Karaoke Is Magic

There’s a special kind of magic to a good public karaoke session.

If you’re me, you walk in already circulating the kind of adrenaline that’s supposed to help you run away from starving lions. You flip through the entire songbook, writing down any song you are remotely familiar with so you don’t ever have to hog the songbook again. Apologetic and trembling, you submit your name and song choice to the host and sit down to await your doom.

When your name is called, you rush onto the stage before the shock can wear off and by the time you get to the chorus your hands have started shaking. But that’s okay, by then they’re firmly wrapped around a microphone and you’re belting loud enough that nobody can tell you’re just a nicely dressed cube of jello. Extra points if you channel the sheer terror into raised volume or foot-tapping. The song ends. You holster the mic and flee the stage like the lions have caught up with you. Flopping into your seat, you gasp for air until the adrenaline finds its way out of your bloodstream, which is sometime in the middle of the next person’s song.

Karaoke, also known as the introvert’s eXtreme Sport. Why ever would you to it to yourself?

I can only speak for myself, but the magic and the high keep pulling me back.

The high is the rush of having conquered the fear and put on a show, good or bad, and participated with the group. It’s performing in a room where the bar is so low, you’d need to be dead (or dead drunk) for them to kick you out. Sure, the whole range of talent is present, including the truly gifted who roust the spectators out of their seats, but it is just as heartwarming to see what happens when the terminally shy or tone-deaf take the stage, or someone who barely knows the words stumbles through their song. It’s then that the audience shows you real magic.

There’s a range of encouragements for the shy and lyric-forgetful. There’s determined clapping-to-the-beat, the slow glowstick-wave using phone flashlights, and sometimes the whole room will add their voices to bolster the singer. Tone-deaf singers are often admired for their sheer courage and everyone leaves the stage to applause. True, it may be more perfunctory applause, but we all know why we’re here; to sing whether we have the gift or not, and to have a good time doing it. To have a moment in the spotlight, holding more attention than most of us get at any given moment, and practice performing under that pressure. So we give each other the support we hope to get when crawling off the stage.

The audience is, then, more of a community than an audience, and when I look around the room that thought brings me great joy. There is every shade of skin color in this room. There’s tattoos and blank skin, people in wheelchairs, the elderly, the young. Last night, an elderly gentleman led his blind wife up front to sing three or four times. The choices are country, pop, rock, break-up songs, love songs, vengeance songs, drinking songs, and the odd song about wanting to become a Paperback Writer. Each choice gives you a fractional glimpse of that person’s soul. I can’t tell by looking at everyone, but I’d bet that, in addition to all the markers I can see, there’s leftists, conservatives, centrists, Jews, Christians, atheists, Wiccans, maybe even Satanists there. And, for a moment in time, nobody is arguing. Nobody is drawing swords or sharpening their wits for battle. They’re too busy picking out their songs and waiting to see if the next person up on stage is going to surprise them. They’re too excited about being part of something fun and magical together. It strikes me that there are several facets of this experience that reflect what the Church was meant to be.

My Mom is an actual singer, but my own voice is untrained. I have some hand-me-down talent that totally hits or totally misses, depending on the given song and pitch. Lucky for me, I can’t tell how good or bad I am when I get up there on the stage. By then, I’m far too busy focusing on the words scrolling by and keeping my knees from knocking. But I go up, and I will go up again and again. Wherever I can find a good karaoke setup I will continue to rush up and sing Drunken Lullabies, Cheeseburger in Paradise, All of Me, and many, many more. The magic is too intoxicating to let fear keep me from it.

Here’s to getting bit by the karaoke bug.