Turn Around Bright Eyes (7 page)

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.

10:16 p.m.:

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 working 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.

In any age, there are social practices that seem acceptable at the time, until future generations decide they’re barbaric. Watch any old movie with a hospital scene and you’ll see doctors chain-smoke in the OR. Even in
The Hunger
, the David Bowie horror movie from the eighties, you can see Susan Sarandon lighting up in her white medical coat. (She’s having hot vampire sex with Bowie
and
Catherine Deneuve, so smoking may be the least dangerous thing she’ll do all day.) It looks bizarre to us, but are we really so different? Have we evolved? Or have we just changed our blind spots?

In our time, there are many equivalents to the “smoking in hospitals” fad, such as “jogging on the sidewalk,” “texting at rock shows,” or “ruining a perfectly pleasant evening by saying ‘get home safe.’” I never heard anyone say “Get home safe” until the mid-nineties, then boom, it was everywhere. How did this become acceptable as a way to say goodbye? I hate when people question my ability to get from one place to another without mutilating myself. It’s tantamount to saying, “Try to get home without screwing it up like last time, dummy,” or “Farewell, for I may never see you again, given the mortality that awaits us all like a crouching panther.”

I will never understand. But I hate “get home safe.” As valedictory clichés go, I would trade it to the seventies for “have a nice day.” Hell, I would swap it to the eighties for “later.” I have no idea why this chatty little curse got so popular, so quickly. But it did. And it’s evil.

Certain fads can show up and seem like they’ve been around forever. It may be shocking, but the thumb-and-pinkie “call me” gesture? Did not
exist
before the nineties. People had been holding their phones that way for decades, yet nobody thought to wiggle a thumb-and-pinkie as a social invitation before. First time I saw it was on
The Arsenio Hall Show
, in 1992. (David Alan Grier, star of
In Living Color
, was the guest, greeting a foxy lady in the studio audience.) Then it spread until the novelty wore off. You still see it today, even though there aren’t any phones you hold that way anymore.

I don’t know how it works, but sometimes that’s how it happens: Abnormal behavioral quirks get normal overnight. People singing along with machines, to instrumental tracks, reading the lyrics off a screen—once it might have looked sick, even sinful. Yet people fell in love with it fast, so they decided to see it as normal, the way previous generations regarded bow ties, shuffleboard, Quaaludes, or witch-burning. You go to the movies, you expect a karaoke scene, just as forties audiences weren’t fazed to see a World War II pilot light a stogie while gassing up his Tomahawk.

Sometime soon, be it two or twenty years from now, people will stop saying “get home safe,” and then we’ll all make fun of our earlier selves for saying it. But we still haven’t realized this about karaoke. That’s one of the most glorious miracles of our time.

10:35 p.m.:

As the summer of 2001 ended, with a string of hundred-degree dog days, I was still living downtown, by the World Trade Center. Apartment 7Q felt like a dead white box in the sky, and I still felt like an alien in my steel-and-glass ice chamber. But I didn’t have the energy to move out, so I renewed my lease for one more year, effective September 1. When my hunger pangs got stronger than my inertia, I walked a block down the alley to the Thai restaurant, in a strip mall called the Excelsior Plaza, to eat in a brightly lit white room—much like the one I slept in—not even tasting the noodles, just sitting in my table next to the air-conditioning vent and listening to myself breathe and thinking, “These people are near you but they can’t hurt you. They can’t see you or hear you. It’s okay. They will go away. They will leave this room. We will all leave this room. Nobody will remember you were here.”

The Thai place always had the Top 40 station on, usually playing something by Destiny’s Child, who were a rare sign of life on the radio. The girls sang like machines until they turned into machines, chanting “say my name, say my name” in heavy rotation. The lyrics were about paranoia and jealousy, but the music was about calming down and chilling out and not giving a fuck. The production was scientific and precise. I loved it.