Karaoke Idols , livre ebook

Intellect Books - Kevin Brown

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

130 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Most ethnographers don’t achieve what Kevin Brown did while conducting their research: in his two years spent at a karaoke bar near Denver, Colorado, he went from barely able to carry a tune to someone whom other karaoke patrons requested to sing. Along the way, he learned everything you might ever want to know about karaoke and the people who enjoy it.

The result is Karaoke Idols, a close ethnography of life at a karaoke bar that reveals just what we’re doing when we take up the mic—and how we shape our identities, especially in terms of gender, ethnicity, and class, through performances in everyday life. Marrying a comprehensive introduction to the history of public singing and karaoke with a rich analysis of karaoke performers and the community that their shared performances generate, Karaoke Idols is a book for both the casual reader and the scholar, and a fascinating exploration of our urge to perform and the intersection of technology and culture that makes it so seductively easy to do so.

Acknowledgments

Synopsis

About the Author

Overture

Chapter 1: My Way

Chapter 2: Turning Japanese

Chapter 3: Boys Don’t Cry

Chapter 4: Paint It Black

Chapter 5: Friends in Low Places

Chapter 6: Sweet Caroline

Finale

Afterword: Karaoke as Performance Reactivation by Philip Auslander

Sujets

Technology Policy

Public Policy

Political Science

Performing Arts

Music

Science

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 novembre 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783204465
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2015 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2015 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Shin-E Chuah
Production manager: Claire Organ
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-444-1
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-445-8
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-446-5
Printed and bound by Short Run Press Ltd, UK
For Grandpa Jim. We did it!
Contents
Acknowledgements
Synopsis
About the Author
Overture
Chapter 1: My Way
Chapter 2: Turning Japanese
Chapter 3: Boys Don’t Cry
Chapter 4: Paint It Black
Chapter 5: Friends in Low Places
Chapter 6: Sweet Caroline
Finale
Afterword: Karaoke as Performance Reactivation by Philip Auslander
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
An enormous thank you to all of the wonderful people who have helped me with this project. Parts of this book were presented at academic conferences including Performance Studies International, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the International Association of Popular Music Studies, the Association for Asian Performance, and the Association of Asian Studies. Thanks to the panel chairs, fellow participants, and attendees for their input. Portions of Chapter 3 originally appeared in Popular Music Studies 26: 1 (2014). Portions of Chapter 5 originally appeared in Popular Entertainment Studies 1: 2 (2010). I thank these journals for their permission to reprint this material. I would like to thank the professors of my doctoral committee for all of their input, including my advisor Oliver Gerland, second reader Paul Shankman, Bud Coleman, Beth Osnes, and Merrill Lessley. Thank you to Phil Auslander for your inspiration, input, and contribution. Thank you to Claire Organ and Jelena Stanovnik at Intellect Books, and MPS Technologies, for all of your help to bring this project to publication. Thanks to the James R., Anne M., and R. Jane Emerson Student Support Fund in the Humanities for your generous support during my research. Thanks to Marcy, Tod, Paul, and Nancy. Thank you to my wife Lauren for helping me find my way. Thanks to all of the wonderful people at ‘Capone’s’. You will always be in my heart!
Synopsis
For two years toward the end of the 2000s, I performed ethnographic research at a karaoke bar near Denver, Colorado, in the United States. When I say that I performed, I mean I performed karaoke. Over the course of two years, I went from wallflower to local celebrity. When I started, I could hardly carry a tune. By the time my research ended, people were putting in requests for songs that they wanted to hear me sing. Karaoke taught me a lot about myself, teaching me how to be more confident and how to better relate to other people. This book is the story about how this happened. It is also the story about why this happened, about the countless other people who I witnessed sing, and about how our identities are shaped through the microcosmic interactions of everyday life. The book begins by introducing the reader to the purpose of the book, which is to use karaoke performances as a window into understanding how human identity is constructed. Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for the methodology used in the project, including a discussion of ethnographic research tools based in performance ethnography, including participant observation, auto-ethnography, thick description, and embodied writing. Chapter 2 explores the history of karaoke within the context of Japanese culture. Chapters 3 through 5 use karaoke performances as examples to discuss the construction of categories of identity: gender, ethnicity, and class. Chapter 6 synthesizes the discussion, concluding that performances of individual identity coalesce to form performances of community. The book concludes that karaoke provides a space of cultural production where performances of identity are not only constructed, but also subverted. Human identity is constructed through small performances that occur all around us in everyday life.
