There are of course inverse examples, where famous people do karaoke. The film Romance & Cigarettes (2005), a kind of karaoke-musical, stars superb actors (James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, and Steve Buscemi) who ham it up to the sound of others’ booming voices, not least that of a certain Tom Jones. Mamma Mia! (2008), the hit film based on the West End musical, features equally superb actors (Julie Waters, Meryl Streep, Colin Firth) singing the evergreens of the Swedish pop-group ABBA. Like a karaoke session, both films are propelled by the spectator’s recognition of the original hits; by the energy of the evergreen, and not, incidentally, by their poor imitations.
When did a harmless bit of anonymous fun grow into a culture? Should these two celluloid examples be considered karaoke culture, or are they simply examples of celebrity culture, a culture in which stars can do whatever they like — from clowning around in an onscreen musical to writing crappy books? Let’s not forget: Karaoke is entertainment for ordinary people, who, within given codes (shaped by technology and genre), and protected by the mask of anonymity, fulfill their suppressed desires within their own communities, or fandoms. Karaoke-people are everything but revolutionaries, innovators, or people who will change the world. They’re ordinary people, readers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, consumers and conformists. All the same, the world changes and ordinary people have their part to play.
The very foundation of karaoke culture lies in the parading of the anonymous ego with the help of simulation games. Today people are more interested in flight from themselves than discovering their authentic self. The self has become boring, and belongs to a different culture. The possibilities of transformation, teleportation, and metamorphosis hold far more promise than digging in the dirt of the self. The culture of narcissism has mutated into karaoke culture — or the latter is simply a consequence of the former.
The market on which the ego can be paraded is open to all comers, everyone and every variant is welcome. The ego, which for centuries lay buried in the subsoil, has seeped out onto the surface and, having changed its properties, become unusually strong. Metaphorically speaking, it’s lucky that Andy Warhol, the inventor of karaoke in the visual arts, died when he did. Otherwise he’d have to look on in horror as a Campbell’s Soup Can moved in to slurp him up. Today the humble Daisuke Inoue sells eco-friendly detergents and cockroach-killing insecticides, cockroaches being the very creatures that crawl down into the karaoke machine and chew on its electric wires. When we think about it a little more, everything runs on wires now. Without healthy wires, there wouldn’t be karaoke culture.
Every text is sustained by the changing relationships between Author, Work, and Recipient. Modern technology has radically altered the structure of the text, whether this be literary, visual, or cinematic. The balance of power, formerly dominated by Author and Work, has been flipped in favor of the Recipient. This tectonic shift has changed the cultural landscape and wiped out many cultural species (while, truth be told, giving birth to new ones), transforming perception, comprehension, and taste — in fact, the entire cultural system. And we’re not even conscious of it all, and neither are we in a position to articulate what has actually happened.[2]
That’s why we’re making a start with the awkward metaphor of karaoke. In the text that follows we’re interested in the human activities in which an anonymous participant, assisted by new technology, uses an existing cultural model to derive pleasure. (And it has nothing to do with sex, if that was what you were thinking!) The models are most often drawn from popular culture (television, film, pop music, comics, computer games), but some belong to what was once considered “high culture” (film, literature, painting). Most often the anonymous participant derives pleasure and gets his kicks by simply getting to be “someone else, somewhere else.” Amateur and anonymous, participants don’t go in for artistic pretension, nor are they overly concerned with the authorship of their creation or their activity, but the desire to leave their mark is beyond doubt. Their creation can’t be called plagiarism, nor can their activity be called imitation, because both terms belong to a different time and a different cultural system. Easily applicable to non-musical activities such as film, literature, and painting, karaoke is the most simple paradigm, hence the hasty and perhaps not completely apposite title of this essay, “Karaoke Culture.” This soft term is less restrictive than those which are currently in use, such as post-postmodernism, anti-modernism, pseudo-modernism, and digi-modernism. All of these terms, including mine, are inferior to the content they try to describe. The content is new, and it’s changing from one second to the next, so what we try and articulate today can disappear tomorrow, leaving no trace of its existence. We live in a liquid epoch.
Apart from “culture” this essay makes frequent reference to “wires.” I admit that I don’t know anything about “wires.” The fact that I don’t know anything about them doesn’t prevent me from writing about them. Until yesterday these two sentences were in contradiction. Today they’re not. Freedom from knowledge, from the past, from continuity, from cultural memory and cultural hierarchy, and an inconceivable speed — these are the determinants of karaoke culture and the leitmotifs of the text that tries to describe them.
[1] www.time.com/time/asia/asia/magazine/1999/990823/inoue1.html
[2]Here’s a quick anecdote. A teenager and I watched the “ancient” film The Silence of the Lambs together. There’s that terrible scene in which Buffalo Bill’s victim is trapped in an unused well. “The chick is dumb, she doesn’t have a mobile” was the teenager’s comment. “What do to you mean?” I asked. “If she had a mobile on her she could call the police.” The teenager, a child who grew up with the mobile phone, watched the film in his own way — as a story about a “dumb chick” who got into trouble because she didn’t have a mobile phone.
2. IT ALL BEGAN SO INNOCENTLY
On my first visit to America in 1982 I found myself in Los Angeles, and of course I didn’t pass up the chance to visit Universal Studios. The photograph of Clark Gable dates from this time; Clark in an open white shirt, a black curl falling on his sweaty forehead, a blazing orange fire in the background, and in his arms, my lithe body. Actually the body belongs to Vivien Leigh, but the head is definitely mine.
The pleasure was one I repeated on a visit to St. Petersburg, where in front of the Winter Palace, poking my head through a painted mural, I appeared in a photograph as Napoleon. Since then the idea has made its way into computer programs and on to the Internet. For Valentine’s Day 2009, ScanCafe.com offered a bit of free fun: people could send in a photo of themselves with their partner and would be sent one back with a minor intervention. Instead of their partner, Barrack Obama was now in the photo.