Karaoke Wishlist: October 2007

1. Shudder To Think, "Red House" STT was one of the first self-consciously "weird" bands I listened to—a high-pitched, inscrutable bunch of art-rockers whose songs were subject to random time changes, and that seemed to accidentally fall into place (considering how far into Steve Miller Band I was when I first heard Shudder, such traits counted as revelatory). Several of the band members recently reunited for a few songs in Manhattan, and "Red House" was the highlight—the way Craig Wedren's voice turns to a plea during the "[she's] someone/I want/bad" bit toward the end is affectingly urgent (the linked clip is from the group's major-label era; I think the original recording of the song is still the best).

2. Aly & AJ, "Like Woah" As danceable as, say, Daft Punk, and almost just as robotic.

3. ABBA, "The Visitors" Having only really been familiar with ABBA's hits—all 137 of them—I've been finding all kinds of great songs on the Complete Studio Recordings box set, including this paranoid, hiding-under-the-desk near-hit. The lyrics are pretty bleak for a disco track ("These walls have witnessed all the anguish of humiliation") and the keyboard line could have been hijacked by Madonna if "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" hadn't worked out so well.

4. Ben Weasel and His Iron String Quartet, "Summer's Always Gone Too Soon"
The former lead singer of Screeching Weasel—and the man who helped put the phlegm into snot-punk vocals—has a pretty terrific, pretty terribly overlooked new album; almost all of the songs are sing-along-worthy, but "Soon" is the highlight, and the open lyrics remind me of karaoke: "Someone is singing a song far away/as if they want everyone else joining in."

5. Britney Spears, "Gimme More" Spears has been doing her sex-kitten act since 1999, and it hasn't aged too well (maybe that has something to do with the fact that, in cat years, she now has the purr of a 49-year-old). That said, "More" is pretty much all production, and the hook is just short and simple enough to work—though how could it not, considering that they bring it back in every ten seconds or so.

Karaoke Wishlist: September 2007

1) Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, "Flowmotion" Even a scratchy YouTube sound clip can't take away from the sheer bonkers-ness of this song, which sounds like a local-news theme straight out of the Rapture (the biblical event, not the band). I would pay $100 to see someone try to sing along with verses 3, 7 and 14-16.

2) Bruce Springsteen, "Livin' In The Future" Despite its terrible title, Bruce Springsteen's Magic is my favorite Boss record in twenty years or so, mostly because it's so heavy on the power-pop; if it weren't for the sax solo, you'd swear he made it with the Heartbreakers, not the E Street Band. "Future" is a barroom sing-along—complete with a "nah nah nah" outro—and it brings to mind the glory days of you-know-what-song.

3) The Monkees, "What Am I Doing Hangin' Around?" I rediscovered this country-pop beaut while listening to the newly remastered Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd.; along with "Porpoise Song," it's possibly my favorite non-hit Monkees track, and further proof of their luck with hired-gun songwriters (the original is by Michael Martin Murphey, but it works much better with a more upbeat tempo and the Jones-Nesmith-Dolenz-Tork harmonies).

4) Junior Senior - Itch U Can't Scratch I know, I know: In music-blog time, this song is like 100 years old or something. But come on—it's still great, and it's not like any of their recent bonus-disc tracks were karaoke-worthy.

5) M.I.A. - "Paper Planes" I like the idea of Joe Strummer—sitting up in heaven, lighting matches off Che Guevara's boot—trying to figure out how the hell he and Wreckx-N-Effect wound up in the same song.

Hear His Call

One last KWC-related post: When I covered the event last year for Wired magazine, one Finnish performer stood out from the very beginning. From my notes at the time...

From finland: Ari Koivunen, long black t-shirt and jeans, long blonde hair; white ballcap. looks like a 14-year-old; has no stage presence—just stands there. Sings scorpions’ “ Still Loving You” crowd goes crazy when he hits the high notes and finnish flags start flying; an older couple slow dances in front of the stage

Ari didn't win that year's KWC competition, but a few months later, he wound up winning the Finnish version of American Idol, where he once again performed the Scorpions tune (he also sang "Piano Man," though I can't find that clip on YouTube):



Koivunen's debut album, Fuel For The Fire, topped the Finnish charts when it was released May 30th, and it's still in the top 10; the hit single, "Hear My Call," is a big power-metal anthem, and proof that karaoke can be a good career move—at least in Finland.

Oops

Some of the Bangkok posts got accidentally published and then un-published, due to my basic misunderstandings of Thai-language Google software. Anyhoo, they're up now.

Bangkok, Day Four (Or Something Like That): Where Is The Love?

The post-KWC festivities went wayyyyyy long last night—all the way into the morning, in fact. The reveling once again took place in the hotel lobby, where we drank and sang and talked until dawn. When the restaurant opened at 6 a.m., our fellow guests didn’t know what hit ‘em; suffice to say that anybody hoping for a nice, relaxed early-morning vacation breakfast was instead treated to the sight of a man singing a cappella near the buffet table.

After a late-morning nap, I headed over to MBK, which is one of several competing overstuffed shopping malls in the city. I’d heard they had karaoke rooms, and was hoping to find “One Night In Bangkok,” which I still haven’t been able to locate here (though one of my newfound friends of Sweden was gracious enough to play a few notes for me on the piano last night). Unfortunately, the MBK song selection was limited, so I wound up belting out the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where Is The Love?”, a song that I barely know and/or like. Oh, Murray Head, why have you forsaken me?!

