Turn Around Bright Eyes (6 page)

                  My local Top 40 station in Charlottesville gives away a movie poster, autographed in a gold Sharpie by Boy George himself. I win by being the first listener to call into Z-95 when the morning DJ plays “Karma Chameleon.” The
Crying Game
poster hangs proudly in my bathroom for the rest of the nineties. Boy George’s handwriting is as fabulous as everything else about him.

                  Do I ever get up the nerve to sing at Mingles? Not in my ungodliest nightmares. Do I have fun watching everybody else express themselves? Always. Mingles goes out of business within a year.

                  As a Hollywood rom-com, this gets much bigger exposure than
The Crying Game
. It’s safe to say that this movie is the real fountainhead of the Hollywood karaoke scene as we know it. From now on, what the “recognition scene” was to Shakespearean drama, the “awkward eye contact during oldies duet scene” is to the garden-variety worse-than-rubella romantic comedy. At this point, even normal people know what karaoke looks like.

                  (Postscript: A couple of years later I interview Rupert Everett and he is possibly the grumpiest brat I ever have to spend twenty minutes being polite to. But Christ, I have to admit he’s hot. I see why they say a little prayer for you, Rupert.)

9:52 p.m.:

Dirty secret: I know a guy who sings karaoke for cash. He’s a pro, working out of a bar in a mobbed-up corner of Brooklyn. I wouldn’t believe him if I hadn’t seen him with my own eyes, but this guy is good. The bar he inhabits has a twice-weekly karaoke night, with a slightly posh clientele, the kind of folks who would rather be in an upscale wine haven. These patrons have rehearsed their pronunciation of “rioja.” Some night they need a little encouragement to stop chatting about
Homeland
and artisanal cheese and make it rain at two bucks per song. So the bar owners secretly hire my friend, let’s call him J.J., to help break the ice. He sits at the bar, looking like just another mild-mannered customer. But when the room gets quiet, that’s the cue for J.J. to go to work. He gets paid to do the wild thing.

I have watched him on the job many times, and I have never seen him fail. He has two proven routines, both classics of eighties booty-hop: Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” and J. J. Fad’s “Supersonic.” But his knockout is Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love.” This wiggly dude busts out his pom-pom moves, and you can see why his pockets got the mumps. Watching him work the mike makes you want to be part of the fun. He isn’t a great singer, but that’s how he reminds people there aren’t any quality standards when it comes to karaoke. He makes you think, “Hey, it’s easy.” Then he sits down. He’s good, which is why we’re all broke and he’s so paid.

How much do the owners pay him? Forty bucks cash, plus his bar tab, plus all the clams and french fries he can eat.

I am kind of obsessed with his hustle, since I had no idea there was any such thing as a k-pro. It requires covert-op skills, as well as a weapons-grade ability to demolish inhibitions. In fact, J.J. puts the “bitch” in “leave your inhibitions at the door.” Nobody would suspect he’s working undercover. When he lets me spy on him, I have to keep remembering not to high-five him.

Sometimes he makes me wonder, “Who else is a pro? How many people in this bar are secretly pros? Maybe I’m the
only
amateur here tonight, the only mark getting shilled? What if my whole life is an elaborately staged prank where I’m the only person I know who isn’t on the payroll of some secret
Matrix
-style karaoke conspiracy?”

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 mic 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.)