KARAOKE KULTURE, AFR Magazine July, 1995

THE lighting was low, the room mesmerized by Diana Ross' Endless Love.

The leggy temptress lovingly wrapped her right hand around the long slender tube, caressed it tenderly with her other hand before putting its head carefully to her mouth.

She looked longingly into my eyes, her own full of love and desire, imploring me to share this special moment as one we would never forget. Abandoning her daytime inhibitions, she lost herself in a wild climax as she built to a passionate crescendo and then……she dropped the microphone.

No, we weren't on the set of Horny Housewives, just another night of Asian
karaoke. As my co-performer, the horrified Hong Kong soo jeh, or miss,
shrank from the stage with embarrassment, her office colleagues fell about
laughing in their seats. The soo jeh instinctively clasped her had over her mouth and fled back to the Fluffy Duck, with dinky ornamental umbrella, waiting at the table.

Her "face" was temporarily shattered but it was nothing the oblivion of
tomorrow morning's stenography couldn't fix.

At that point, Sinatra's My Way struck up, cue for my Filipino companion to head straight for the mike.  It was then we knew it was going to be a long and expensive night at the Mandarin Palace Night Club in Hong Kong's Wanchai district.

Across Asia, the same scene was being played out in thousands of
restaurants, clubs and bars. Karaoke, or "empty orchestra" as it translates
from its native Japanese, is the staple entertainment of an estimated
500,000 outlets around the region.

Whether it be branded KTV, California Red, or K-Box, karaoke is not just a
fad in Asia, its near disease, a regional obsession without frontiers.
Indeed, the one certainty of a business trip to any country in Asia is that
the self-conscious Western executive anxious to stitch up a deal will
have to warble something at some point to people of an alien culture he or
she has only just met. They don't teach you that in management school.

On the right night, or at lunchtime for the hardcore, an enthusiastic
Western vocal chord dedicating The Two of Us to an erstwhile local business
partner will probably make more impact as even the ubiquitous brown paper
bag in the right official's hand to get that crucial deal away.

It would be easy to compare the Asian obsession with karaoke with, say,
Melbourne's passion for Australian Rules football or Sydney's with a
harbour view. Easy but wrong. Its much, much deeper than either, and taken
so much more seriously. But equally karaoke isn't something Asians
intellectualise about, or even think they take that seriously. They just do
it. The intellectualizing is left to bemused Westerners.

Geelong boy Michael Cave examined the karaoke at close quarters during a
two-year stint as editor of Tokyo Time Out, the popular Japanese
entertainment and listings magazine.

"Japan, and this is probably true of Asian societies generally, is a place
where the concept of indidividualism is generally suppressed," explains
Cave. "Karaoke is a way to express yourself without any lingering shame
being apportioned to you.

"You can let yourself go. It's a release from society's pressure cooker.
It's a rare opportunity to be an individual.

"The dichotomy here is that they don't think consciously of karaoke as
their chance to be an individual. But as an outsider looking in, we can
understand that might be why they do it and like it, to express the deeper
need."

Karaoke machines, starting at $2700 each, are just as likely to be found
in the poorest Burmese village as in the glitziest, tackiest Hong Kong gin
palace. Regardless of their language or enthnicity, karaoke is a word all
Asians understand, a language they all speaks.

In assignments across the region, this correspondent has warbled with a
Vietnamese family crowding around their $7000 Sony karaoke player in their
Hanoi lean-to, lured by a shingle inviting allcomers in for a session.

I have had Love Me Do crooned at me by a Shan songtress in a flash
military-owned club in Rangoon. I've interrupted an afternoon session by a
posse of Chinese economic reformers in a government building in Guangdong
province to keep an appointment with one of them. And I've sung along
arm-in-arm with matey Chinese and Taiwanese mariners performing Click Go
The Shears (the Aussie shearing song is inexplicably a big mainland karaoke favourite) in Mandarin at Mawei port in Fujian province, where not so long ago the two sides were dropping bombs on each other.

Karoke has also become a political weapon, particularly for China's
committed communist cadres. The revolutionary classics of the Mao Zedong
are now available on karaoke laser disc and distributed across the
motherland. Its always a good look for an ambitious cadre to slip a golden
Mao oldie - No Communist Party, No New China for example - to impress a
party big shot who might be in from Beijing for a banquet that night.

