(Karaoke haters will eat this up—“Hah! It’s performance without originality!”—but fooey. Performance is always original, and never original. If you’re on stage, somebody else carved that nitch out for you, and you’re just filling it—kicking ass hopefully.

The second reason, is that I love pop music, and Karaoke is an advanced ritual for extracting and purifying pop’s poppy essence and shooting it into my veins.   

Pop songs don’t exist in an artist’s vision, they exist in the collective mind of a mass audience (dig?). So if that’s true, pumping pop songs through a combination of a timed text file, a drunk person’s memory, and the musical imagination of outsourced studio musicians on a tight budget isn’t distortion, it’s a filter!

The classic notion of karaoke is of people mangling songs. But while this happens sometimes, it isn’t the norm. More often, people pick music they love, and while they might forget half of it, their synapses start firing like crazy in the parts they love the most. This energy shows through, and it’s like going over all the song’s juiciest lines with an emotional highlighter.   

I’ve seen mangled songs. But it’s happened so many more times that a karaoke performance has showed me what I love about a song.