This morning's reading included Sarah Layden’s ”The You You've Wanted to Become”, which appears in the first Online Edition of Diet Soap, a literary ’zine edited by Doug Lain and M.K. Hobson. Ms. Layden’s tale of a doleful, workaday loser finding solace, perhaps even redemption, within the red leather embrace of a Japanese restaurant/Karaoke bar is expertly crafted, with a protagonist that engenders a reader’s sympathies, even as he drunkenly blunders along, pining for the woman who abandoned him along the way. Even as he watches the bar’s patrons performing, this sad-sack yearns for more: “Even if he could sing, standing on a stage in front of strangers seemed show-offy, a mark of desperation, foolish. A small part of him wished he had the guts to perform, but the feeling was like a painful splinter under a thumbnail: in need of removal.” While Layden’s story remains firmly grounded in a First World, non-fantastic setting, there is a hint of something larger, something perhaps even magical at play as it reaches towards its climax, intimating that true change, real transformation is about to occur.

In an attached interview, Layden states, “There’s something so heartbreakingly real and true about karaoke, which is basically the art of faking. The performers, by and large, are a bunch of amateurs, and they’re so vulnerable.” While I would agree with Layden’s assertion that karaoke singers are exposing their vulnerabilities (but what artist isn’t?), I can’t help but feel that she is off the mark in calling karaoke “the art of faking.” In fact, I would suggest that karaoke, at least as a fictional device, is a perfect metaphor for the magical, the fantastic, and the transformative, in a culture that has, for the most part, abandoned belief in the supernatural.

Karaoke, its name a portmanteau of the Japanese words for “empty” and “orchestra,” has, over the last thirty or so years, moved from hotel lounges and backwater bars to the forefront of Western attention. Several nights a week, you can turn on a television and watch note-perfect mimics warbling renditions of popular songs spanning the past forty years. Many fall short, but some are transformed, becoming kings and queens of popular culture at the whim and delight of an always-fickle public. Is this faking it, or a reward of self-transformation? And is the idiom of the popular song, through the influence of these amateur endeavors, evolving into something more? There are very few rituals in 21st Century Western culture, few transformative rites. Pop music is the only common book we have.

An early draft of Mark Anthony Carpenter’s (sadly unpublished) “Fall of the Karaoke King” puts it this way: “For anywhere between two and five minutes, you’re a star. For two to five minutes, you’ve got them eating out of your hand. Under the spotlight, sweat beading on your brow, your hand shaky on the microphone, you still exude a certain confidence. You might forget some of the words, but to the drunks, you’re Elvis. Presley or Costello, that’s your choice. […] The KJ calls your name, puts on your song, and you’re transformed. For the next two to five minutes, you’re Springsteen or Sinatra, David Bowie or Toni Basil.” For a society that dreams of, yearns for stardom, karaoke is transformation in action.