The People's Liberation Army is partly financed by the receipts from a
good few of the 100,000 karaoke outlets in China. In Tibet, human rights
activists charge Beijing is using karaoke to dilute and perhaps ultimately
abolish indigenous culture in the Dalai Lama's mystical Himalayan homeland.
In democratizing Taiwan, politicians woo voters with outdoor karaoke
machines, maybe taking a cue from The Philippines, where politicians have
always been quick with a public tear-jerker, or a stirring national ditty
evoking People Power to round off a rally.

Even in sinister, Stalinist North Korea, touched by visiting patriotic
Japanese-Koreans, karaoke has been installed in the basement bar of the
main Pyongyang hotel where the regime houses and monitors its foreign
guests.

But you won't find The Carpenters in the Koryo Hotel. On a visit there last
October, I was treated to a stirring rendition of "Dear Leader Kim Jong-il
is our guiding light, our divine glory, the font of all wisdom, the great
teacher of us all. With you we will win a thousand victories."

The lyrics weren't quite The Way We Were, but they dripped off the lips of my
North Korean spook-minder, Mr Hyon. It made a welcome change in tone at least from his week-long propaganda monologues in defence of his ridiculous country.

Western businesspeople in Asia generally hate karaoke sessions but
nevertheless tolerate it, seeing it as a necessary evil, a stepping stone
to clinching that deal, opening that branch office.

Leighton Holdings' Hong Kong-based Mr Fixit, Graham White, reckons he's
seen the inside of too many karaoke clubs while romancing the construction
group's contacts in the region.

He tells the story of a recent night in buttoned-up Kuala Lumpur where he
and a group of Malay and Japanese repaired to a club after a long day's
negotiating. "I'll never forget the sight," chuckles White. "This guy had his pants
around his ankles and was doing the pelvic thrust in his underpants. He
wasn't just trying to be Elvis. He was Elvis."

White says that was a mild night compared to some he's had - he pointedly
doesn't say enjoyed - in the line of duty but decorum forbids description
"for the sake of a family newspaper."

Hong Kong-based publisher Ken McKenzie, a native of Gunnedah, fondly
recalls how he and his party of hell-raising gweilos took over the Mandarin
Palace nightclub one mis-behaved night.

After several cognacs too many, "we got the karaoke mikes and took them
into the corridor near the club's entrance and were interviewing, TV
news-style, all the punters as they arrived with their mistresses.

"We asked them very personal questions. We were very badly behaved."
McKenzie chuckles.

Michael Cave says "what we Westerners might think of as making a dick of
ourselves is not something to be ashamed of in Asia, if its done at
karaoke."

He notes a strict karaoke etiquette in Tokyo. "It is very bad form to be a
microphone hog - much, much worse than not getting up at all."

Cave says the classic karaoke moment in Japan starts with a
"sobbing-into-his-cognac loser singing Unchained Melody.

"The video playing behind him is of some semi-cute girl, who has just
missed out on being truly beautiful, perhaps because of a physical defect,
sitting alone in a bar.

"She looks up with her sad, wistful face at the appropriate lyric and sees
an old boyfriend walking down the street with a really cute girl, or her
better-looking best friend.

 "The punter will sing the song with so much conviction, and if its done
properly it will definitely bring a hush over the audience and possibly
even a lump to their throats. Big applause and the loser is a huge hero."

One explanation for the karaoke phenomenon is that its closely linked to
sex. Hong Kong wives, for example, have a fit when they hear their
entrepreneur husbands have visited a karaoke club while inspecting their
sweatshop factories in the nearby Pearl River delta.

They know only too well that these bars are mostly meat markets where ji,
the Mandarin word for chicken that's slang for prostitute, is available for
a fraction of the cost back home.

But Cave notes, karaoke is less a sex thing in Japan than it is in Asia's
Chinese societies.

That was very much in evidence the night I visited the New Tonnochy Night
Club in Hong Kong's Wanchai district. Up the front, the Filipino MC Willy
was warming up the seemingly disinterested crowd - it was early in the
night - with a spine-tingling version of My Way and a duet of Endless Love.

