singin in a smoky room; i smell of wine and moscow mules

There’s a reason that Karaoke is so well known and associated with Japan: it’s freaking incredible.

Never in my life have I been a singer. In elementary and middle school, when music classes were mandatory and frequent, I would do everything to avoid them: feigning sickness to spend 45 minutes in the nurse’s office, hiding out in the bathroom, or simply moving my mouth and lip-synching the words among my classmates, allowing them to do the dastardly singing while leaving my vocal chords unexercised. It worked for me, and for the last 20 years of my life nary a song has escaped from my lungs. And like so many of these entries, then I came to Japan and the whole thing changed.

From what I’ve seen, heard, and experienced, karaoke in America is a curiosity without any real home. It arrived on our shores in the eighties to much fanfare and ballyhoo and then whimpered away when no one realized that they actually wanted to stand in front of a crowd of strangers and sing “Blitzkrieg Bop”. Not only this, but the audience would much rather listen to a singer who doesn’t need to read the lyrics off of a 19” Magnavox. And so from what I understood, karaoke was now drifting around in the US, searching for its niche. It seemed that that the most likely place for it to find success was in college-age bars, where drunken fratboys can sing Journey to their hearts content. Still, the notion of standing in front of a room full of people you don’t know and singing a song you can’t sing did not seem fun.

The Japanese realized this too, and in the early 90s adjusted the format of karaoke to make it considerably more accessible. The only thing that was needed was a simple change in the physical space of the activity: instead of singing in a bar with rows and rows of seats in front of you, Japanese karaoke places are like dormitories: a main building consisting of multiple little rooms into which you and 5-10 of your closest friends pile and begin the song-making. It’s fantastic. There is a TV monitor with a DVD-player-looking device hooked up to it, out from which two microphones are attached. Using a hefty PDA kind of thing, you type in the name of either the song or artist you’re looking for, and tap the song with a stylus when you find it. The PDA thing then beams the information to the deck and the song begins playing. The thing that astounded me was just how many English songs these places have; we’ve sung everything from The Police to the Beatles to Dave Matthews, Radiohead, The Four Tops, and yes, the aforementioned Journey. Johnny Cash is my specialty, and apparently when I am unable to attend karaoke sessions it is sung in my honor. I couldn’t be more thrilled.

And so, as it has done for many aspects of life, Japan has given me a new outlook on and appreciation for that black sheep of music, karaoke