Redemption song

We were doing our usual late-night survey, but the pickings were getting slim. Places open up one week, then close down a few weeks later. It seems there’s not enough moolah to be made by coaxing drunken patrons to warble through Every Rose Has Its Thorn. So this is the final frontier, the last lounge act in town: the karaoke joints of Malate, a dying breed if ever there was one.

A long time ago, I wrote an article called “Why Americans Fear Karaoke,” about how foreigners such as myself experience panic attacks when handed a microphone and asked to sing.

Well, there’s a flip side to that. If you do, by chance or great effort, convince an American to conquer those deep-down fears and get cozy with a microphone, you will probably never be able to drag him or her away from it again. Once they’ve found what they think is their “zone,” they will become the characters up there on the karaoke stage who pick three, four, five songs in a row (instead of passing the mic), who insist on hogging the songbook and combing it for hidden gems, and generally act like it’s American Idol auditions.

Now, judging from most American Idol auditions, there are many Americans who really should stay away from microphones. Yet look at the hordes that turn out each year for those auditions.

Over in Malate, finding Americans on the karaoke stage is still not easy. Koreans have made in-roads, as have Japanese visitors (places like Chick Maid Café and the catchily-named but now-defunct “The Japan” cater to this clientele with appropriately Nippon karaoke selections).

But Americans? Hardly ever see them. Except for myself, sometimes, reflected in the omnipresent disco mirrors. Fellow writer Igan D’Byan has already documented his fascination with the apocalyptic jukebox called karaoke (“The Videoke of Doom at the End of the World”). He and fellow STAR comrade Jojo Gamboa have made it their mission of sorts to drag as many sedate souls onto the vocalist stage as possible. I’ve joined them on a number of these treks. There are always girls on hand: girls of the G.R.O. persuasion whose chief responsibility, in the early stages at least, is pouring bottles of beer into waiting, half-empty glasses, and punching in numbers from a karaoke songbook.

Chick Maid Café in Malate is serviced by Filipinas wearing, er, maid outfits. They have karaoke, too.

Many of our favorite haunts have stages with disco lights and Vegas razzamatazz, though we prefer the private rooms. The girls hang around at the edges of the party, clapping and whooping, not unlike the celebrity judges on American Idol. They occasionally appear onstage unexpectedly in the middle of a song, shaking a tambourine.

Igan sees something doomsday-ish about the whole need to grasp the microphone — like we all secretly want to sing our final, favorite numbers before Armageddon carries us away in a rapture or down through a crack in the Earth. My take on the karaoke demon is more prosaic: it has to do with age, and how at a certain point in life, holding the mike, watching the words scroll up the video screen, and belting them out as though you really, really mean them has an existential appeal: it feels… cathartic.

Sometimes, anyway. As with most thrills in life, it can also feel like going through the motions — another round of Aerosmith songs, another shot at belting out Cheap Trick’s Surrender or Radiohead’s Creep. This, too, becomes an existential choice: whether to make the song count, or to simply go through your petty paces.

The bucket of San Miguel Light is there on the table, sweating, and the songbook is open. Pages flip, fingers fly past the Korean and Japanese section, past the ugly standards that have gotten so many people in trouble (My Way, anyone?). We have stumbled upon the Necronomicon of all karaoke songbooks: the one housed primarily in Japanese joints, with decent arrangements and a deep trove of songs that won’t make you shudder or hurl. One kind of guideline: Does the songbook contain Brass in Pocket by The Pretenders, What’s So Funny (About Peace Love and Understanding) by Elvis Costello, and More Than This by Roxy Music, all featured in the movie Lost in Translation? Then it scores basic hipness points. Does it then go further, including every Guns ‘N Roses song you ever wanted to belt out, some Black Sabbath, a handful of numbers by Blur, Badfinger, The Ramones, even Jeff Buckley? Does it have Led Zeppelin? Then it might be the very karaoke book they pass around up in Heaven.

The Necronomicon seems to migrate from week to week, with places shutting down before you become really attached; then it pops up again in some other Nippon-friendly place. Everybody has their personal preferences: for my wife, who visited a certain Japanese maid-serviced bar with us one night, it was the presence of Bjork, Japan and Duran Duran songs that made the book legit. For me, it changes every time I rifle through the thing. There’s always some track I thought I’d never see on a videoke screen — stuff from Jane’s Addiction or Stone Roses. And then there’s things you swear you’ll never, ever go near again in public — Meatloaf’s Paradise by the Dashboard Light, for instance.

Another lesson of karaoke: you finally learn what the hell the words are all about. Up there on the screen, the lyrics scan like poetry, when they’re not swallowed up by “Ohhh-mmm, oooh, yeah, umm, yeah”s or similar typed-out exhortations. You actually appreciate what the singer was getting at, and maybe, with the proper lighting, liberal application of iced beer, and the right key, you can catch the frequency — whether it’s Black Francis inquiring as to the location of his mind or Mick Jagger sticking his hand in his heart to spill it out over the stage.

Most of the time, it’s just a lounge act, you up there and the people downstage checking their cell phones in polite boredom or staring off into space. But sometimes the song can match the mood of the singer, like a hidden code being sent out into the dark, reverberating the air. Maybe only you know it’s for real, behind the microphone.