Karaoke Videos
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
What personal experiences shaped the host's view on karaoke?
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.
I definitely remember nights and times when I was singing when everyone would just kind of turn their head toward the video because they were so strange and they're so ambitious and they're so weird. And some of them look really great.
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.
Like the Benny and the Jets video, you can interpret that song 85 million ways. But the video we remembered for some reason was like a mom luring a bunch of kids slowly to a plate full of cookies. And I'm like, what the hell does this have to do with Benny and the Jets? No Benny, no Jets.
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.
There's a very strange video that we used to talk about all the time for Paul McCartney's Ebony and Ivory, which was really, I don't know if it's problematic or not, but it was like, there's a black man walking a white dog, and then a white man walking a black dog, and then they become friends. It is trying to be true to the spirit of this, you know, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder duet, but it makes no sense that it's a dog park.
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. Ryan wanted to know who had made these and why go through all the effort.
I was just kind of like, this is weird that like, this is a video that like, we're just here as a goof and someone put a lot of time and effort to make this video for this Hall & Oates song that we're all drunkenly singing in a tiny room.
As it turns out, these weirdo karaoke videos were kind of their own micro-movement of filmmaking. It only lasted a handful of years and is only remembered by a handful of people, but it gave a generation of aspiring filmmakers something that barely exists anymore. A paying gig where they could just mess around and figure out how to make stuff.
It's about as close to an outside-of-Hollywood Hollywood project as you can get.
Some videos were good, some were bad, and several were so bad that they were awesome. And I had to know more about where they came from. The story of these videos actually originated about a decade before Brian discovered them at Village Karaoke. Back in the 1980s, the world of consumer electronics was exploding. Personal computers, the Walkman, camcorders, fax machines, the Game Boy.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:40
2
What personal experiences shaped the host's view on karaoke?
0:40–4:59
3
How did Brian Raftery's karaoke experiences differ from the host's?
4:59–9:41
4
What was the unique production approach of karaoke videos in the 90s?
9:41–15:46
5
Who were the key figures behind the creation of karaoke videos?
15:46–35:14