The missus adores karaoke. Depending on the venue and who’s
filling it on a particular night, I either sort of enjoy it — as I did in
February at our hotel in Tenerife, where the audience lustily applauded my
version of Conway Twitty’s "Only Make Believe," maybe because they thought
(wrongly!) that doing so would shut me up for the night — or passionately hate
it. The other evening at the Brass Monkey in LA’s Koreatown, I hated it as I
have rarely hated any purportedly recreational activity before.
A succession of young
singers with whom I felt I had very little in common swaggered up to the
singer’s area and performed a succession of tuneless songs with what seemed to
me must be the stupidest, most vulgar lyrics in the history of the English
language. Ever hear Erykah Badu’s "Tyrone," in which the singer advises a lover
who apparently hasn’t been spending enough money on her to send his
friend over to collect his belongings from her house? “I think ya better call
Tyrone and tell him come on/ Help you get your shit.” She notes disapprovingly,
“Every
time we go somewhere/ I gotta reach down in my purse/ to pay your way and your homeboys' way/ And sometimes your cousin's way/They don't never have to
pay.” Compared to this, Bo Diddley’s “Bring It to Jerome” wasn’t Rodgers &
Hammerstein, but Mozart.
Somebody got up and performed
one of Adele’s signature hits. I have never enjoyed Adele’s music more. I will
never enjoy it as much again.
The respite was brief, as a
young man then treated us to the lovely and talented Chris Brown’s "Look At Me
Now," in which the singer best known for beating up Rihanna asserts, “Lil
nigga bigger than gorilla/ 'Cause I'm killing every
nigga that try to be on my shit/ Better cuff
your chick if I want her, I can get her/ And
she accidentally slip and fall on my dick/ Oops
I said on my dick/ I ain't really mean to
say on my dick/ But since we talking about
my dick/ All of you haters say hi to it/
I'm done.”
Yes, yes, I know. I’m a grumpy
old man, and I’m doing in 2015 what the TV star Steve Allen did in 1957, or
whenever it was, when he amused his studio audience of hopeless white, uh, squares
with a dramatic reading of “Be Bop a Lula.” I should be ashamed of myself, but
you know what? Not one little bit.
After what seemed around two
months of this stuff, the DJ finally summoned the missus, whose version of The Hooters' "Satellite" must have sounded to the assembled Chris Brown and Erykah Badu fans like
Martian music. The lyrics weren’t especially belligerent, and came pretty close
to rhyming in many instances. There was a discernible tune.
She received approximately as
much applause as the Adele guy, and the DJ turned the microphone over to a
succession of small Korean women who seemed to believe that a note sung very
out of tune isn’t objectionable if sung at the top of one’s lungs. I have not,
to my knowledge, ever heard cats being tortured, and never want to, but I can’t
imagine it sounding very much different.
I have been in this situation
before, and know that the missus wlll eagerly endure the unendurable for
another chance to sing. I was pretty sure that if I had to listen to one more
young woman screaming in the key of H, I might kill someone, but then the
missus uttered the words I most enjoy hearing at karaoke: We can go if you want
to.
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