Here’s all the info for the “Karaoke Obsessed” show I’ll be doing in Philadelphia next month; you can order tickets here. The show is part of the First Person Festival of Memoir and Documentary Art, and unlike some of the other book-related events I’ve done, you’ll actually be able to do some singing, thanks to DJ Sara Sherr. Anyway, here’s all the who’s/what’s/etc.:
Friday, November 6, 9-11 pm
Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106
$12 (First Person Arts members) / $15 (general public); after Oct 25: $15 / $20
Below is write-up for the event, though I can’t guarantee I’ll be making the same half-smirk face during the entire presentation:
I’ll be at the Brooklyn Book Festival’s Main Stage @ 4 p.m. More info here. I encourage you to show up and drown me out with an a cappella rendition of “Sister Christian.”
If you live in New York City or Philadelphia, there are a few book-related events coming up. I’d love to see you there:
Sunday, Sept. 13th
BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL
Brooklyn, NY
4 p.m. @ Main Stage, “Obsessive Fun” panel
More info here.
Monday, Oct. 19th
DREAM ON LIVE-BAND KARAOKE FUNDRAISER
New York, NY
6:30 p.m. @ The Red Lion
I’ll be emceeing this event, a benefit for Cancer/Care Young Adult Program and Dream On. You can order tickets here.
Friday, Nov. 6th
8TH ANNUAL FIRST PERSON FESTIVAL OF MEMOIR AND DOCUMENTARY ART Philadelphia, PA
More info coming soon. In the meantime, you can check out a preliminary description here.
Here’s a link to the Wired magazine article I wrote about Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator who woke up four years ago and discovered his voice had mysteriously disappeared.
I spotted this last Friday, while in the middle of a Michael Jackson-intensive karaoke session, and I present it here with mild apprehension and strong disbelief. Keep in mind the following:
- This video was created by an English-language karaoke provider, which means the mistake can’t be blamed on translation/spelling errors.
- Said karaoke provider went through the trouble of re-recording the original song; shooting and editing a video; timing the lyrics so that they’d scroll with the lyrics; and then, presumably, testing it at least once. Yet at no point in the process did anyone notice/halt the following gaffe.
- The original version of this song sold millions of copies around the world, and its accompanying video featured Macaulay Culkin wearing gold chains and wayfarers while fake-rapping in front of a brownstone. Which means that, whether due to nostalgia or trauma, the lyrics should be indelible.
- I originally had a question mark at the end of this post’s headline—but really, is there any doubt?
(Karaoke Wishlist is a semi-regular collection of old and new songs that are maddeningly hard to find at karaoke bars)
1) Michael Jackson, “It’s the Falling in Love” tied with “Baby Be Mine”
You have to go pretty deep into MJ’s catalog to find a song that isn’t available at karaoke; along with the Beatles and Elvis, he’s one of the best-represented sing-along artists of all time (you can even find “Liberian Girl,” which I’ve always mistakenly referred to as “Librarian Girl” every time it’s brought up in casual conversation, which doesn’t really happen a lot). So here are two relatively rare Jackson tracks, which I’m sure are available at karaoke bars in Dubai, but difficult to find stateside: “It’s the Falling in Love,” from Off the Wall, is a tipsy homage to ’70s Philly-soul; on any other album, it would have been a smash, but it’s tough to stand out among the likes of “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” or “Rock With You.” As for “Baby Be Mine,” it’s one of only two Thriller tracks not released as a single, and that makes sense: Truth be told, it’s probably the eighth-best song on the album, right after “The Girl is Mine,” but above “The Lady in My Life, (the latter of which I’ve never listened to all the way through, despite playing Thriller so much as a child that my grandmother once threatened to whack me on the head if I didn’t stop talking about Michael Jackson.
2) Mclusky, “To Hell With Good Intentions” I miss the days when “college rock” was performed by people who (possibly) never went to college. It’s hard to imagine the Decemberists writing a lyric like “My love is bigger than your love/We take more drugs than a touring funk band” without having a two-hour band meeting afterward to discuss whether the song was too phallocentric or “ambiguously faux-gauche” or whatever.
3) Bay City Rollers, “Shang-A-Lang” For years, I’d look at all the Bay City Rollers karaoke-bar options and realize I only knew two of the band’s songs (I was born in the mid-’70s, and not as a screaming teenage girl, so they weren’t exactly a priority growing up). But I’ve been listening to the a BCR best-of pretty much non-stop during the last few weeks, and now that I’m finally ready for “Shang-A-Lang,” it’s suddenly disappeared from my regular songbooks. I blame the Gravy Robbers.
4) Taking Back Sunday, “Sink Into Me” Many, many years ago, some music critic dismissed the ’90s post-punk band Quicksand with a terse three-word review that read, “Fugazi sells out.” I always thought that was kind of lazy summary, but after listening to this song, I’ll be damned if I can think of a better way to describe it other than, “Quicksand sells out, but only after listening to Heaven Tonight repeatedly, so it’s all good.”
5) Michael Jackson, “Burn This Disco Out” I can’t help myself; the past few days have just been too Jackson-intensive. Can somebody please whack me on the head?
I recently worked on an extensive oral history for Spin magazine on the 25th anniversary of Purple Rain (the story’s not online, but the issue is on newsstands now). Most of the interviewees were Prince collaborators from that era, but I did wind up talking for a few minutes with Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, the drummer for the Roots. As it turns out, he’s a bit of scholar on Purple Rain, and since I couldn’t fit all of his observations in the story, I thought I’d reprint them here:
I wasn’t allowed to see Purple Rain. My two trips to see it in the movie theatre were foiled by my parents. Then I tried to pull a fast one by spending the night in my grandma’s house, and trying to see it with my cousins. My grandmother was like, “They going to the the movies,” and my mom was like, “Ahmir is not allowed to see Purple Rain. He can see Footloose, but not Purple Rain.” When I was a kid, a lot of my R-rated experiences with movies—or any other type of pop culture—had to be experienced second-hand, via the recapping and the recollections of friends. Eventually, when it came out on videotape, my friend got it for Christmas in 1985, and I watched it.
I always say that Prince really started hip-hop culture, whether the historians want to view it or not. Everything in that film mirrored hip-hop culture. You have Prince himself, a very unsual-looking figure. Most of the mavericks in hip-hop have a very distinct physical trait about them. Prince is about five feet tall, and a musical genius, [and] pretty much anybody that’s considered a musical genius in hip-hop has some sort of physical feature about them that’s odd, i.e. Biggie’s lazy eye. And then the whole idea of beefs—Prince and Morris. Morris’ whole pimp attitude, that was something you didn’t hear since the blaxploitation films of the early ’70s.
[There was also] the innovative use of drum machines, definitely a first in synth music. “When Doves Cry” is pretty much the first ringtone pop hit. It’s bookended by an intricate Egyptian chord in the beginning and a sort of classical run at the end, but in between it’s a very sparse, one-note affair.
And he definitely invented the video ho. Before Purple Rain, brothers had a hard time embracing a bikini-clad, high-heel-boot sporting, five-foot Midwest, light-skinned guy with a high falsetto. But the second after my block saw the “When Doves Cry,” and he was getting on Apollonia. That changed a lot of opinions.
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