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Pitch: #6 Karaoke

Singing Karaoke at a Club in Japan

The ingenuity of a phonograph’s mechanism may incite the inventive genius to its improvement, but I could not imagine that a performance by it would ever inspire embryotic Mendelssohn, Beethovens, Mozarts, and Wagners to the acquirement of technical skill, or to the grasp of human possibilities in the art.

When music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study and close application… it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely.

-John Philip Sousa, September 1906

 

John Philip Sousa was right, of course, the technology got better…a lot better. I’ve got a device in my pocket right now that can stream basically any song you can think of as long as it’s not on a THOM YORKE SOLO ALBUM.

But do we enjoy our electronic music makers at the expense of the amateur? Has the amateur “disappeared entirely”?

Well…no.

 

The music of amateurs can still be heard in nearly every small town and large city across the United States. It didn’t disappear, a lot of it just moved to the karaoke bar.

In the early 70’s a not-very-gifted drummer named Daisuke Inoue built and leased out the first 11 karaoke boxes to bars around Kobe, Japan. In less than a decade there were thousands of karaoke bars all over Japan. 

Karen Campbell has lived and taught in Japan off and on…but mostly on…since 1975. Karen remembers when it first became popular, “I just remember it suddenly being there and becoming a new fad. People would just be sitting around talking and eating and drinking or whatever and suddenly somebody would say ‘Oh, I feel a song coming on. I’m going to sing My Way.'"

 

 

Producer Erin Cisewski Recording at a Karaoke Club in Japan

"For a lot of us Americans, David Byrne was how we first got our look at karaoke," said Rolling Stone writer and author of a new karaoke memoir Rob Sheffield. "The Talking Heads video ‘Wild Wild Life’ in 1986 was set in a karaoke bar, which at that point was strictly a Japanese thing. I remember watching that video on MTV in ’86 and thinking wow okay there is this club that they’re in where all these people are just getting up and singing a line of the song. And I didn’t know the word karaoke at that point but the seed was planted for it to become the thing that it became later in the nineties.”

As late as 1992 there were still questions about whether Karaoke could actually ever take root in America. 

It was movies throughout the 1990s that were largely responsible for popularizing karaoke in the United States. “I think the movie The Crying Game in ’92,” said Sheffield, “which is not such a famous movie today, in its time it was a hugely popular Irish film that became very popular all over America in areas where they didn’t have a lot of foreign films. One of the reasons the movie became so popular was the plot focused around a karaoke scene, and the way it used karaoke as plot exposition was really ahead of its time to say the least, since pretty much every Hollywood movie since then has attempted to work in a karaoke scene if it’s at all possible.”

The same thing that had happened in Japan, happened in the U.S. Amateurs found out that there were places they could get together and make music, and immediately they starting doing it as if it were something they’d always done.

Are karaoke bars churning out “embryotic Mendelssohns, Beethovens, Mozarts, and Wagners” to quote Sousa? Probably not.

But, they are teaching people one way to intensely love music. And the whole point is not being passive with music. It’s being willing to step up and to take a turn, to interact with music, test it out, get familiar with it, talk about it, laugh about it, hate some of it, and let it into your life in a more complex way than just through a set of earbuds.

I’m a musician and radio producer in New York City. I sing and shred in Blue & Gold; produce stories about music on my podcast, Pitch; and freelance for WNYC— specifically, Soundcheck, The Takeaway, and The Brian Lehrer Show. My work has aired on PRX Remix, WCAI, and KSJD, and has been featured onHowSound. I’m a Transom Story Workshop alum (Spring 2014).