The problem is, part of me gets bored with it really quickly (beers, bars, kids, songs) and I want to fuck everything up a bit and take it to the next level. One thing leads to another, and we get progressions like…

Karaoke mashups…

Sing like glue for contest, win contest, learn like glue like really, really well and combine with other buy out riddim songs (like red red wine or two princes / nuttin no go so) into a sort of mainstream buy out medley. Start learning other dancehall verses for karaoke mashup purposes (like soul survivor / gun session or cham’s ghetto story over what happened to that boy or stupid stuff like Stay Fly over Ghostbusters). Then I worked out a super fun solo performance and was on the verge of going on tour with it.

Ableton Live – driven karaoke dance party…

Started with karaoke night in a fun bar. Songs like We’re in Heaven spur short, violent dance parties but there’s no way to cue or mix songs. So, I convert a bunch of CDG’s into videos and make a megamix in Ableton Live. Then you can do a fun DJ set that is built around people in the crowd singing, and maybe even rock Autotune.

KaraokeCrime will be an umbrella for exploring these threads and others, with videos and howtos. Hopefully I’ll be able to involve some other karaoke explorers, and it’ll never stop. Uau!

(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.