//////////////////////////////////

Slippages, shower singing.

Karaoke and the ‘urban cowboy phenomenon’ can be viewed as cultural metaphors (culture with a two drink

minimum) or markers and projections in which there is a symmetry between the performer and the

observer/audience.1 Urban Cowboyites transform the places they frequent (to dance two-step and ride rodeo

bulls) into distinct, cultural districts. The people who partake in this craze do so knowingly. They know that

they are accountants, pretending to be cowboys and it is all bullocks, I mean bollocks but it doesn’t matter,

because it gives them pleasure. Karaoke compels people into going beyond, transcending and usurping their

capability. The act of karaoke contains slippages, its enactment, like singing in the shower, can elevate the

voice of the participants during the performance to heights that are unattainable in ordinary scenarios.                                                                                                                1 The “urban cowboy phenomenon” was a craze in the 1980’s in response to a film of the same title starring John Travolta. “When the movie was released in 1980, the urban-cowboy phenomenon took off. Mechanical bulls were installed in clubs all over the country, western clothing became de rigueur, and country music found a mainstream audience…” “How a Continuing Studies Program Led to “Urban Cowboy,” http://glasscockschoolblog.com/2012/03/07/how-a-continuing-studies-program-led-to-urban-cowboy/ (accessed November 23, 2013).

Fig. 18 Film Still: Woody Allen, To Rome with Love, 2012.

Freestyle, lip-synch and ventriloquism can similarly contain the expression of unconscious ability and altered

states of being. Automatic writing, medium trance states and the production of art that supposedly derives

not from the self (but from dream inspiration or altered states of creative potential) claims no authorship,

these are about transcribing something other and in the process this other becoming one’s own.

Fig .19 Sigmar Polke, ‘Higher beings ordered: paint the right upper corner black!’, 1969.

Karaoke and lip-synch use temporal change and mimicry in an attempt to establish control over

transmutation by trying to copy rather than render a new rendition. Sometimes this attempt at

repetition to achieve the perfectly copied performance becomes sterile and creatively dead, like the

death mask. For those listening to karaoke, it is not the notes that are perfectly mimicked that

provide entertainment, but those that are wildly off.

‘ ’Play _ play _ play _ play play play _ play play play play play play //////////////////

Can you see me anymore _ can you see me anymore _ can you see me anymore _ can you see me anymore _ can you see me anymore _ can you see me anymore _ can you see me anymore _ can you see me anymore _ can you see me anymore ‘‘_ _ _ 2

                                                                                                               2 Excerpt from Sue Tompkins’ More Cola Wars, 2004.

In Karaoke audience members become interchangeable with the performers, they are both passive and active

and make a conscious decision to be part of the action, they are entertainer and paying audience. It smacks of

wish-fulfilment, this participatory act which implicates the audience, as they are inseparable from the source.

Of the ‘space’ and mutual complicity between the artist and the audience, I believe that there can be a role

inter-changeability in the minds of the observer and the artist, where they can share the creative process, this

interface. As with karaoke, art can challenge ways of looking, and shift the satisfaction of being involved.

Karaoke is transmutative and reflects the day-to-day changes of culture, Tammy Wynette can be sung many

ways, and each time it is sung it has an echo of the truth. In the murky mire of precedents, that bouillabaisse

we submerge ourselves in, our creative cornucopia, we are ‘stretching our toes downward to find a new

bottom from which we might push off’. 3 We are again in the dumpster, diving for inspiration.

                                                                                                               3 Dave Hickey, Pirates and Farmers, (London: Ridinghouse, 2013), 53.

Fig. 20 Michael Krebber, Flags (Against Nature), 2003.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig. 21 Sing the hits of Tammy Wynette, Tribute Karaoke CD, 2004.

 

The artist can create something akin to a personal ‘karaoke’ singing along to an object in their own mind;

altered reality, hyper-reality, which they then refine and transmute. It has a semblance of the original in their

head, but is voiced exclusively by the artist in their own way on each repetition. The reason is the archetypal

nature of the original, as soon as it is touched it is transmuted.

The echoed original is cross-pollinated, misappropriated, begged, borrowed and stolen, dumpster-dived,

regurgitated, reconstituted into a new object with which to engage the observer. This semblance (of the

original) can have the strength of a violating interloper or the subtlety of a haunting. It is a performance of

reality, it is a voice tuned to reality, but it is not the original that the artist has heard, like the snakeskin. In the

tuning in and out, across the spectrum of white noise, the sound carpet, the copy is heard sensorally, unlike

the original, which the artist has perceived. As in karaoke what is sung is not the pure original, but what is

perceived with all the distortions and interesting phenomena which occur within the process of listening.

‘When you sleep with a source you sleep with everyone your source has slept with.’4  

                                                                                                               4 Mark Costello & David Foster Wallace, Signifying Rappers, (New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1990), 87.

Fig. 22 Leah Capaldi, 7 hours, 7 days, 2009.5

                                                                                                               

5 During this seven-day performance artist Leah Capaldi sang sixty-five love songs on repeat for seven hours a day. “The songs had been recommended to me on request by friends. I asked visitors to duet with me as they entered the gallery.”

Leah Capaldi, “Works 2009”, http://www.leahcapaldi.com/2009-7hours2.html (accessed September 25, 2014).

Karaoke is not about perfect recreation, it is about the transformation into something that is new,

containing novelty and differing perception. Rap music is based on the accumulated, residual foundations

of African and Afro American music and verbal art, infused with a personal style. It is enveloped by a digitally

synthesized sound carpet of sampled, or pirated, ‘backbeats’, which becomes the song around and behind

the rap. This cultural deposit saturated within the music imbues it with potency, vitality. Its sources are

diverse, culturally eclectic and by sampling familiar lines it hooks the listeners ear, keying it in and acting as a

segue into a plethora of musical and cultural signposts.

It can be argued that there is nothing new in art, and that copying and sampling has been the

predominant movement and guiding influence in the development of art. In the same way that

radicalism against the convention (which can often be considered as debasement and creative noise

in the context of copying/reproduction) is the source of novelty and transition. In the same way the

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

physical score to the symphony is a static object, well defined in time and space, whereas the ‘art’ of

the performance of a symphony relies on huge aspects beyond the printed page. No performer can

reproduce a prior performance; every encounter with the score produces a new performance. We

return to the mirror but note that every reflection is different. The notion of an ‘original’ is spurious,

it is comforting to think there is something solid and determined, the reality is that everything is

transitional, the freedom is that by repetition you create something new.