Karaoke World Championships: Karaoke Kings

I arrive in Helsinki around noon, still reeling from a brutal 15-hour transatlantic flight.  Jet-lagged, and nearly twisted on Lorazepam, I hop a taxi to the harbor and board the M/S Galaxy, a luxury liner offering weekend cruises to Estonia.  I drop my bags in the windowless cabin that will be my home for the next three days and make my way downstairs to the Starlight Show Lounge.  At this point, the Lorazepam, a prescription sedative generally prescribed for anxiety disorders and short-term insomnia, has fully kicked in, adding a foggy, surreal effect to the proceedings.  As if on cue, I’m approached by a large Irish man dressed in a velvet leprechaun suit.  We begin chatting, and when he learns that I’m on assignment for HARP magazine, he insists on buying me a drink.  This is a scene that will repeat itself numerous times over the next three days, though not all my benefactors will be dressed as magical elves. The bartender pours us shots of Salmiakki Koskenkorva, a foul Finnish liqueur resembling burnt Jagermeister. The enormous leprechaun raises his glass and toasts, “E’res to ya, mate!”  At the front of the large theater, the stage goes dark except for a lone spotlight, and a hush comes over the crowd.  It’s just before midnight when a fleshy, egg-shaped man with a towering pompadour and white satin jumpsuit takes the stage and launches into the Presley classic Burning Love.  His name is Jouni Viirtala, but I will come to know him as the Elvis of Finland.  His wide, spongy hips undulate to the rockabilly beat, his voice a soaring vibrato of passion and repressed sexual angst:

Lord Almighty, I feel my temperature rising/ Higher higher, it's burning through to my soul/ Girl, you gonna set me on fire/ My brain is flaming, I don't know which way to go

While this may sound like a Vegas-themed trip of David Lynchian proportions, what I’m actually witnessing is a standout performance from the 2006 Karaoke World Championships.  Over the next two days, 44 participants from 20 countries will vie for the hefty prize package and the coveted championship title.  Now in its fourth year, the KWC has become the world’s premier venue for competitive karaoke.  These events, however, are mostly designed to boost tourism and are not generally taken seriously. But competitive karaoke is a different beast. For one thing, it requires actual talent (sorry, air guitar shredders).  It can also be a springboard to a legitimate recording career – Just ask Nashville’s Mindy McCready, who parlayed tapes of her karaoke performances into six Top 40 country hits and over a million record sales.  But most significantly, karaoke has become a global industry generating an estimated ten billion dollars in annual revenue.  No longer relegated to seedy hotel lounges, bowling alleys, or happy hour at TGI Friday’s, karaoke has emerged as a bona fide cultural phenomenon that crosses all social, political, religious, and ethnic lines.  In Japan, 280,000 bars are outfitted with karaoke systems and 64 million people, nearly half the population, perform karaoke on a regular basis.  There are thousands of karaoke bars in the US, and hundreds of thousands more across the world.  And it doesn’t stop there:  The Karaoke Channel is delivering monster ratings on digital cable and satellite TV, and companies like Sound Choice offer karaoke tracks for your cell phone, computer, DVD player, and iPod.  Next year, CBS will launch a karaoke-themed reality show, and a number of British churches have installed the Hymnal Plus, a karaoke system that allows parishioners to sing along with their favorite gospel tunes, including a disco version of Amazing Grace.  Like it or not, karaoke has ensconced itself in all facets of our culture, burrowing its way into our collective psyches.  And it’s not going away any time soon.

The M/S Galaxy, home of the 2006 Karaoke World Championships, is a full-service cruise ship making daily runs across the Gulf of Finland, from Helsinki to the medieval walled city of Tallinn.  For this particular voyage, karaoke systems have been installed in every nightclub, lounge and casino, allowing passengers to sing virtually anywhere on the boat.  There are even karaoke machines in the pool area and inside the saunas. The KWC performances are broadcast on TV monitors in all the restaurants and gift shops, and the audio from the event is piped into the bathrooms, elevators, and even into the passenger cabins.  As one elderly woman lamented, “I am on the boat for vacation.  But the karaoke is everywhere.  You cannot escape it.”

