Anatomy of a Karaoke Night
My favorite memory of a karaoke night was when I was filming a travel show in Okinawa, Japan, back in 2018. I became quite close to the crew, and one night, they brought me to a local karaoke joint, and showed me how the Okinawans partied. It was a full-body workout. We jumped up and down on the couch: singing along to the advertisement jingles the Japanese grew up with (that were somehow all available on the karaoke system); doing squats and lunges; knocking back Orion beers. We stumbled back to the hotel in the wee hours of the morning, with a 7AM call time to make the next day. I’m not an actress but I worked hard to conceal how hungover I was, with make-up and excessive chirpiness. After our first scene cut, I asked: was that okay? The crew gave me a thumbs up, and cruising on unearned confidence, we went for another round that very night.
From ages 7 to 18, I was a soprano. There are a lot of clichés about sopranos: how we’re loud, noisy, bitchy, and love attention. Most of it is because the soprano section essentially hogs the melody through-line in any arrangement. But a lot of it, in retrospect, had to do with the fact that we were young girls, and accepted labels as synonymous with being part of something bigger than ourselves, being part of a group. Choral singing is a lot like that too. A choir is only as good as its weakest singer — any deviation spotlights the individual and not the harmony. The first time I got a solo, I hyperventilated throughout rehearsals, then cried for two hours in the stairwell, my voice stripped bare of all group protections, strange even to myself.
My first karaoke experience was with other choir girls. We all fought for the microphone, but it didn’t matter who had it; everyone sang along, harmonizing in fifths and thirds. We were like this in public, too. We sang on the streets, in malls, and sometimes, passersby gave us money, and we’d use it to split a coke or bubble tea.
My first non-choir girl karaoke experience, everyone picked pop music, and I belted number after number from the Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, and High School Musical. After the hour was up, a girl whispered to me: Don’t you know any normal songs?
A month ago, I crashed at my editors’ place for a weekend, with another staff writer from No Contact. Our editors had a karaoke machine, which they busted out after a couple of drinks. I didn’t know any of the normal music, and kept apologizing for my weird song choices. But as any karaoke aficionado will tell you, the worst thing you can be at karaoke is self-conscious. Four songs in, my editor grabbed my face, and said, kindly, generously, you should sing whatever you want.
My favorite song to hype myself up with at karaoke is “Ain’t it Fun” by Paramore, but I feel the most comfortable when clicking back into choral registers. My finger hovers over the operatic tracks at every karaoke session, trying to snap out of self-consciousness, trying to remember that karaoke is an act of indulgence and letting go, for yourself and yourself alone. If we get late enough into the night, I might succumb to sappiness, switch to the Chinese ballads from movies obscure to those I’m with, the rounded vowels of Mandarin closer to choral tones than English’s sharp angles. The other night I was at karaoke with a group of Americans, mumbling in Mandarin about missed opportunities and lost love, and a boy I’d never met before yelled, suddenly, oh shit. I know this song, it’s sad as shit, and I nearly cried.
Almost all of the karaoke places I loved back in Singapore closed in the pandemic. It’s not a good time for public exhalation, and singing still isn’t allowed, whether in karaoke bars or religious places of worship. A lot of the karaoke rooms pivoted, renting their rooms out by the hour for people to hang out, read, or study in, but it’s hard to justify splurging on space in an economy like this. And besides, with the fluorescent lights thrown on, karaoke rooms take on a different tone. Reading, studying, even just sitting around in them — it feels different. Exposed, somehow.
A few months ago, in July, a cluster of COVID cases erupted in Singapore, the beginning of the end of our long period of relative normality. The cases were tracked back to a series of illegally operating karaoke lounges, where rich men went to feel good and have hostesses sing for them. There were so few COVID cases prior, that when anyone came down with it in July, we all knew where they’d been. Historically, men have always paid for female companionship; grammatically, there is a subject and object, the actor and the acted upon. And yet, the xenophobia that erupted in the wake of the karaoke cluster — directed primarily at the hostesses, many of whom were foreign workers who’d come to Singapore to seek a living — was simultaneously disappointing and unsurprising. Since then, the pandemic has returned with a vengeance. How did we allow ourselves to slip into complacency? Why did we ever assume that the biggest worries one could have in the dark was our own insecurities about our voice? When the lights came on, it became obvious how fragile everything was. And yet, of course, there are some for whom karaoke has never been about losing oneself in song. To be self-conscious is a privilege, too. There are some for whom karaoke has always been a necessary performance.
Three days after the second karaoke night in Okinawa, a typhoon hit, and I was stranded in the hotel. It was my first natural disaster, and I was panicking. Late, late into the afternoon, watching the torrential winds rip a metal road sign off its hinges and whip it across the streets, I hummed the Japanese advertising jingle of a commercial I’ve never watched, wrapping myself in the comfort of blankets and song, glad to be safe, yet stunned at how quickly things change.
