Don't Stop Believin'
How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Armed with a keen eye and a terrible singing voice, writer Brian Raftery sets out across the globe, tracing karaoke's evolution from cult fad to multi-million dollar phenomenon. In Japan, he meets Daisuke Inoue, the godfather of karaoke; in Thailand, he follows a group of Americans hoping to win the Karaoke World Championships; and in New York City, he hangs out backstage with the world's longest-running heavy-metal karaoke band. Along the way, Raftery chronicles his own time as an obsessive karaoke fan, recalling a life's worth of noisy relationships and poor song choices, and analyzing the karaoke-bar merits of such artists as Prince, Bob Dylan and Fugazi.
Part cultural history, part memoir, Don't Stop Believin': How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life is a hilarious and densely reported look at the liberating effects of a good sing-along.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What some condemn as an aesthetic crime is actually "the most direct form of music appreciation that now exists," contends this indulgent tribute to a dubious art form. Entertainment journalist and karaoke connoisseur Raftery celebrates the medium as both a democratization of our overprofessionalized entertainment culture and a kind of therapy that transforms shamed self-consciousness into brazen, talentless self-acceptance. He traces the industry's history from its early struggles to cajole club goers into making spectacles of themselves to its rise as mockery-proof nightlife mainstay. Delving into the stringent engineering of instrumental backup tapes, he explains why Bobby Brown's "On Our Own" (from Ghostbusters II) is a greater karaoke song than Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." Intertwined in his world tour of karaoke bars is a personal saga of singing badly for drunken audiences from Manhattan to Tokyo, a habit that eased the forming and breakup of relationships and prodded him into a blissful state of "not caring about how I look or sound." Raftery vividly evokes the boozy, semimelodic pathos that makes karaoke a profound group-bonding rite, while acknowledging nay, toasting its tackiness. The result is an entertaining, exuberant homage that's anything but off-key.
