Karaoke was invented in Japan in the 1970s, and it quickly spread around the world. It’s both performance and participation, and it became common in bars and at private parties seemingly everywhere through the 1980s. As it grew in popularity in different countries, it adapted to those cultures.

According to Stephen Royce Giddens, as karaoke became part of pop culture in the United States, it started appearing in television shows and movies, operating as a plot device that allowed characters to express their true feelings through their choice of song. Protagonists from vampires to aspiring entertainers suddenly stood up to present their truths with pre-recorded music and singing of varying quality.

Meanwhile, for the rest of us, the amateurism of the karaoke performance became an important part of the creative act.

“Bad singing,” writes Giddens, citing French economist and social theorist Jacques Attali, the kind of singing “that disrupts a mimetic repetition of a song, not necessarily unpleasant, but certainly lacking in a ‘technical’ proficiency that only operates conventionally to silence other/different voices” is a political act, “in that it is ‘the permanent affirmation of the right to be different.’ It suggests a move from ‘repetition’ to ‘composition.’”

That’s certainly a very empowering interpretation for those of us who have belted out “Total Eclipse of the Heart” after a couple of beers.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, looking at globalization in China, finds in karaoke the perfect proof of the process.

“Cultural globalization is about hybrid forms, as opposed to simple Americanization,” he writes,

meaning a more apt symbol for twenty-first-century globalization than the McDonald’s franchise might be the karaoke bar, which arrived in China around the same time as McDonald’s. While karaoke bars rarely get the same media attention as the burger behemoth, there are now many more locations in China to sing karaoke than there are to order a Big Mac. McDonald’s outlets have American roots, but karaoke bars have a more complex origin story that speaks more effectively to our era: they bear traces—via their organization, look, and playlists—of Filipino, Japanese, British, and American influences, and indeed African influences as well.

Global flows, then, travel through mechanically supported, often out-of-tune performances of pop tunes in front of friends and strangers.

Back in its country of origin, karaoke is so ubiquitous that scholars can use it to study other aspects of society. According to legal scholar Mark D. West, two decades after their invention, karaoke machines were pervasive in social spaces such as snack bars.

“In 1999, karaoke was the fourth most popular leisure activity in Japan with over 50 million participants,” West writes. “The only more popular leisure activities were eating out, driving, and sightseeing.”

Given its popularity, karaoke, a noisy and often late-night activity, triggers a large number of noise pollution complaints. But as West points out,

[w]e might expect [even] more karaoke noise incidents in Japan. Due at least in part to a relative lack of private space and various social factors, karaoke is much more popular in Japan than in the United States. Inhabitable land is scarce, people live close together, and many houses have poor noise protection. It is little surprise that noise is sometimes problematic.

West uses karaoke to study how people in Japan use the system against a network of social capital and attitudes towards noise and neighborly respect—and how this reflects Japanese citizens’ use of the state’s dispute resolution mechanisms. Focusing on sound complaints related to the volume and duration of karaoke performances, he examines conflict resolution strategies in the Japanese legal system, noting that “karaoke fights are an easily definable set of disputes with a surprisingly good set of data.” But many complainers are happy to divert their complaints to a mediation option rather than pursue a solution through the courts.

“My analysis leads to two claims,” West writes. First,

karaoke noise disputes, like virtually all pollution disputes in Japan, are usually resolved before they reach the litigation stage through a bureaucratic pollution complaint resolution mechanism led by “pollution complaint counselors.” More than 80,000 complaints per year, many of which might otherwise clog the court system, are made to counselors.

Second, “use of the pollution complaint mechanism appears to be a function of both self-interested, institutionally encouraged behavior and social factors.” In other words, a clear understanding of the litigation system—its costs and its flaws—encourages the use of alternative bureaucratic solutions.

“One of the major complaints [in Japan] has been that citizens have poor access to legal institutions,” West writes. ”At least in the limited context of [noise] pollution, however, Japan appears to have done an impressive job of resolving a set of disputes by simpler and less costly means than the formal legal system.”

Carry on, karaoke, carry on.

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