It’s around 2AM on this first night of the competition and the Starlight Lounge is jumping.   Japan’s Takahiro Masuda just ripped through a pitch-perfect version of Led Zeppelin’s Rock and Roll, and now Ari Koivunen, a 19 year-old heavy metal wonderkind from Finland, is powering his way through the Scorpions Still Loving You. Borrowing from the successful American Idol format, the contest features a series of performance and elimination rounds with the top five men and women advancing to the finals.  The competitors choose their own songs to perform and are judged on voice quality, stage presence, and entertainment value by a multinational jury panel.  At the end of the second day, an overall male and female winner will be announced during a lavish award ceremony. 

The competition has all the rabid nationalism of the World Cup Finals, with legions of boisterous fans draped in the flags of their countries.  Estonia has the largest contingent with more than twenty supporters.  They wear matching shirts, hand-decorated with the names of the Estonian performers written in sparkle dust and puffy paint.  A fresh-faced, genial group, they could be easily mistaken for camp counselors or members of the high school glee club.  The Irish fans, however, are not of the sparkle dust ilk.  Numbering at least fifteen (including the leprechaun), they are a loud, wild, drunken mob.  Though they occasionally heckle other fans, it is all in the good-natured spirit of the event.  I cannot say the same about the Russians.  There are only three of them, but they are a dark and menacing presence.  These barrel-chested brutes with enormous Popeye forearms and neck tattoos are seated at a cocktail table next to me.  One of them, a stocky 50-something man, wears an all-white tracksuit with Soviet Union emblazoned on the back in fiery, Communist red.  I’m certain they are Russian mafia or ex-KGB, dispatched from Moscow to assure victory for their karaoke comrades.  The group is so intimidating, with their cold dead eyes and excessive man-jewelry, that I am compelled to cheer for the Russian competitors regardless of the performance quality.  When Svetlana Erukhimova finishes a tepid burlesque rendition of Feelings in which she sounds like Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle, I applaud with the thunderous fervor of a madman, beating my hands together until the palms are red and swollen and tender.  “Bravo!” I scream, but the only thought in my head is Please don’t kill me.

While there’s no disputing karaoke’s impact on global culture, there are many theories to explain its enduring popularity.  Some see it as a self-help tool, providing the participants with the encouragement and adulation lacking in their everyday lives.  For most of us, singing in a karaoke bar is the only time we’ll ever hear people cheering for us.  It massages our fragile egos and restores our confidence.  Others think karaoke is simply a revival of public singing, an age-old tradition that is hard-wired into our DNA.  “People have innate desires for several things,” says Kurt Slep, CEO of Sound Choice.  “Sex is one.  Eating is another.  And singing.  People have been singing since the dawn of time.  It’s natural.”  Sociologists and cultural anthropologists, however, attribute karaoke’s success to something more reflective of modern society:  our obsession with celebrity.  Earlier in the day, I heard one of the competitors tell an interviewer, “If you aren’t somebody, you’re nobody.”  This says a great deal about the value we place on celebrity, and how we use it to define ourselves as human beings.  Noted sociologist and author Erving Goffman suggests that without celebrity, we “run the danger of being, in our own eyes, unpersons.”  Karaoke fills this void, allowing us to become celebrities for a few moments while we’re on stage.  “Everyone wants to be a rock star,” says Kristin O, a karaoke host from Michigan. “Everybody wants a taste of fame.  And karaoke gives them that opportunity. ”

To me, this momentary brush with celebrity is the heart of karaoke’s appeal.  And it happens every night, in karaoke bars around the world.  When people sing against type – the shy, mousy accountant who sings a sexy Madonna song – they transcend themselves if only for a moment.  In my younger days when I’d sing David Lee Roth’s Just a Gigolo at the Silver Cloud in San Francisco, I would transform into a daring lothario, bold and flirtatious with all the swagger of, well, someone else.  And that was the point.  But when the music would stop, I’d revert back to my nebbish self, a pudgy insecure lad with wrinkle-resistant Dockers and a nine-dollar haircut. 

