Karaoke!

Karaoke is a wonderful thing. It's a great thing. If the UN all got into a karaoke bar in Osaka for the night, the world would be a much nicer place by the morning. You go in with a bunch of friends - if you're lucky you get a theme room with Hello Kitty mics - order drinks, food and open a huge book with lots of songs to choose from. There are probably thousands of songs in that book, but that's not a problem as I'm probably only going to sing three or four times in a night, and two of them will be the same track. I actually don't like to sing, but when with a group of friends and some Japanese beers, things seem to get better.

The thing is, while you watch the words going along the screen, nearly everyone else in the room either has to look at you looking at the words, or has to watch the video going on behind the words. Of course licensing and all that mean you can't have the *real* videos playing, so what is the karaoke company going to do? I think they steal footage from home movie processing labs and bits from 1980's teen dramas which never made it past pilot. They mix this up with drive-by footage they got in Hawaii while on holiday and edit chunks of it into 4 minute MPEGs (preferrably really badly encoded) and run them randomly behind songs.

What this means then is that while we were getting heavy with a Metallica track, a young couple are hugging on a beach in Hawaii. My favorite was a girl crying all the way though my friend's rendition of 'My Way'. If you're really lucky, you get a video with a sequence of bikini beach babes playing volleyball half way through Radiohead's 'Creep'.

I think in it's own way, the rather randomly edited video clips, combined with random music sung by a tone deaf drunken maniac has become something of a media platform and artform in itself. Next time I go, I'll try to get some pictures, and put thm up here to better illustrate my point. Until then, next time you're singing 'Roxanne', try to do it in the style of one of the characters in the video. I can't wait until instead of buring a CD of yourself singing the song, you get a Quicktime movie showing the video too. Rock on.