ten minutes a month, when I pick up the mike to sing “Crazy in Love” or “Halo” or “Countdown” or “Say My Name.” I don’t know if I could take a solid hour of being Beyoncé, not without doing serious damage to my halo. She was Destiny’s Child—I am Density’s Child. But she has that charisma that inspires the rest of us to fake it. I fake it so real, I am Beyoncé.
I don’t have the frontman chromosome. Whatever the frontman is in front of, I am more comfortable lurking somewhere in the back of that. That has to be part of why I’m drawn to karaoke, the way it lets me sparkle with a little shabby secondhand glamour stolen from these true stars. No lurkers allowed, no parking on the dance floor. “If you can’t fix it, flaunt it” is a motto that’s built right into the mentality.
SO MUCH OF IT COMES right down to the microphone. So let’s talk about that for a minute. The thing itself. The electrical instrument. The magic wand that turns those who clutch it into gods and goddesses.
Everybody loves microphones. As soon as they were invented, singers loved them. Frank Sinatra and those forties crooner guys used to bend the mike over tenderly like a dame they were kissing on V.J. Day. As Old Blue Eyes told Life magazine, “It’s like a geisha girl uses her fan.” That has never changed. Singers love microphones. Rappers love microphones. I’ve seen indie guys press their lips up and slobber on the microphone so they get electrical shocks and I’ve seen rock stars bear-hug stage-rushing fans as they all crowd around the mike stand.
Microphones are outdated technology, in a sense; if you want to, you can mike a performer so the audience doesn’t see the equipment. Singers only flaunt the microphone because they want to. In the nineties, people from Madonna to Garth Brooks began using the wireless headset mike thingaroo, which creates a whole different iconography. The headset is businesslike, above all. It says, “I’m not some pop floozy up here, I’m the CEO of an entertainment enterprise, I’m a brand, I’m working my ass off,” etc. But you can’t become a star that way. You have to already be a star to wear the headset, because it does not in itself confer star status. The microphone does. That’s why little girls learn to sing into the hairbrush before they even learn to brush their hair with it.
The air guitar makes sense on a pragmatic level because a guitar does things. When you play air guitar, or beat out a drum solo on the dashboard, you’re miming a mechanical operation. But the air mike, that’s a different statement. And it usually is the trusty hairbrush. In the excellent 2002 Britney Spears film Crossroads , she uses a spoon while she’s in her room belting Madonna’s “Open Your Heart,” which is interesting for a number of reasons, the two toppermost being 1) WTF? They didn’t have a hairbrush? They’re not hard to find and teenage girls have them in their rooms, always, and boys usually do, too, whereas teenagers generally do not stash the silverware in their sleeping chamber unless their “cry for attention” game has reached condition red, and 2) Britney always used a headset, not a handheld mike, so rocking the mike like this must be a long-standing fantasy that she could never satisfy in her actual day job as a singer, only in the movies when she plays an amateur fan who can only dream of being a singer, which could be the whole karaoke ethic in a nutshell.
Stars love to put pictures of themselves holding the mike on their albums, whether it makes them look cool or ridiculous or so far past ridiculous it’s magfriggenificent. (Like Morrissey on the inner sleeve of the first Smiths album, where he’s making microphone love so intently, he practically pins and mounts it like a butterfly.) The best had to be George Clinton of Funkadelic, on the cover of his 1979 classic, Uncle Jam Wants You . George is some kind of dictator-king sitting on his wicker
I don’t have the frontman chromosome. Whatever the frontman is in front of, I am more comfortable lurking somewhere in the back of that. That has to be part of why I’m drawn to karaoke, the way it lets me sparkle with a little shabby secondhand glamour stolen from these true stars. No lurkers allowed, no parking on the dance floor. “If you can’t fix it, flaunt it” is a motto that’s built right into the mentality.
SO MUCH OF IT COMES right down to the microphone. So let’s talk about that for a minute. The thing itself. The electrical instrument. The magic wand that turns those who clutch it into gods and goddesses.
Everybody loves microphones. As soon as they were invented, singers loved them. Frank Sinatra and those forties crooner guys used to bend the mike over tenderly like a dame they were kissing on V.J. Day. As Old Blue Eyes told Life magazine, “It’s like a geisha girl uses her fan.” That has never changed. Singers love microphones. Rappers love microphones. I’ve seen indie guys press their lips up and slobber on the microphone so they get electrical shocks and I’ve seen rock stars bear-hug stage-rushing fans as they all crowd around the mike stand.
Microphones are outdated technology, in a sense; if you want to, you can mike a performer so the audience doesn’t see the equipment. Singers only flaunt the microphone because they want to. In the nineties, people from Madonna to Garth Brooks began using the wireless headset mike thingaroo, which creates a whole different iconography. The headset is businesslike, above all. It says, “I’m not some pop floozy up here, I’m the CEO of an entertainment enterprise, I’m a brand, I’m working my ass off,” etc. But you can’t become a star that way. You have to already be a star to wear the headset, because it does not in itself confer star status. The microphone does. That’s why little girls learn to sing into the hairbrush before they even learn to brush their hair with it.
The air guitar makes sense on a pragmatic level because a guitar does things. When you play air guitar, or beat out a drum solo on the dashboard, you’re miming a mechanical operation. But the air mike, that’s a different statement. And it usually is the trusty hairbrush. In the excellent 2002 Britney Spears film Crossroads , she uses a spoon while she’s in her room belting Madonna’s “Open Your Heart,” which is interesting for a number of reasons, the two toppermost being 1) WTF? They didn’t have a hairbrush? They’re not hard to find and teenage girls have them in their rooms, always, and boys usually do, too, whereas teenagers generally do not stash the silverware in their sleeping chamber unless their “cry for attention” game has reached condition red, and 2) Britney always used a headset, not a handheld mike, so rocking the mike like this must be a long-standing fantasy that she could never satisfy in her actual day job as a singer, only in the movies when she plays an amateur fan who can only dream of being a singer, which could be the whole karaoke ethic in a nutshell.
Stars love to put pictures of themselves holding the mike on their albums, whether it makes them look cool or ridiculous or so far past ridiculous it’s magfriggenificent. (Like Morrissey on the inner sleeve of the first Smiths album, where he’s making microphone love so intently, he practically pins and mounts it like a butterfly.) The best had to be George Clinton of Funkadelic, on the cover of his 1979 classic, Uncle Jam Wants You . George is some kind of dictator-king sitting on his wicker
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