Hey, Karaoke Fans (All 3 of You), It’s Time to Finally Face the Music

I have one word for you.

Just one word.

Karaoke.

Make it go away.

I know karaoke has been around for a while, but last Saturday was my first confrontation with it. I was at a birthday party for a couple of friends who were turning . . . hmmm, how can I say this delicately? Well, let’s say they were turning a number that rhymes with “pixty,” and by this time next year, I fully expect them to be dead.

Now I am no spring chicken myself. In fact, if I were a chicken, I wouldn’t even taste like chicken. I would taste like mutton. But what is it about otherwise reasonable people that makes them think they can sing along to old rock songs?

What makes a guy in his pixties think that because he can read the words off a prompter to “I’ll Be Doggone,” that he will sound like Marvin Gaye? When in fact he sounds like the Enola Gay?

And the women always want to sing along to the Supremes. They always want to do “Stop! In the Name of Love,” when all you’re begging for them to do is: Stop! In the name of God!

*

Here is what karaoke does: It encourages people who have no musical talent to shriek into a microphone that amplifies the fact that they have no talent.

And once they get their hands on the microphone, they don’t stop. They do medleys! It’s horrifying. It’s like watching your grandparents neck.

The last straw was a guy doing karaoke to the Eric Clapton song “Wonderful Tonight.” I wondered how horrified Clapton would feel if he could have heard it. It would have probably driven him back to heroin.

Karaoke must stop.

Excuse me, Tony, it has stopped. The only place it exists anymore is at birthday parties for pixty-year-olds. Nobody else would be caught dead doing it. It is self-indulgent to the point of nausea. Speaking of which, I know that you will be shocked (shocked?!!) to learn that Kelsey Grammer’s “Macbeth” closed after just 13 performances on Broadway. Kelsey Grammer’s “Macbeth.” Who could resist that? What’s next, Drew Carey’s “Richard III”?

I understand the impulse to perform at a party. You figure: I’m among friends. How bad can I be?

Does the phrase “Neil Young in a hot skillet” mean anything to you?

*

Everybody wants to sing. Everybody knows someone who has gotten up at one of these karaoke things, and to the amazement of the crowd, has sung a classic Sinatra love song, like “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” in a tenor so warm and so perfect that the room grows still, except for the small, aching sound of tears being cried by the most beautiful women in the room. Everybody knows (and hates) a guy who can sing like that.

But it’s not you, you dope.

When you sing “It Was a Very Good Year,” you sound like a garbage disposal.

Some of us have the good sense to know that. My friend Nancy was at the party, and fearing she would be bold enough to try karaoke, she said to her husband, “No matter what I say or do, no matter how I plead and beg, don’t let me go up there and sing!”

My friend Tracee did more than lip-sync. “I used to play my sister’s records, and pick up my hairbrush like it was a microphone,” Tracee said. “I did this whole show called ‘Tracee Sings.’ I was great. I did ballads, then up-tempo songs, then some show tunes. I had choreography. I had stagings. Stagings! But I had the courtesy not to do it when any member of my family was home.”

I, myself, have made the awful mistake of singing out loud. An example: In 1985, the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA championship, and because they were led by Magic Johnson, one of the sportswriters thought it would be nice to quote from the 1965 Lovin’ Spoonful song “Do You Believe in Magic?’ But no one remembered the words.

So my friend Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News called me at home and said, “Do You Believe in Magic,” and I rattled off: “In a young girl’s heart, how the music can free you whenever it starts. And it’s magic if the music is groovy, and makes you feel happy like an old-time movie. I’ll tell you ‘bout the magic that’ll free your soul, but it’s like trying to tell a stranger ‘bout rock ‘n’ roll.”

And 90 guys had columns.

So because I know the words I get to sing. But my voice is awful. So when I am pixty, there will be no karaoke.

There will be fondue!