaoke fans aren’t fans at all — they’re professional entertainers like James Corden and Blake Shelton.

Karaoke is so pervasive now that, even as a known hater, I was invited to another party just this week. Of course karaoke is supposed to be about the people—your people!—and for the sake of mine, I’ve trudged back again and again over the years, showing up to work karaoke, bar karaoke, Twitter mutuals karaoke, private karaoke with a live KJ. Excruciating. I remember a birthday party at a neon-lit box high up in Manhattan Koreatown, where I lasted all of 10 minutes before ducking back into the elevator. At an Irish bar in south Brooklyn, where the sidewalk door barely cleared the karaoke floor, I retreated to the patio and spent half an hour working up the mental fortitude to run for the exit.

There is something irresistibly fascinating about karaoke as a concept — the way its subcultural embrace of amateurism corresponds to the fuzzy optics of CRT monitors, or in the distinct cultural and technological creations that took us from private salon recitals to Japanese bar entertainment to the rise of the lip-sync app. Karaoke as history and aesthetic: fascinating, hauntological, postmodern. But here we consider the shape of the thing separate from the thing itself, because actually going to karaoke is a headache. Next time, make your apologies and suggest something — anything — else!

—Harmony Boring

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