Raindrops Keep Falling on My AK-47
Oliver Hunt on the plastic surfaces of karaoke visuals.
Today, Cinema Year Zero presents a new essay by Oliver Hunt, whose discovery of an obscure 1990s karaoke video leads to a deep dive on the aesthetic pleasures and inherent contradictions of the genre.
Oliver is a programmer and video artist.
John Lennon is dead. His ashes are scattered by long term creative, romantic and sexual partner Yoko Ono in Central Park. Then in 1999, across an entirely different hemisphere, a cameraman aims his lens at a bikini-clad woman who finds herself in a precarious circumstance as a tribal sacrifice unfolds. Tied up, her body will be ritually committed to the Gods. An indeterminable time later, a drunken salaryman sings ‘Let It Be’ in a dulcet tone, contemplating his rebellious youthful aspirations in a karaoke booth off a side alley in Shinjuku. Despite these seemingly opaque moments appearing disconnected, via the lens of karaoke videos still quietly circulating through digital archives, such threads begin to cohere.
Karaoke videos occupy an oddly overlooked corner of video culture. They are, in essence, conceptual grunt work, often found flickering behind the lyrics in the low glow of karaoke booths worldwide. Designed for half glances and minimal engagement, they resemble the faintly Dadaist animations found in bowling alleys. The precedent had been set decades earlier through Max Fleischer’s “bouncing ball” sing-a-long animations of the 1920s, though by the 1980s karaoke companies in Japan had begun folding low-budget video imagery into the format. Throughout the 1990s, karaoke videos circulated primarily via LaserDisc before disappearing into the obscurity of car boot sales and, eventually, online archives.
Karaoke videos are typically delivered in two flavours. The first derives from cheaply purchased stock footage of American skylines or first-person travelogues somehow pressed into service beneath Anglo-Western songs and ultimately mismatched over Morrissey’s warbles. The second, more common for Japanese city pop catalogues, resembles a shoestring rendition of familiar music video grammar: a heartbroken woman clutching candles beneath the moonlight, a youthful Casanova kicking stones down a lonely road, et cetera. Instantly recognisable forms of melodrama. Perhaps lorem ipsum is the key to it all. A placeholder, yes, but also a curious aesthetic proposition. Something recognisable yet unknowable, suggestive of meaning without ever quite delivering it. To the uninitiated, it carries the vague promise of coherence and for the initiated, it is gloriously nonsensical. A plastic surface stretched taut over a void.