Bangkok, Day Three: There's A Choice We're Making

The Karaoke World Championships just ended about an hour or so ago here in Bangkok. The first-place winners: Lu Hee Wah, a jewelry-industry marketing and sales rep originally from Malaysia (though he's lived in Thailand for the past nine years); and Julie Walter-Sgro, a coffee-company operations manager from Australia. The U.S. took second place in themale division, thanks to Michael Moses Griffin. The whole shebang ended with a sing-along of (what else?) "We Are The World," which got the crowd going:



One unfortunate bit of news from the evening: I paid 10 Baht to try out one of the private karaoke booths, only to have my song of choice get stuck in a loop, meaning that I heard "If you leave me now..." repeated a half-dozen times before I just gave up. Now I know what Mrs. Cetera feels like.



On a final, unrelated note, I saw someone selling squirrels today—squirrels wearing miniature wool caps. More info tomorrow.

Bangkok, Day Two: Are You Tuk-Tuking To Me?

If you enjoy karaoke, alcohol and free-roaming feral cats, than there was no better place to be Friday night than Bangkok’s Suan-Lum Night Bazaar, where the 5th annual Karaoke World Championship got underway. Seventeen singers from eleven different countries* performed two songs each, and despite the humidity and fog machines, none of them passed out. The beer garden was larger than I expected (its website says it holds 6,000**) and, for the first few hours, surprisingly crowded; despite the fact that this was a last-minute venue change, the organization managed to get the word out. Those in attendance got to hear several power ballads (Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go,” U2’s “One”), and saw this year’s two U.S. contestants, Michael Moses Grifith of Illinois and Barbie Robbins of Kentucky. Some poorly taken photos:



As if the on-stage antics weren’t enough, the beer garden has eight private karaoke booths on site, though only a handful of songs are in English, so I didn’t get a chance to try them out. But I did see a group of about a half-dozen or so exchange students from the U.S. and Australia crammed into a booth, trying to improvise their way through a Thai ballad. The gentlemen overseeing the rooms, Mr. Pornchai (below), told me they get an average of 100 customers a day; he also told me that karaoke is a relatively new phenomenon in Thailand—it only really took off, he said, in the last ten years—and that much of the hold-up was over copyright disputes and song availability.



But the real highlight of the evening took place afterwards, in the lobby of the Arnoma Hotel: That’s where a group of about 20 or so contestants and friends gathered around a piano to sing along to the likes of “Stand By Me,” “Sweet Child O’Mine,” and, of course, “We Are The World.” It was almost 1:30 a.m., and these people had just spent the last five hours listening to karaoke; they had every excuse to head back to their rooms and enjoy the silence. But they love nothing more than to sing, and so the prospect of a makeshift music hall (especially one that’s well-stocked with cheap Thai beer) is irresistible.

I stayed for an hour, watching with a placid, infant-like grin on my face. I don’t want to sound like a Nextel ad, but there’s something joyous about seeing people from so many different countries communicating with each other, especially when they do so using music. This upcoming week will mark another 9/11 anniversary, and for the last six years, the U.S. has alienated much of the rest of the world; at this point, whenever I visit another country, I automatically assume that somebody’s going to corner me and ask about Bush. But there were no politics in the room last night,*** and while I don’t want to extrapolate a big notion from a little moment, it’s comforting to know that the world’s not so far gone that we can’t all stop for a few minutes and break into a Stevie Wonder song now and then.

* Australia, Austria, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Malaysia, Poland, Sweden, Thailand, United States
** UPDATE: The organizers tell me it's actually 2,500.
*** UPDATE: Of course, because I wound up leaving, I found out that I did, indeed, miss the political discussions that went on until dawn. But I'd prefer to remember my naive little "we're all in the same gang" moment as it is.

Bangkok, Day One: Is This Thing On?

Apparently, when you plug into Bangkok's Internet providers, all of your Google language settings are converted to Thai. If I had been smart enough to figure this out beforehand, I would have at least learned what the Thai symbol is "change me back to English, because I have no idea if I'm doing this properly, and I don't want to press the wrong button and accidentally download opium and then get arrested." So forgive any lost-in-translation mistakes over the next few days.

Anyhoo, after a 17-hour flight (during which I went only partly stir-crazy), I arrived in Bangkok Thursday afternoon, and soon after went for a walk around the neighborhood of Pathumwan, which I would best describe as "hot and friendly." I soon met up with the two U.S. contestants for this year's Karaoke World Championships. We went out looking for karaoke (what else?) around the city's Silom Soi 4 area, where we found two near-empty bars; turns out the real action was on the street, where the locals were holding an elaborate lady-boy beauty pageant. Still, we had a good time entertaining ourselves, though I have yet to find Murray Head's "One Night In Bangkok" available for karaoke here, which is amazing—sort of like walking into Allentown, Pennsylvania, and seeing no copies of Billy Joel's The Nylon Curtain.

The competition starts tonight, with 11 countries participating. More info tomorrow; in the meantime, enjoy these crappily taken pictures.