In the text that follows we’re interested in the human activities in which an anonymous participant, assisted by new technology, uses an existing cultural model to derive pleasure. (And it has nothing to do with sex, if that was what you were thinking!) The models are most often drawn from popular culture (television, film, pop music, comics, computer games), but some belong to what was once considered “high culture” (film, literature, painting). Most often the anonymous participant derives pleasure and gets his kicks by simply getting to be “someone else, somewhere else.” Amateur and anonymous, participants don’t go in for artistic pretension, nor are they overly concerned with the authorship of their creation or their activity, but the desire to leave their mark is beyond doubt. Their creation can’t be called plagiarism, nor can their activity be called imitation, because both terms belong to a different time and a different cultural system. Easily applicable to non-musical activities such as film, literature, and painting, karaoke is the most simple paradigm, hence the hasty and perhaps not completely apposite title of this essay, “Karaoke Culture.” This soft term is less restrictive than those which are currently in use, such as post-postmodernism, anti-modernism, pseudo-modernism, and digi-modernism. All of these terms, including mine, are inferior to the content they try to describe. The content is new, and it’s changing from one second to the next, so what we try and articulate today can disappear tomorrow, leaving no trace of its existence. We live in a liquid epoch.
Apart from “culture” this essay makes frequent reference to “wires.” I admit that I don’t know anything about “wires.” The fact that I don’t know anything about them doesn’t prevent me from writing about them. Until yesterday these two sentences were in contradiction. Today they’re not. Freedom from knowledge, from the past, from continuity, from cultural memory and cultural hierarchy, and an inconceivable speed—these are the determinants of karaoke culture and the leitmotifs of the text that tries to describe them.
[1] www.time.com/time/asia/asia/magazine/1999/990823/inoue1.html
[2]Here’s a quick anecdote. A teenager and I watched the “ancient” film The Silence of the Lambs together. There’s that terrible scene in which Buffalo Bill’s victim is trapped in an unused well. “The chick is dumb, she doesn’t have a mobile” was the teenager’s comment. “What do to you mean?” I asked. “If she had a mobile on her she could call the police.” The teenager, a child who grew up with the mobile phone, watched the film in his own way—as a story about a “dumb chick” who got into trouble because she didn’t have a mobile phone.
2.
It All Began
So Innocently
On my first visit to America in 1982 I found myself in Los Angeles, and of course I didn’t pass up the chance to visit Universal Studios. The photograph of Clark Gable dates from this time; Clark in an open white shirt, a black curl falling on his sweaty forehead, a blazing orange fire in the background, and in his arms, my lithe body. Actually the body belongs to Vivien Leigh, but the head is definitely mine.
The pleasure was one I repeated on a visit to St. Petersburg, where in front of the Winter Palace, poking my head through a painted mural, I appeared in a photograph as Napoleon. Since then the idea has made its way into computer programs and on to the Internet. For Valentine’s Day 2009, ScanCafe.com offered a bit of free fun: people could send in a photo of themselves with their partner and would be sent one back with a minor intervention. Instead of their partner, Barrack Obama was now in the photo.
Who knows, maybe this innocent fairground attraction, having one’s picture taken with a painted mural, was the embryo of karaoke culture. The invention of the camera satisfied our desire to immortalize ourselves the way we actually are, but a painted mural, this hokey technological innovation, offered a better option: Why wouldn’t we be someone else for a moment? We could have our photos taken with our idols (me and Clark Gable!), take someone’s place (hey, I gave Vivien Leigh the shove!), fabricate the personal history we leave to our grandchildren (that’s me kids, with Clark Gable!), enter a fictional world (hey, there I am in Gone With the Wind!), reshape oneself (ahh, look at my slender waist!), travel through time, or change one’s class, race, or sex (hey, there I’m a man, Napoleon!). All in all, it gave us the chance to intervene in reality, in which we are held back by our first names and last names, not to mention our genes, class, race, sex, religion, and ideology. The experience of having one’s photo taken with a painted mural was not only a bit of fun (which we knew), it was also transformative (which back then we didn’t know).
But a lot of other things had to happen for the Pandora’s box of our repressed desires to open. God had to die, so that our interventions in his work would go unpunished. The Time of the Great Inventions had to come to pass. Communism had to be born, and humanity, or least a part of it, had to be reset and convinced that the happiness of the collective would bring happiness to the individual. Freud had to appear, and humanity, or at least a part of it, had to be reset and convinced that the happiness of the individual would bring happiness to the collective. Modernism, radio, television, consumerism, the computer, mass media culture, postmodernism, feminism, postcolonialism, the mobile phone, the Internet, all had to step out into the light.
The Internet is the final, most explosive powder keg strewn on the eternal flame of our fantasies. The Internet is the cornerstone of both the new democratic revolution and the computer user’s evolution into a free man, a man forever transformed (Never again a slave!), eyes fixed ahead on the screen (a “window to the world”), whose hands self-confidently control an emancipatory mouse: a proletarian-man, an amateur-man, a man finally worthy of the name.
The Internet has not only democratized but also internationalized the consciousness of its users. As if in one of Mao Zedong’s nightmarish dreams, the Internet is a field on which a thousand flowers really bloom. What has happened to society in the intervening time is, however, difficult to say. It’s entirely possible that in the democratic deluge of realizing individual desires society has dissolved and fragmented into millions of little pieces, into millions of virtual communities, or fandoms, held together by various obsessions—from Gobelin embroidery to the protection of earth worms. Having absolutely nothing in common, Gobelin enthusiasts and those worried about earth worms are two virtual communities that will never communicate. In this respect, sticking to our primitive karaoke metaphor, the Internet can be understood as mega-karaoke, a place with millions of microphones, and millions of people rushing to grab the mic and sing their version of someone else’s song. Whose song? That’s not important: amnesia is, it seems, a by-product of the information revolution. What is important is that we all sing.
There is little dispute that the Internet is a revolution, and as they say, every revolution occurs in the name of an enlightened idea. In his book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Culture Is Killing our Culture, Andrew Keen claims that “the noble abstraction behind the digital revolution is that of the noble amateur.” As Keen maintains, in this case the amateur has raised a revolution against “the dictatorship of expertise.” Keen uses T. H. Huxley’s infinite monkey theorem as an example; it holds that if an infinite number of monkeys sat down at an infinite number of typewriters, sooner or later one of the monkeys would come up with a masterpiece to rival Shakespeare. On the Internet “amateur monkeys” create “an endless digital forest of mediocracy.” The forest is growing rampantly, and Keen predicts that by 2010 there will be five hundred million blogs “collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture.” Keen assails the notorious fact that Wikipedia is the work of amateurs, of anonymous contributors, the end result being that “it’s the blind leading the blind—infinite monkeys provide infinite information for infinite readers, perpetuating the cycle of misinformation and ignorance.” Things being as such, no one can be called to account, and what’s more, attempts by experts to intervene and assist amateurs usually end in failure. The Internet
