Vivian Leigh

This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Vivian Le in this week for Roman Mars.

I was raised in a Vietnamese household, which means I was practically born with a karaoke mic in my hand.

Birthdays, family reunions, funerals, Sunday mornings after the Raiders lost, all good reasons to whip out the karaoke machine.

And one of the things that I remember most vividly during these formative mid-90s moments was watching the videos that played during the karaoke tracks my parents were singing along to.

They were mostly stock footage synchronized to the music.

You know, people on a beach, people sailing boats, people in a hot air balloon, pretty generic stuff.

Every time I hear the song, listen to the rhythm of the falling rain, I could still see freestyle roller skaters weaving through cones in an urban park.

These videos were like watching the equivalent of hotel art.

Something to look at, not necessarily something to think about.

In other words, they were nothing like the karaoke videos that Brian Raftery was watching when he was in his 20s.

Brian is a culture writer and author of the book Don't Stop Believin', How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life.

Brian's entry point to karaoke came in the late 1990s.

He and his friends were living in New York City when they discovered a little dive called Village Karaoke.

It was during these late night excursions that he realized the karaoke videos playing at Village were on a whole other level.

It wasn't like these videos were unrelated stock footage just thrown over music.

These were all originally produced short films, equipped with their own storylines, characters, and tangential interpretations of the song's lyrics.

And there were literally thousands of videos like this.

Some of these karaoke videos were clearly bananas, but they were not lacking in ambition.

Actors were hired, locations were scouted, lighting was designed, and a lot of them were shot on actual film stock.