Turn Around Bright Eyes (24 page)

The karaoke scene also became a popular trope because there are so many different ways to play it. It can be slapstick, as in
Shrek
or
Rush Hour 2
. It can be sensitive, like Ewan McGregor singing “Beyond the Sea” with Cameron Diaz in
A Life Less Ordinary
, or ominous like Jim Carrey doing “Somebody to Love” in
The Cable Guy
. It can be romantic, as in
500 Days of Summer
. Or it can be totally inane, like Gwyneth Paltrow and Huey Lewis in the “karaoke king by day, serial killer by night” drama
Duets
. And yes, that one really happened.

It just goes to show how people were jonesing for karaoke to hurry up and arrive, without even realizing it. (In
When Harry Met Sally
, they didn’t even have the word
karaoke
—they had to call it a “singing machine.”) Every teen film of the eighties would have been so different if karaoke had existed. Consider the Duckman. If
Pretty in Pink
had been made a few years later, when he would have enjoyed access to karaoke equipment, Duckie wouldn’t have to settle for lip-synching “Try a Little Tenderness” in the record store for Molly Ringwald. He could have sung his own version. But karaoke was about to take off like a dirty shirt. And once it did, the slow clap started to look as quaint as a bolo tie with a powder-blue tux.

You saw
Lost in Translation
, right? There’s no slow clap in that movie, right? It doesn’t end with Bill Murray kissing Scarlett Johansson dramatically on the sidewalk, inspiring a crowd of bystanders to burst into applause? Of course not. Instead, there’s a karaoke scene, and it’s completely brilliant, possibly the saddest karaoke scene in any movie ever. Bill Murray, who spent all those years on
Saturday Night Live
mocking lounge singers, plays it straight with the Roxy Music song “More than This,” expressing all the romantic yearnings he can’t share with Scarlett in any other way. Meanwhile, Scarlett dresses up in a purple wig to do the Pretenders’ “Brass in Pocket.” There couldn’t be a better picture of how karaoke works in the public imagination. It gets at the emotional essence of it: Sometimes you can only confess the truth about yourself when you’re pretending to be somebody else.

A real historical turning point was the short-lived and soon-forgotten MTV show
The Blame Game
. You might remember this show, or you might not, but most likely you wouldn’t admit it if you did. It was on weekday afternoons, right after
Total Request Live
. I’m not ashamed to say
The Blame Game
kept me chuckling through many a dreary afternoon in the late nineties, as I sat in a catatonic stupor on my couch, caked in despair and Cheetos dust. Somebody besides me must have been watching, right? Maybe not, actually. (Where’s the DVD box set, MTV?)

The Blame Game
was set in a courtroom where supposedly real-life ex-couples would go on trial to see whose fault it was that they broke up. A judge in a black robe presided over trials like “The Case of the Tube Top Tease.” Like most courtrooms, this one had a DJ, plus a live studio audience, all of whom were probably mad they couldn’t get tickets to
Singled Out
instead. Each of the exes had an attorney (Kara for the ladies, Jason for the gents) as they gave testimony and got cross-examined in the “You Did It—Admit It” section. After the audience voted on the verdict, the loser had to kneel and beg for forgiveness, or else get their mug shot printed in magazine ads with the headline D
O
N
OT
D
ATE
T
HIS
B
LAME
G
AME
L
OSER
!

But the best part of this magnificently cheap and crummy show, the scene that kept me on the edge of my seat, was the scene toward the end where the exes would testify in the Karaoke Chamber. Each litigant would step into the booth and sing a popular song, selected to express their feelings about their side of the breakup. The guys would usually pick something by Pearl Jam or Ugly Kid Joe; the ladies would go for Alanis or Toni Braxton. The only time I ever saw a gay couple on the show, the loser sang Madonna’s “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore.” (It was also the only time I ever saw an actual forgiveness hug at the end, and I would have acquitted that dude, too, just for that song. Oh, the healing power of Madonna.)

My favorite Karaoke Chamber testimony was the Southern belle who had broken up with her boyfriend because he’d told her he was a virgin (he wasn’t) and because he was a jerk (he was). For his testimony, he picked Green Day’s “When I Come Around.” She stepped into the booth to sing a cheesy nineties soft-rock ballad, Jann Arden’s “Insensitive.” I vaguely remembered disliking this song on the radio, but in the Karaoke Chamber, it was deep soul. This girl wailed it like every line was getting wrenched from her heart, ascending straight to overshare heaven. She wasn’t just off key—she didn’t even drop by the key for a visit. It didn’t matter. Even the judge was wiping away tears. The Green Day dude didn’t stand a chance.