The second day of competition begins at 11AM, and the boat is rocking.  Not rocking in the figurative sense, like how you might say Bon Jovi rocks (which they totally do), but actually rocking in a violent back and forth motion.  A massive storm had formed in the pre-dawn hours, turning the glassy Baltic Sea into a swirling black cauldron.  At this point, the ship is pitching so severely that the performers are having trouble maintaining their balance on the stage.  I should probably mention that I suffer from motion sickness in all its regurgitative forms.  I get seasick, airsick, carsick, and on one regrettable trip to the Grand Canyon, donkeysick.  As the storm’s intensity grows and the ship’s vicious thrashing along with it, I feel the bile rising in my esophagus.  Frantically, I thumb through my Estonian travel dictionary for the phrase, “I’m feeling nauseous.  May I have a vomit sack?”  Luckily, I remember reading that Lorazepam, the sedative prescribed for my anxiety on airplane flights, has a side effect of reducing nausea.  I fish the bottle out of my camera bag and pop three of the little white pills, washing them down with a cruel Estonian vodka.  As I would learn the hard way, this particular medication has the exact opposite of its intended effect when combined with copious amounts of grain alcohol and a lack of sleep.  Instead of calming me, I quickly become jittery and overtly paranoid.  Though my teeth are grinding and my mind is racing through a number of wildly improbable conspiracy theories, at least I won’t be blowing my lunch off the deck and into the angry sea.

In the afternoon, the top 15 men and women semifinalists are announced and surprisingly, all four Russian competitors make the cut.  Perhaps it’s the narcotic-induced paranoia or just the cynicism that comes with middle age, but I immediately suspect foul play.  One of the Russians, Veronica Konnova, is a true talent and easily a frontrunner among the women.  But the other three performers are only average singers, placing them near the middle of the pack.  Could this be a sign of jury tampering?  My suspicions are bolstered when a series of mysterious technical “glitches” begin plaguing the top performers.  As Malaysia’s Tham Hui Chye hits the chorus of Mama Mia, the audio suddenly drops out and she is forced to start again.  Michelle Lynch of Ireland, clearly one of the strongest performers in the competition, flees the stage when her Bonnie Tyler song stalls and then skips forward.  Is this the handiwork of the Russians?  Clearly my paranoia is skyrocketing to dangerous levels.  Just as I feel that a complete psychotic meltdown is inevitable, my fears are allayed and I begin to come down from my misery. When the top five men and women finalists are announced and the only Russian to advance is the lovely Miss Konnova, I know that all is right with the world.  

It’s now 4AM, and I’ve been listening to karaoke continuously for 34 hours.  The storm has finally moved beyond us, and my Lorazepam-induced neurosis has subsided.  During a brief break in the action, I hit the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face.   When I look in the mirror, I barely recognize the person staring back at me.  I’m completely strung out, my cheeks puffy from the booze and fatigue, three-days of spotty beard growth, pupils wide as milk saucers, my right eye twitching uncontrollably.  Though I’ve made many errors in judgment, it appears I was right about one thing:  Anyone who would fly halfway around the world for a karaoke contest must be deranged. I just didn’t expect that person to be me.

The judges have submitted their final votes, and the winners of the 2006 Karaoke World Championship are about to be announced.  The contestants nervously await the decision, some pacing, others praying, their faces all strained with anticipation and exhaustion.  Mark Wilson of Australia and Tham Hui Chye of Malaysia take first place for the men and women respectively.  Veronica Konnova places third, and the disappointment is visibly welling in her eyes.  The Russian man in the white tracksuit embraces her, plants a gentle kiss on her forehead and whispers something reassuring in her ear.  In the end, the Russians were not gangsters or thugs, but rather, doting spouses and supportive friends just like you or me.  For the grand finale, all the competitors, sponsors and event organizers join hands on the stage and sing We Are the World.  It is a saccharine-sweet moment, free from all irony, cynicism and ill will.  “Karaoke epitomizes not just a way of making music but a way of life,” says Rob Drew, author of the book Karaoke Nights and Professor of Communication at Saginaw Valley State University. “Karaoke casts a model for how we can live every moment of every day, its Utopian ideals cobbled together from impossible dreams.” The sun is coming up as I leave the Starlight Show Lounge, and I can actually feel myself smiling.  Maybe the world needs a bit of saccharine every now and again to remind us of a simpler time, when we were still young and full of hope. Of course, saccharin causes cancer in laboratory animals, but we’ll save that one for another day. 

Editor’s note:  Three days after the 2006 Karaoke World Championships, both Tham Hui Chyi and Badri Ibrahim of Malaysia were offered recording contracts by Sony BMG and Warner Music.

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