Karaoke Collage
Abstract
I went on an artist residency in Tokyo in 2018/19 for three months and ended up spending most of my time in karaoke boxes. I don’t remember what my actual project was but in the birthplace of karaoke, amateur singing of pop songs was all I could think of.
Karaoke is about taking turns at performing evergreen pop songs and is really more about the performance than about being good at singing. It’s a good example of audience participation performance that actually works. It’s about listening to one’s own voice.
Pop songs are mostly written in the language of clichés, English. Isn’t it the point that you don’t know what you sing or what it means? Karaoke Collage is created by collaging pieces for texts from other karaoke songs together. When it’s sung, the melody adds another semantic layer to the text, that somehow makes it make sense. Karaoke Collage is an homage to the pop songs that are such mega hits around the globe that they have become cheesy earworms. The lyrics of the song Karaoke Collage is created by fragments of existing karaoke songs in a spolia-like1 process. Reusing the tropes of pop music lyrics, seem to be inherent in the genre of pop music itself.
References
Raftery, B. (2009) Don't stop believin': How karaoke conquered the world and changed my life. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo.
台北時報 (2004) Karaoke machine inventor not looking back. Taipei Times. 台北時報. Available at: https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2004/11/22/2003212131 (Accessed: January 2, 2023).
Dolar, M. (2006), A Voice And Nothing More. Cambridge, Massachusets. London, England. The MIT press
Cavarero, A. (2005). For More Than One Voice – Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, Stanford, California. Stanford University Press
Neumark, Norie. (2017) Voicetracks – Attuning to Voice in Media and the Arts. Cambridge, Massachusets – London, England. The MIT press
- 1spolia is a concept for the recycling of material, for instance the reuse of marble in historical periods in antiquity.
