The Magic's in the Music and the Music's in Me

This weekend we had our prospective grad students up for a visit. We wined them, dined them, tried to cull out the weak. Highlights include watching TheoryPirate hold court at a tableful of prospectives while doing his best to sell the school (heck, made me want to reapply), finding out that composition teachers have the same problems the world over, and being the pre-eminent 20th century Americanist at the welcome reception (all my colleagues in the field were absent, excepting Tennessee Stretch, but he studies poetry, which doesn't really count). Made me feel like a big man as people kept bringing new prospectives up to me so they could talk to an Americanist. Lowlights include my inability to drink all the free alcohol floating around, and the fact that one prospective is dating one of my former students (which leads to awkwardness, as we didn't really get along that well). But fun was had, and it gave me an excuse to further put off my work.

And now, my long-promised monograph on the theory behind Karaoke Revolution. To those non-Madisonian readers, this may be somewhat less amusing, so I apologize.

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A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Performance: Reading the Screen in Karaoke Revolution

The Xbox system has recently revolutionized the drunken activities of Madison Graduate Students. Where once they would go to a bar and sit there, blithely drinking until it was time to stumble home, I have noticed an increasing trend to consume more alcohol more quickly, with the promise of immediate relocation to the karaoke machine. The locality of drinking and night's conclusion has been shifted, out of the bar and into the living room, in what may very well constitute the domesticity of drunkeness. Of course, the conceptulization of alcoholism invading the domestic sphere and the concurrent withdrawl of immediate and prolonged capital from the bars of Madison is a rich and fruitful topic itself, worthy of future research. Yet that is not my intent in this brief writing. Rather, I wish to examine the practices of performance itself, revealing both the development of a specific kind of critical understanding and perhaps indicating a new potentiality for the karaoke machine. By examining the practices of the past, we may hope to find a degree of intertextuality between the academy and the karaoke machine, with the promise of a new, more engaged relationship between singer and observers. In brief, I contend that we must break the television in order to save it.

Prolonged and repeated observation and participation in the recent phenomenon of Karaoke Revolution marks it as a rapidly rising form of entertainment within the department. From its drunken roots at the New Year's opening, the game has meteorically risen in status and entertainment, meriting comments on numerous blogs, transnational discussions of song preferences, and even critical attention from highly respected professionals (I cannot provide their names here, but Madisonians may recognize a certain faculty member known only by his three initials who was recently heard invoking the karaoke machine itself to his colleagues). Clearly, the attention gained by this apparatus marks it as a great gain to our late-night entertainment.

Yet the game itself is marked not only by its participatory nature, but by its undercurrent of containment, perhaps too obviously hidden in its status as a game. Unlike the larger cultural concept of karaoke, which holds no rewards other than singing in front of a bar full of people, Karaoke Revolution revolves around the key duality of performance for audience and performance as goal. While singing for friends, you are also singing for points, singing for the reward of the game itself recognizing your ability to control pitch, tone, and rhythm. "Proper" performance leads to gold and platnum records, miniature statues, and the unlocking of new characters and even new songs. Of course, by its status as game, we as participants seek victory, striving to better our performances and become more what the game recognizes as proper singers.

I would contend, however, that this degree of competition takes on new meaning due to the fact that we are performing music, rather than simply obliterating aliens, racing cars, playing golf, or the myriad of other video game concepts at hand. By seeking to match our songs to the songs of their original recorders, we become engrossed in the song itself, conferring upon it a status of perfection that we seek to emulate. Observe the singer in action: he stands, facing the tv, intently reading the lyrics, closely watching the pitch register as it fluctuates and indicates his adherence to the ur-melody of the song itself. His worth as singer is only measured by his recognition of the superior, inflexible worth of the song itself.

Like the literature we study and the writing we teach, karaoke has an inherent duality. On the one hand, it is indeed a contained piece of writing, complete in itself, with clear intent and worth due to its status as finished product. However, it is also about performivity, where worth is not merely inherent but rather created through the interaction of text and audience. A song may have its own meaning, but it takes on a new, different, and often more profound meaning through the response of its audience. (See, for example, repeated performances of the various works of Britney Spears, songs of dubious inherent worth that take on far greater cultural capital through their audience recognition.) In the act of karaoke, more often than not the performance itself allows for nuances of meaning unseen in the text of the song itself.

But we do not see this in our performances; or, if the audience sees it, the performer does not. We have become fixated upon the composer's performance, as if all the answers and all the meanings are apparent in the stylings of Huey Lewis, A-Ha, and their fellows. We feel that if we keep returning to the songs, practicing harder, we may come to a greater ability as a singer. In the literary field, there once existed a group of people who followed a similar philosophy. Dubbed the "New Critics," they were the scholars of the postwar period, arising on the tail end of the Modernist revolution, forced into their apolitical, text-based criticism by a government obsessed with containment of insurgency and rebellion, even in the academy. For the large part, these men are now considered passe, outdated, seeking to perpetuate a flawed, hegemonic, static reading practice. They have been rightly debunked by modern theorists, and while their contribution to the academy was and is substantial, we have since moved on to newer, more fruitful and open-ended methods of reading.

I would contend that we as performers are the "New Critics" of the karaoke discipline, for the reasons I have already mentioned. Much of this practice, of course, has been forced upon us by an unfamiliarity with the music and a desire to master these texts. But recent endeavors and repeated practice indicate that we have reached a plateau, that we have learned the texts, and that we are reaching the limits of understanding contained within a purely textual rendering. In order to move to the next level of entertainment and understanding, we must look no longer to the text, but to what is beyond the text, the audience. We must break the grip of the lyrics, the pitch meter, the scores themselves. We must realize that BTO and Bette Midler do not contain all the answers, that fun may be had through the rejection of dominance. By doing so, we would be participating in a grand musical tradition, hearkening back to the scat singing of Louis Armstrong and his contemporaries, which found new modes of expression through the breaking of lyrics as much as the lyrics themselves. This is the path we must walk, lest we stagnate as scholars of the karaoke field.

How might this be accomplished? We must, as I have said, break the tv. Ignore it's hold. We know the lyrics, we know the pitches, and if we do not entirely, we should not feel beholden to them. I offer the possibility of singing to the audience itself, of facing away from the screen and ignoring any attempt to score a decent score. We must seek connection with our listeners and duet singers, monitoring their reactions and altering our own performances to encourage new types of response. Recent experiments with Avril Lavigne's "Complicated" have revealed a potential depth worthy of further exploration along these lines, and such trailblazing scholarship of performivity must be continued and encouraged in order to further our understanding of the medium and lead us to greater depths of enjoyment. I call upon all future performers, therefore, to look through the tv rather than at it, to look into the eyes of the audience rather than casting a detached ear to their laughter. The future is ours to seize, and we must learn from the lessons of our academic past in order to elevate our drunken future.