About the Author
Dr. Kevin Brown is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre at the University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, United States. He has been a producer, director, actor, and designer of theater for twenty-five years. He is an editorial review board member of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media . Brown currently serves on the Board of Directors of Performance Studies International as their Digital Publications Officer. He has published many works, including ‘Liveness Anxiety: Karaoke and the Performance of Class’ in Popular Entertainment Studies , ‘Auslander’s Robot’ and ‘The Auslander Test: Or, “Of Bots and Humans”’ in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media , ‘Spectacle as Resistance: Performing Tree Ordination in Thailand’ in the Journal of Religion and Theatre , ‘Dancing into the Heart of Darkness: Modern Variations and Innovations of the Thai Shadow Theatre’ in Puppetry International , ‘European Theatre and Performance’ in the Encyclopedia of World Popular Culture , and entries on karaoke, interactive video games, national identity, virtual bands, virtual communities, and social networks in Music in American Life: An Encyclopedia of the Songs, Styles, Stars, and Stories that Shaped Our Culture . His article ‘Sometimes a Microphone is Just a Microphone: Karaoke and the Performance of Gender’ was recently published in Popular Music Studies.
Overture
It starts out as a fairly mellow Saturday night at Capone’s. Several of the regular singers are performing their trademark songs. Jennifer is a young woman in her early twenties with a pale complexion, long brown hair, and a petite frame. She wears clothes that are typical of an average working-class girl of her age: a white blouse with thin, blue, horizontal stripes, blue jeans, and plain black leather shoes. She has chosen to sing ‘She’s in Love With the Boy,’ as written by John Simms and recorded by Trisha Yearwood. Jennifer arrived earlier in the night with her boyfriend, a young, short-haired man dressed in a white, long-sleeve shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots. He admires her performance from his seat on a stool by one of the pool tables near the back of the bar. The song is about a young girl who is in love with a boy of whom her father does not approve. Their eyes meet as she sings, a demonstration of the performance of a gendered relationship.
As Jennifer wraps up her song, a group of young men in their twenties enters the bar, a common event late at night when the mood at the bar goes from subdued to raucous, as the older regulars filter home, replaced with younger patrons who often arrive at karaoke later in the night after attending various concerts or parties. Among the new arrivals is Kenny, a young Latino man in his early twenties. He wears a black concert T-shirt with red lettering, baggy blue jeans, and tennis shoes. His hair is shaggy, and he wears a dark goatee and a thin mustache on his face. He also sports multiple piercings, including an eyebrow ring, a small gold nose ring, and large hoop earrings in both of his ears. He has several small, colorful tattoos along his forearms. Kenny turns in a slip of paper to the Karaoke Jockey (KJ) and soon he is called up to sing. He has chosen to sing the song ‘Poison,’ by Bell Biv Devoe. He sprints up to the stage and grabs the microphone. The voice that comes out of his mouth is a bit surprising for his tattooed and pierced appearance: it is soft, somewhat fey and lisping. But the words are not as soft, and he bellows into the microphone as he starts his song: ‘Less fuckin’ country!’
Kenny sings the song loudly, dancing from side-to-side with one arm holding the mike and the other arm held in a fist, pumping it up and down. After Kenny is done, he goes back to his group of friends who are hanging out along the back wall of the bar, giving him ‘high fives’ as he returns to his seat. After Kenny, it is Jennifer’s turn to sing again. This time she is singing ‘Crazy,’ a song that was written by Willie Nelson and made famous by Patsy Cline. As she begins to sing, Kenny starts to taunt her. ‘That’s not how it goes,’ he shouts at her, ‘you’re fucking it up!’ Jennifer is visibly shaken and tries to ignore Kenny. Kenny begins to sing along with Jennifer from the audience, trying to correct her, and she gestures to him with her middle finger. During the next musical break, Jennifer looks at Kenny, then points to her boyfriend and threatens him, ‘That’s my boyfriend. He’s gonna kick your ass if you don’t shut up!’ Kenny backs off for the moment, but the mood among the rest of the patrons in the bar has perceptibly shifted from mellow to tense. Eventually, the situation seems to be diffused through the fact that it is happening in the public context of a karaoke performance and not in private. As far as I can tell, no actual violence happens and all of the parties involved in this verbal (and musical) scuffle go home unscathed.
The Big Three Killed My Baby
This performance was one of many I observed during my ethnographic research of a local karaoke bar. How is it that three words directed at a genre of music (‘Less Fuckin’ Country’) could create so much trouble? The answer to this question seems to be rooted in the way that karaoke, as a space of cultural production, acts as a conduit for the performance of various categories of human identity. This particular example is quite unique, in tha