Don't Stop Believin': How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life

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Overview

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.
 

Editorial Reviews

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. (Jan.)

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The Barnes & Noble Review
Ah, my karaoke glory days. From old-man bars to private booths to a Blackfeet reservation in Montana -- where my soaring rendition of Charlene's "I've Never Been to Me," including the spoken monologue, was received utterly without irony -- I spent years chasing the exuberant high of the "empty orchestra" from Japan. I kept song lists in my Palm, Sundays free for recovery from sunrise duets of "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." Ain't no doubt about it: I was obsessed. So when I saw that someone else had written a -- the -- memoir-slash-pop-cultural chronicle of karaoke's Stateside success, my inner K-J cued up the Gin Blossoms' "Hey, Jealousy." But karaoke's goofy joy allows no room for enmity -- nor does Brian Raftery's endearing, entertaining Don't Stop Believin': How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life. "I love karaoke. I love it without qualifiers, apologies, or actual singing talent," Raftery writes. "When people talk about the adrenaline rush that comes with playing competitive sports or putting angel dust on their eyelids, I think, 'Yes, fine, but have you ever performed "Bennie and the Jets" in a hot tub?' " Raftery weaves together his own karaoke adventures (earning, on a good night, "slippery high fives") with nerd-tastic analysis (including a spot-on taxonomy of karaoke-friendly tunes); an interesting -- and surprisingly elaborate -- anatomy of background tracks; and colorful reporting on the origin, evolution, and entrenchment of the off-key phenom. He argues convincingly that, while karaoke caught on here at a particular moment ("It's hard to imagine a time when Americans didn't want to make public spectacles of themselves"), it also captures something profoundly, gleefully universal. "Underneath all the social barriers like headphones and iPods," he writes, "we're just a world of singin' fools." Yep. As Charlene would say, "That's truth. That's love." --Lynn Harris

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780306815836
  • Publisher: Da Capo Press
  • Publication date: 12/8/2008
  • Pages: 232
  • Sales rank: 709,972
  • Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.25 (h) x 0.62 (d)

Meet the Author

Brian Raftery's features, profiles, and criticism have appeared in such publications as Wired, Spin, GQ, and Entertainment Weekly. His favorite karaoke song is Night Ranger's "Sister Christian."

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