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Also this issue: Take This Job and Shove It Rebel May Care Middle East Memoirs |
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June 26-July 2, 2003
cover story
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Karaoke Nation's Steve Fishman on why karaoke makes a better cultural metaphor than get-rich-quick scheme.
Karaoke came over to the United States from Asia, and as it traveled the Pacific, its goofiness quotient increased. In Asia, karaoke is taken seriously, while in America, karaoke has run amok; although the more fanatic singers might brush up on their song choices before heading out to the bar as they do in Asia, the American brand of karaoke seems pointedly ramshackle.
"It’s the quintessential amateur sport," Steve Fishman, author of Karaoke Nation (Free Press), says over tea at Odeon, one of his haunts in New York City. "It’s totally participatory. Everybody gets up to the mic, the more you drink the better you sound -- it’s crazy."
Fishman’s book -- subtitled Or, How I Spent a Year in Search of Glamour, Fulfillment, and a Million Dollars -- tells a simple tale: It’s the story of a man, who, one day, decides to strike it rich. A night out at a karaoke bar in New York gives him the idea to open his own karaoke bar, one that’s hip-hop-themed; when someone asks him the question, "How are you going to make a million dollars from a bar?" he switches his focus -- like so many were doing in early 2000 -- to the Internet, and births the idea of KNation: Karaoke Nation.
It’s not hard to see karaoke -- where amateurs drop their guard enough to revel, if only for three minutes or so, in the possibilities of grandeur on a rock-star level -- as a metaphor for not only the "anyone can be a millionaire" culture of the Internet boom, but 21st-century culture as a whole. (Let’s not even mention uber-karaokist Clay Aiken’s mug on the cover of the new Rolling Stone.)
"Karaoke’s the current contemporary cultural metaphor," Fishman insists. "Karaoke kind of posits that, in some ways -- especially the way we do it in America -- it’s totally fun and rewarding to get up in front of a microphone and sing kind of unrehearsed, unpolished, unschooled. And none of those things really count, which nicely parallels the Internet as well.
"But on the other hand, it also parallels this American gestalt. Look at reality TV. It posits, åWe don’t want actors who actually can mimic other peoples’ emotions, who are schooled and who look great. What we want is real people giving us their first take, their unrehearsed emotions, their unvarnished reactions.’ It’s a total karaoke moment, this reality TV explosion. It’s like karaoke brought to the world."
Karaoke Nation details how Fishman eventually sold the product after a near-striptease by one of the buyers in a New York Japanese restaurant. Unlike many other products dot-com postmortems, the site remains online, though the hip-hop focus is gone -- like those at your lesser karaoke establishments, it’s licensed from one company, and reads like a WMMR playlist left out in the sun to rot.
"We thought about going to Beijing, doing it pirate," Fishman recalls. "Going into this, I thought the whole thing would be a technology challenge. But it turned out that the challenge was really a music-rights challenge."
Despite his enthusiasm for selling the idea of karaoke, Fishman wasn’t really made for the stage.
"I knew I couldn’t sing -- so it wasn’t as if I was born for the stage and found this as my true calling," Fishman recalls. "I was the tone-deaf karaoke entrepreneur. And I knew, and constantly lived in fear, of the idea that I would be called to sing at some sales meeting. And that always seemed to be kind of hysterically funny, too."
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