Does anyone even pretend to enjoy karaoke? For the participants, it's embarrassing and humiliating. If you're lucky, you'll be too drunk to remember what you did the next day. For the audience, listening to untrained, inexperienced, and inebriated voices is tedious at best and painful at worst.
I'm not sure if karaoke exists anymore in the US. Maybe it was just one of those fads that floated over from Japan in the 80's, along with video games and Walkmans, when everything Japanese was cool, before the country went broke. I'm out of touch with that, but I can tell you, here in China karaoke is huge.
Talent is no prerequisite to performing; all that's required is a willingness to entertain. No party will be considered completely successful unless someone pulls out the microphones and the music discs and loads them onto the living room TV. For more important occasions, you can go to any self-respecting hotel and rent a karaoke room, for a night of singing and suffering.
When the director of our Office of International Cooperation wanted to show us a good time, it wasn't enough for him to take us out to a lavish dinner, and it wasn't even enough for him to order rounds of beer to get us comfortably drunk. It was also necessary for him to take us, and more than a dozen of our Chinese coworkers, to the best hotel in the neighborhood, with the biggest and loudest karaoke ballroom. No expenses were spared. Apparently, you pay not only for the room and the DJ, but also for the breadth of the music catalog. We got the deluxe package. On each small table in the karaoke room there was a song notebook thicker than my hometown phonebook.
The tables were clustered at one end of the room, a giant screen for the projection TV was at the other, and dance floor filled the center. Up on the ceiling were a mirror ball and an assortment of colored spot lights, currently off. In the dark room, half a dozen attendants stood ready waiting for us to hand them slips of paper with our song requests. They also kept our cups filled with a choice of complimentary tea or hot water. Unfortunately, the alcohol supply had vanished just when we needed it most.
It was going to be impossible for us to refuse to sing, so Deb and I figured we would seize the initiative and go on early, while we were still tipsy enough to imagine that we'd have fun. The songbook listed hundreds, maybe thousands of titles, but there were only two pages of English choices. Looking over the songs chosen to represent 50 years of American pop music was depressing. I had never heard of about a quarter of the titles. I will never be drunk enough to sing something like "You Light Up My Life." The only song that we were both familiar with, that wasn't disgustingly maudlin, was "Love Potion Number 9."
While I really dreaded singing some tearful ballad filled with heartache and romantic despair, "Love Potion Number 9" had the virtue of being up-tempo, with self-mocking lyrics and a limited vocal range. Plus it's relatively short. In my desperate and drunken state, I could actually imagine this performance going well.
Deb was willing to give it a shot. She knew the melody, and while she couldn't remember all the words, this was karaoke so she didn't need to. Plus, nobody in the room understood English well enough to know if we got the lyrics right or not. I had the feeling that our coworkers just wanted us to get up and go along, just to reassure them that we were having fun.
Our song was the second one to play, so we were onstage before we had time to consider our foolishness. The dance floor, with two microphones on stands at either side, was still dark, and the mirror ball was inactive. I wasn't sure our coworkers were even paying attention, which would have been all for the best.
Once we picked up the mikes, we had a problem we'd never considered. If we faced the screen to read the lyrics then we'd have to turn our backs to the audience. That seemed kind of rude, so since I knew all the words, I decided to give myself to the crowd. Deb kept trying to keep one eye on the screen, until she realized that her mike was dead. Since no one could hear her, she just danced around and pantomimed the lines like, "She bent down, turned around, and gave me a wink" and "I held my nose, I closed my eyes; I took a drink!"
We weren't exactly Ike and Tina, but I thought we did OK. We got a big round of applause, which doesn't mean much because people are always generous in showing appreciation for what we do. We could have stood there and recited Lincoln's Gettysberg Address and they'd have been just as excited.
After us, when the rest of our group took their turns singing, I began to see how we may have gone wrong. First of all, no one else shared my misgivings about ballads. I never knew so many songs could sound like "My Heart will Go On." The only thing more popular than one person singing a broken-hearted love song, was two people singing a broken-hearted duet.
Our style was all wrong too. Nobody else faced the crowd. The dance floor lights never came on so there wasn't much point. The singers didn't even stand on the dance floor. Instead, they took their mikes and walked off to the side, singing in total darkness. It was almost as if they were trying not to be present at all, as if we were supposed to watch the video without being distracted by the singer, as if the singing were part of the video.
But the biggest surprise of the evening was not the singing. After a couple of hours of off-tune crooning, the room was unexpectedly filled with the sounds of a very techno dance track. There was a pumped-up, mechanical beat, lots of keyboard sounds, and a synthesized voice that periodically interrupted the music to say, in Chinese, something that sounded remarkably like the line - "Meanwhile, back in the States" - from the R&B novelty hit "Stranded in the Jungle."
More surprising than the music was the video. Instead of the usual images of a singer in concert, or moody scenes of lovers walking hand in hand, we were watching nightclub shots of almost naked women with their legs spread wide open, rhythmically humping their hips and wiggling with the beat. As I struggled imagine how such an embarrassing mistake could have occurred, our director appeared to our table. I expected him to start apologizing for the soft-core on-screen dancing. But instead, over the thumping beat, he was insisting that Deb and I step up to the dance floor!
I would have thought this was some kind of cruel hazing, except that the dance floor was already jumping with all of our coworkers. The mirror ball had been broken out of retirement, the spot lights were fired up, and all the middle-aged office workers were up out of their seats and boogying.
I sometimes think that people get pleasure from feeling safe in dangerous situations. Bungie jumping, rock climbing, traveling in the third world, even gambling and drug use, all involve overcoming the fear of failing at something risky. Now I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't a similar pleasure in overcoming the shame of being an idiot in public. If that's possible, then being in China is preparing me to be the happiest guy in the world.
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