Karaoke Around the World: Global Technology, Local Singing

Karaoke is a Japanese word essentially meaning “empty orchestra.” Karaoke recordings are specially prepared versions of popular songs in which there is no vocalization or vocal track. Karaoke songs are played through an electronic sound system with a specially designed mixing microphone that allows a karaoke singer to provide a live vocal performance to match the orchestral score.

The nine essays in this anthology explore the development of karaoke in Japan, the United Kingdom, Italy, Sweden, non-Japanese East Asia, and to a lesser extent the United States. These were presented at a conference on karaoke held in Kanazawa, Japan, in 1996, funded in part by Japan Airlines. Five of the authors are Japanese. All the essays are written in or are translated into English, with a few rough edges that produce some interesting turns of phrase.

Several of the essays try to provide a chronology of the introduction of karaoke technology in Japan and the other countries covered in the various essays, but don’t look here for a very clear history. And I was disappointed in the vague connections made between the current karaoke systems (dating really from tape systems in the early 1980s) and earlier forms using phonograph records, live orchestras on radio shows just after World War II, or Max Fleischer’s bouncing-ball motion picture songs and Mitch Miller on American television in the 1950s.

The essays are more about who sings karaoke (demographics) and how karaoke establishments create a safe haven for belting out songs in front of others (daytime karaoke coffee shops for middle-aged women in Japan) than it is about the technology of karaoke. Karaoke is about people singing: “What is significant, however, is not that people get together and sing, but that singing is mediated by machine and filtered through the indispensable microphone.” (Toru Mitsui and Shuhei Hosokawa, introduction, p. 14). While some of the early history of the form of karaoke technology eludes us in the essays, we can learn that it has roots in the Mamasan Korus (choirs for middle-aged women), that certain Japanese gangsters (yakuza) are good karaoke singers of songs of unrequited love, and that some businessmen take karaoke equipment along with them on business trips with their employees in order to entertain them personally in the evenings.

In these essays we learn that in Japan there are unwritten but clear rules, in the form of seven taboos, about personal behavior in a karaoke “box” (a small, specially designed establishment), coffee shop, or bar. Similar rules may exist for the limited number of karaoke bars in the United States, but more interesting is the essay by Casey Man Kong Lum, who teaches at William Paterson College in New Jersey, in which he explores the cultural inhibitions within North American society that make karaoke far less popular. He links Marshall McLuhan’s idea of Americans’ quest for privacy in public spaces to the idea of karaoke spaces as basically and inherently “un-American.”

In the final essay, by Akiko Otake and Shuhei Hosokawa on karaoke in East Asia, the authors make two important observations. The first is that “What is at stake is the production of space correlated with a form of technology, the structure of industry and the articulation of singing and listening bodies. It is misleading to think that there exist audiovisual products separate from the space they occupy and the bodies they are addressed to” (p. 191). And later: “It is true that karaoke by necessity institutionalizes non-professional performances in front of bar or box audiences through pre-recorded sound, cheap images and amplified voice; it does not erase the local differences in which the material practice of singing are embedded” (p. 200).

These short essays remind us that regardless of how well or how poorly we may understand the technical form and development of a technology, it is more difficult to understand how that technology...