Out back near the toilets, in front of a showcase of XO cognac bottles in
various stages of emptiness, about 50 girls were getting their lippy right,
trussing up their big hair with a last snot of mousse, adjusting their stilletoes and stealing a last pre-coital cigarette.

Ten minutes later, as the black-sequinned Willy slipped effortlessly into
Born Free, six of the girls left on the arms of six mobile phone-wielding
clients in sharp suits. The starting price is $55 and that's simply to get
them out the door. In one club in Kowloon, hostesses discreetly slip a
smart card that tallies the minutes they sit - and sing - with clients into
a reader at the booth. If the tame porn videos circulating Asia's nether
regions, karaoke might well provide a local form of foreplay.

Karaoke is an enormous business. The US entertainment bible Billboard said
in 1992 that karaoke trade was worth $7 billion annually. Most industry
estimates now double that, if one includes the merchandising extras that go
with the obsession; the money spent on escort girls and prostitutes, the
$1500 bottle of French XO cognac and the obligatory tropical fruit platter
that seems to come with every club karaoke session.

The software side of the industry, the discs and soppy videos, is also
huge. Its dominated by the major recording companies, most of them
Western-owned. The hardware side is predictably Japanese, although South
Korea's Samsung has made a big splash this year with its TV-OK machine, a
conventional television with 500 karaoke favorites pre-programmed for when
the nightly fare gets unwatchable and the urge takes over at home.

Thomas Yeung of Dutch group Philips is the General Manager (Karaoke/Special
Projects) for the Polygram divison, which claims 60-70 per cent of the
karaoke software marketing in Asia. Its nearly impossible to move in
Yeung's office in Mongkok, on Hong Kong's Kowloon side of the harbour.
The space is crammed with the latest in karaoke technology, one wall coated
with karaoke videos while another is piled high with laser discs, playlits
and brochures.

Yeung reckons Polygrams's karaoke business has doubled every year for the
past seven. The company sub-contracts the video producers for the backing
film, distributing an average of three new laser discs a month in Hong Kong
alone.

Each sells about 50,000 copies, at $55 a unit. He estimates the original
Western artists of karaoke favorites, such as Sinatra, the Bee Gees and,
obviously Madonna, receive annual royalty cheques from karaoke "in the
mllions." An organization appropriately known as CASH tallies usage.

"We can't keep up with demand," beams Yeung. "The market is growing all the
time."

In fact, karaoke is so fast becoming a fact of daily Asian life and
corporate entertainment that - take a note P.A's and secretaries - it might make good business practise to add the lyrics to Close To You in the briefing notes.

Something to peruse in business class on the leg to KL, and probably more useful than Time magazine.

TOP KARAOKE FAVORITES - AND WHY

MY WAY: Ol' Blue Eyes has a lot to answer for. In nations where
individualism is frowned upon during the day, a nighttime rendering of this
take of private courage and achievement is sure to unlock those tear ducts.
Unchallenged at number one.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK: Now you know why Cranky Franky doesn't tour. He doesn't need to. Symbolic of the  American Dream's magnetism in the region.

YELLOW SUBMARINE: Oh what fun! This Beatles ditty is guaranteed to loosen the boss' tie. Rollicking and a bit bawdy, it'll raise a knowing snigger in the office the morning after.

LIKE A VIRGIN/MATERIAL GIRL: Possibly the perfect combination for an Asian
businessman. Bigger in the Chinas than in Japan - but then so is sex. Just
look at the population difference.

YESTERDAY: The Beatles' melancholy ballad. Done right, a sniffle or two is
guaranteed. The clear and easy lyrics also help improve one's English.

UNCHAINED MELODY: Became popular again as the theme to the film Ghost. A
Japanese weepy standard but if you are really on form you can pretend to be
sculpting something like Demi Moore did in the movie. Ghost was big in
Asia.

BORN FREE: Junior cousin of My Way and sung for the same reasons. Slightly
subversive in China but the African theme doesn't translate well.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS:
Love Will Keep Us Together - Captain and Tenille;
Daydream Believer - The Monkees
Happy Birthday/Silent Night/Jingle Bells (at any time of the year)
Anything from The Beatles mid-60's
Top of the World - The Carpenters
Rivers of Babylon/Raputin - Boney M
Anything by Whitney Houston