So, here’s a different sort of scenario for an audience-participation post:<\/p>\n
Imagine that you are in a weirdly well-stocked karaoke bar, and you have<\/strong> to sing a song. There’s no way out of it– if you don’t you’ll lose your job, rabid squid will eat your family, deranged America-hating terrorists will kill a puppy, whatever. The bar has absolutely any song you might want, no matter how obscure, and you only have to do one.<\/p>\n What song would you sing?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This post really begins with a conversation at Readercon, where it was noted that the World SF Convention will be held in Yokohama in 2007<\/a>. Kate and I are hoping to go (whether we do or not is somewhat contingent on my tenure case, and other factors, but it’s about the best shot I have at getting her to go to Japan…), and I was talking with some people about whether they planned to go or not, and the subject of karaoke came up. As any fule kno, karaoke is popular in Japan, and is really sort of inevitable.<\/p>\n Back in 1998 when I was there, I wandered into a restaurant near my apartment one Tuessday night, looking for a cold beer and a meal I could order by pointing at food in a display case. As I was one of probably three Westerners within walking distance of this place, my arrival was an Event, and I was given lots of strange food (that was my first encounter with basashi<\/a>), given many, many drinks, and whisked off to a karaoke bar, wherre I was pushed on stage and made to sing “Yesterday” by the Beatles.<\/p>\n (The next morning, I stumbled into work with a wicked hangover, and ran into an English post-doc, who took one look at me, and said “You got dragged to karaoke last night, eh?” “Um, yeah.” “They made you sing ‘Yesterday,’ didn’t they?” “How did you know that?” “Oh, they do that to all the Westerners. I have no idea why.”)<\/p>\n There were, of course, two major problems with that whole scenario. First, the Japanese take their karaoke very seriously, while in the US, it’s more often played for laughs. The other people in the bar who got up and sang were really, really good, and while I have my share of experience at singing while extremely drunk (I played rugby in college), it’s not the same thing at all.<\/p>\n Second, and more important, “Yesterday,” well, it kind of sucks. It’s not the worst song in the Beatles catalog, but it’s nowhere near my favorite. It’s certainly not what I would choose to sing in public, especially as I was sorely tempted to sing the off-color version (“Leprosy… Now there’s pieces falling off of me…”). Though, really, it was one of the better options I was presented with in any of the trips I wound up making to various karaoke places (I never successfully refused anything when I was in Japan…).<\/p>\n I thought of this the other day when I was out running errands, and singing along with the iPod: if I found myself in that sort of situation, and had<\/strong> to sing a song in public (as opposed to singing along with the radio), what would it be. Assuming, of course, that the rugby catalogue was out of the question (“This song is not a rebel song. This song is ‘I Don’t Want to Join the Army’…”).<\/p>\n It’s actually a pretty tough question. I mean, I’m a champion sing-along-with-the-radio guy, but most of the really fun songs to sing along with wouldn’t really work in a karaoke context, just because I can’t hit the required notes. I do a mean version of “Beast of Burden” at about 2 am on the Jersey Turnpike, but I don’t think anybody else would really appreciate it. Ditto “So Lonely” by the Police or “Tracks of My Tears” by Smokey Robinson.<\/p>\n You also need to have the right sort of song. I could do a fairly credible Bob Mould, but “The Act We Act” or “Black Sheets of Rain” are kind of a buzz-kill. And a lot of songs with the right basic energy level are just too damn complicated– you don’t want anything with a lot of words, or complicated rhythms to keep track of. That means that even though just about anyone could sing better than Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone” is probably out of the question. And while I’ve sometimes joked that Tom Waits’s “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” would be the perfect karaoke song for me, it’d be damnably hard to do right.<\/p>\n You also want something relatively short, because there’s nothing worse than looking at a tv monitor with words scrolling across it that you’ve never heard before. (Let me note that both “Hey Jude” and “Strangers in the Night” have a lot<\/strong> more words than you think they do. And let’s leave it at that.) So “Hotel California” is right out.<\/p>\n And, of course, if you have any delusions of hipster credibility, you don’t want to pick something totally cliche. Sure, “Peace, Love, and Understanding” is almost perfect, in terms of pitch, length, and number of words, but there’s no way to do a karaoke version of it without everyone in the bar saying “Oh, right. Bill Murray in Lost in Translation<\/cite>.” And even if you were singing to save a puppy from terrorists, you wouldn’t want that reaction. And don’t even think of doing Elvis, OK?<\/p>\n Really, it’s a Hard Problem.<\/p>\n So what would I pick? Well, the specific song I was singing along to when I first started thinking about this was “Big Brown Eyes” by the Old 97’s. That’s probably got too many words (though really, it’d be hard to pass up “I got issues… yeah,\/ Like I miss you… yeah.”), but either “Nightclub” or “W. I. F. E.” would probably work. The latter probably has more comedy value.<\/p>\n Motown is generally a good source of eminently singable songs of the right basic type, but they’re either ensemble pieces (you can’t do “My Girl” without backup singers), or in registers that I can’t really handle (the aforementioned “Tracks of My Tears”). “Ain’t to Proud to Beg” is almost within my reach, but it’s probably on the wrong side of the cliche line.<\/p>\n Traditional or neo-traditional music is another good possibility– at a rugby tournament my freshman year, I got us a round of drinks by singing “Wild Rover” in an Irish bar in DC. A good song in that general vein has probably been done in so many different versions that any key you’d care to sing it in would work.<\/p>\n With that in mind, if I had to pick one song identified with a specific person, I’ll go with “When I Get to the Border” by Richard Thompson. It’s fairly short, it’s catchy as hell, and there aren’t too many vocal flourishes. And it’s basically pitched in an octave I can approximately reach.<\/p>\n I reserve the right to change my mind, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So, here’s a different sort of scenario for an audience-participation post: Imagine that you are in a weirdly well-stocked karaoke bar, and you have to sing a song. There’s no way out of it– if you don’t you’ll lose your job, rabid squid will eat your family, deranged America-hating terrorists will kill a puppy, whatever.… Continue reading Less Dorky Poll: Karaoke Supernova<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,2,29,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-personal","category-sf","category-silliness","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}