After
The Blame Game
, the deluge. Like the brilliant karaoke scene in Britney Spears’s maiden cinematic voyage
Crossroads
. (Yes, I realize I can’t stop mentioning this film. It is important. What can I say?) In this fine feature film, Brit’s on a cross-country road trip with her high school girlfriends, and their car breaks down in New Orleans, and they need a whole bunch of cash to get it fixed, y’all! So they enter a karaoke contest, which Britney wins easily with the first song of the night, her version of Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ’n Roll.” The bartender, played by old-school rapper Kool Moe Dee (how ya like him now?), passes a tip jar through the crowd, netting a prize of four hundred dollars for Brit and her cronies. That’s right: A room full of drunks in New Orleans shell out four hundred dollars for Britney
not
to take her shirt off! See, I told you! Movies are awesome!

The scene is perfect in its way, because you don’t believe a second of it, which makes it just like the rest of the movie, but you can tell what’s going on and why. Because karaoke is a dip into the unreal, the unrealness of the movie catches up with the unrealness of the scene and they coalesce into a moment of oddly convincing emotional truth. The same thing happens in the David Lynch movie
Mulholland Drive
, where the torch singer does a Roy Orbison song in Spanish and whispers, “Silencio. No hay banda.” Except even David Lynch is about one-twelfth as creepy and disturbing as Britney singing “I Love Rock ’n Roll.”

Jennifer Love Hewitt has a similarly great moment in
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
, where she sings the bustiest, most foreshadowing-intensive version of “I Will Survive” to appear in any horror movie. She’s singing, to entertain her group of school chums who are on a tropical vacation trying to forget their big guilty secret (the one about what they did last summer). But then the lyrics on the karaoke screen mysteriously flash the words, “I
still
know what you did last summer!” Eeek! I wouldn’t be too sure about all that surviving you have planned, JLH.

And yet that’s only my second-favorite bad karaoke scene with Jennifer Love Hewitt. I might be the only person who remembers
Time of Your Life
, her spin-off from
Party of Five
. Just like Britney, she’s trying to find herself, which means she wants to go on a long journey, meet her long-lost mother, and bang some hot dudes. (Although instead of Kool Moe Dee, her guardian angel turns out to be RuPaul.) So she moves to New York City and moves in with Jennifer Garner. In the first episode, she gets a job waitressing at the local karaoke bar, the one where all the single hot guys hang out. She gets peer-pressured into making her karaoke debut, with the world’s shakiest version of R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”

I have to admit, I loved this scene. I had a copy of the pilot as a VHS screener tape, so I kept rewinding and rewatching that scene for days. The sight of Jennifer Love Hewitt chanting those rapid-fire R.E.M. lyrics was touching despite itself. It dares you to guffaw at how ridiculous it is, and yet I couldn’t. I cried actual tears watching it. (So did Michael Stipe, I bet, although for different reasons.) It was even better than the episode of
The Golden Girls
where Bea Arthur sings jazz standards for the boys at the Rusty Anchor.

But really, it all goes back to Natalie Wood in
Gypsy
, a stage kid who’s been overlooked and ignored all her life, dressing up to do her first burlesque routine, only to be mesmerized by the sight of herself in the mirror, mumbling, “I’m pretty, mama! I’m a pretty girl!” It’s one of the most wrenching scenes in any American movie.

Natalie Wood sings “Let Me Entertain You” in the burlesque parlor, completely dazed by the feeling of having people notice her for the first time. She spins around a few times. They’re yelling for her to take some clothes off, but she doesn’t even notice. She gets so wrapped up singing “Let Me Entertain You” that she forgets to take anything off except a glove. Her mother yells, “Sing out, Louise!” Nobody watching can tell how profound this awakening is for Natalie Wood, or why she seems like she’s in a trance. Nobody truly understands her except the song that she’s singing. And for a couple of minutes, it’s all she needs.

