All That Is Solid is an attempt to examine the relationships between popular music and global capitalism. Click here to access the archive.
I'm a little late to the party, but recently I had the pleasure of playing Rock Band for the first time on my friend's Xbox. From what I understood of the game before (as well as Guitar Hero), I thought that my aptitude for playing a real guitar would be a detriment to playing the game correctly, and my experience confirmed my prejudice. But it also became apparent to me very quickly that my "musician's handicap" didn't matter -- it's a game, for cryin' out loud! After a couple of turns on all the instruments, I started getting the hang of it, and I'll be damned it if this wasn't the most enjoyable variation of Simon Says I have ever played. With the right friends, the game creates a party-like atmosphere, transforming a living room into your own private karaoke bar, and I got to thinking about the similarities between the two as musical experiences. The two share a lot of features -- the ability to "perform" without the prerequisite of musical technique, the vicarious pleasure of identifying with pop songs as the performer, the temptation to mimic iconic styles -- but their foundations rest on different political bedrock.
While the tradition of karaoke is necessarily part and parcel of a Culture Industry that mass-produces and mass-markets discrete objects, the social space it occupies mimics a more pre-industrial way of experiencing music. Before the existence of recordings -- and, crucially, before the legal category of Ownership applied to musical compositions -- the only way to experience music (other than practicing an instrument) was in a social setting, and traditional songs and melodies were community property. Karaoke recreates this space: the binders full of pop recordings represent a bank of "community property," which anyone may use to perform their favorite melodies from a shared cultural history. To borrow some terminology from the world of jazz, these binders represent a late-20th century Fakebook -- they have become our Standards, to the point that new iterations are more of a reflection of the performer than of the composition. I would even go so far as to say that the term "folk music" more accurately applies to karaoke catalgoues than it does to acoustic guitar-toting traditionalists.
But the essential feature that turns off karaoke detractors is exactly what makes it unique, arresting, and wonderful: participants are encouraged to sing in spite of (or even because of) often being terrible singers, in addition to being encouraged to sing "bad" songs. In fact, singing "bad" songs implicitly forgives "bad" singing: in this setting, it is much more fun to belt out a shoddy rendition of Def Leppard than to perform a pitch-perfect take of "Everything In Its Right Place." I even have the feeling that it's almost unsportsmanlike to perform really well -- I would feel like more of an ass if I rehearsed and perfected my Prince routine than if I fell flat on my face trying to approximate his falsetto. Add to that the (sometimes tacit, often not) entreaty for everyone to sing at least once in an evening, and we have a truly democratic forum to commune and participate in our shared cultural heritage (even if the heritage is nothing more than that of Global Mass Media -- hey, it's all us postmodern subjects have got). And to any Ayn Rand fans who would say this is a perfect example of the triumph of mediocrity, I say stay home and play Rock Band, because this is as wholesome as it gets. I say this because Rock Band (et al) is for technocrats, all wrapped up in grand old capitalist values like Competition, Excellence, Achievement, and Perfection. Karaoke is a shared experience of human folly, and Rock Band is about winning.
Again, I understand that Rock Band is a game, which by definition has objectives that are external to the actual activity (i.e. "play" the guitar correctly in order to score points), and as I mentioned earlier, I think it's a lot of fun. These games aren't alone, though. Along with American Idol and Making The Band-type shows, they feed directly into the notion of Music (and by extension, Art) as Meritocracy, the hoariest ghost of capitalism.
Ignoring for a moment the relative lack of commercial success enjoyed by former Idol winners, these forms of competitive music-making reinscribe the great myth that those who are most successful are those who "earned it" through a combination of talent, hard work, and gumption. Rock Band lays it out explicitly in "career mode" as you gain a specific number of "fans" from each performance relative to how precisely you are able to ape a given song. Obviously no one believes that bands gain support in exactly this way, but the metanarrative probably rings true to what most people believe about popular musicians. Even those of us who don't believe the ruse about the origins of Success probably do subscribe to the flipside of the story: we believe that a band playing to a crowd of five is most likely not as good as one that plays to a crowd of 500. Finally, this metanarrative reinforces my least favorite myth, the one that says some people are Musicians and other people are not. Karaoke tells us the opposite: we are all musicians, and even those cursed with lead pipes instead of golden ones are capable of delivering transcendent performances. I like that story, and by Calvin Johnson I swear that, even though I have been playing instruments for 20 years (and got my B.A. in Music Composition), I am not any "better" at music than anyone else. By the people, for the people, zzzzz...