3:02 a.m.:

Bury my heart at Planet Rose. Under the zebra-stripe couches, under the crusty red velvet carpet, under a bar stool. A piece of me will always be there. Where the bartender charges two dollars per song while watching the World Cup on mute. Where the tipsy Eurotrash girls flash their breasts for songs. Where the round mirror-lined wall forces all the different parties to sing to the entire room. No private corners here—it’s a fishbowl karaoke-quarium.

How did we get here tonight? It started last night when we trucked out to Ding Dong Dang in Koreatown. They give you free Snickers and Milky Way bars and the songbook has tons of 1990s “Ordinary World”–era Duran Duran. But they were full. What’s up with that? They’re
never
full at Ding Dong Dang! So we motored next door to Music Story, where they give you free bowls of popcorn and cheese-puff balls, and where the sign on the wall promises, Y
OUR
S
TORY
I
S
A
BOUT TO
U
NFOLD
! (Remarkably similar to what Rod Stewart tells his virgin houseguests.) The book offers nineteen different Stryper songs. How is that possible? How could the devil himself know nineteen Stryper songs? It also has Swedish metal-guitar pioneer Yngwie Malmsteen, whose songs barely have any words at all, besides
death
and/or
Viking
.

After a late night at the Music Story, we’re a bit hoarse and shaky. But we came out to the East Village tonight for a friend’s birthday party at Planet Rose, or as we call it, Wet Hoes. It’s 6 p.m. on a Sunday, when the place is usually empty, but there are three different crews, each of which was hoping for a private party. There are the Eurotrash girls, who improvise dirty words to show tunes, as in their version of “Summer Nights” from
Grease
. (“Met a slut with blood on her knees, met a whore with so many STDs,” etc. Ladies, where
did
you learn English?) There’s an all-male group of eight college bros, which is unusual for any karaoke place. They came to sing “Gimme Shelter” and “Sweet Child O’Mine.” There’s us, distinguished by the goth fashion, the pizza boxes, the cake, and the birthday girl. Nobody goes home until she does her ABBA song. And her Depeche Mode song. And about a dozen Monkees duets with Ally. Face it, the birthday girl is going to keep us here a while.

There’s also a couple on a date, who look mortified. They sing one Sublime song and make their escape.

Everyone adapts to sharing the room. We clap for the other parties. The bartender favors the Eurotrash girls, and keeps moving their sticky Post-it notes to the top of his wall, but then, they’re probably the regulars. When the birthday girl’s boyfriend and I sign up for Hall & Oates’s “Did It in a Minute,” the bartender puts on “Say It Isn’t So” by mistake and we roll with it.

But when our friend busts out the ABBA classic “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” she doesn’t have to wonder whether she’s getting an “uh huuuuuh.” She will get all the “uh huuuuuh” she can handle. The audience knows that part of the karaoke code is giving the singer the sing-along response she needs. We turn into an army of Björns and Bennys. She turns on her Agnetha. (Or Anni-Frid? I never can tell the ABBA ladies apart.) For every “knowing me, knowing you,” she gets a queen’s ransom of “uh huuuuh.” See that girl. Watch that scene.

That’s the beauty of karaoke. It’s always a little taste of being the star, but a lot bigger taste of being the audience while you wait your next turn to be the star. It’s five minutes of being Agnetha and an hour of Björn and Benny. If you’re so needy you can’t wait around, this isn’t your jam. If you don’t enjoy the listening-to-drunk-strangers element of karaoke, you don’t like karaoke. You can go sing in the shower.

Hey, we
all
have a song in the queue. We all have our Post-it note on the wall. We came here to be stars. But it goes deeper than that—we came here to make
each other
stars.

IT’S FAIR TO SAY THAT
anybody who knew me for the first three decades of my life would be stunned to see me in karaoke mode, because I was always such a shy, bookish lad. Definitely the quiet type. I mean, I liked to think of myself as mirthful and articulate, just because I read a lot of Oscar Wilde. But there’s no hiding the truth—I was just an indie boy who wouldn’t say boo to a goose. I was the kind of kid who grows up watching
Animal House
and thinks, “Man, I can’t wait till I get to college—so I can argue with Donald Sutherland about
Paradise Lost
! His reading of John Milton’s poetry is utterly inadequate. And it’s not fair to claim Milton’s jokes are terrible, because there aren’t any jokes in
Paradise Lost
, although there are some real laugh riots in
Areopagitica
.”