“In the karaoke universe, we can be whoever we want. We express ourselves by turning into colorful and disastrous parodies of pop stars who are already appalling parodies of human beings. And somehow, that’s how we end up as our most sincere version of ourselves. When you step into the song, you’re not sure who you’re going to be on the other side.” – Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes

This is a very powerful, insightful quote into not just karaoke, but really the music industry as a whole. One thing that I have noticed, especially recently, is just how often pop stars will parody themselves and others. What really bothers me about that is, really, music is about expressing the colors of your soul, your emotions, your feelings. Each of us has a unique voice, a unique way of bringing to light the melodies and harmonies within each of us. Because, at its core, music is part of physics. It’s a physical thing that’s shared among all living beings. Everything vibrates, just by the nature of atomic power. Music is simply an extension of those vibrations.

Those vibrations are what keep us alive and keep us moving. The reason certain music connects with us, whereas certain other music doesn’t, is because the vibrations are unique to us. The vibrations that connect with us, that vibe with us, as the kids would say these days, are the songs that connect with us the most. The cool thing about karaoke, and really just singing along in general, is that we can then put ourselves in the shoes of the singer.

The other reason this quote really struck me as relevant is that this idea is related to another favorite subject of mine: cover art. Cover artists tend to parody the songs and artists that they are portraying through their cover performances. And the great irony of this, as Rob being a writer for Rolling Stone would know this probably better than most, is that most pop stars are already parodies of themselves, parodies of human beings, parodies of what it means to be an artist and a performer.

What’s funny is when we do karaoke, when we sing songs in karaoke that we love, we become that artist. But we then somehow become a slightly different version of that artist. Music allows us to connect with our core selves, our most intimate feelings, and there are things that music can do, things that music can express, which nothing else can. 

When you’re singing a song that really connects with you, where the lyrics truly resonate with your thoughts and your feelings and your singing, you can tell how somebody is really feeling. You can tell who somebody really is just from the way they perform music. If someone sounds angry when they sing, it’s because they are angry deep down. If they’re happy, they’re going to show that through their singing. The cool thing about karaoke is it’s a shared experience. 

After all, music is meant to be a shared experience. Yet for so many years, music was often a solitary listening experience for me. I had very few friends that enjoyed the music that I did, so the people that did enjoy the music that I did were my best friends. These are people that are no longer part of my life in any way, shape, or form except in fading memory. The only friend I have now that enjoys music with me is my own wife. And that’s a tragedy, because music is meant to be shared with people. Like our feelings, it’s not meant to be locked up in a cage like a songbird.

But what really gets me about this quote is where Rob says, when you step into the song, you’re not sure who you’re going to be on the other side. That’s a very interesting observation, that when you sing a karaoke song, or a cover song for that matter, what you don’t necessarily know is how is this song going to affect me? How is it going to change the way that I feel about myself, about others, about the song itself? 

Music can be interpreted in so many different ways. Some music just repulses us, it makes us angry and wish that piece didn’t exist in our universe. Other songs make us our happiest, best selves, and only music can do that in quite the way it does. Music often allows us to shed an outer layer or three, and we should take this removing of dead or artificial layers into making better cover art and music and karaoke.

So, cover art and karaoke kind of share a similar area of performance. Of course, the difference with karaoke is that it’s okay to be bad, to sing badly. In fact, karaoke means “empty orchestra”, in Japanese. The whole idea of karaoke is all about the voice that you are portraying. And again, sometimes that voice is a parody. Sometimes that voice is your true voice, and it’s very off-key, and it’s very embarrassing. But when you’re doing karaoke, that’s okay. It’s okay to be bad, because you’re bringing forth the best version of yourself when you’re singing. And unless you’re true to yourself when you’re singing, people are going to know that you’re faking it.

Cover art is very different. When you cover a song, you’re either trying to directly parody the original song, you’re trying to blend that song with your own style, or you’re trying to force another style on top of it. Or you just take that song, you make it your own, and you find your own way to express it, rearrange it, remix it, to fit the way that you want it to be. We need covers of our favorite songs to be that way to express some unspoken feelings, some unspoken thoughts that you have not been able to vocalize.

Music is a language, a language of love, a language of emotion, a language of nature. And lyrics are simply poetry put to music. There was a time where I thought all the great poets were dead until I realized, oh yeah, the great poets of our age are all songwriters because it’s way more commercially viable to be a songwriter. So, if you really listen to some of these pop songs, you’ll recognize some of these songs have incredible lyrics. They might sound simple on the surface, but the best songs, the ones that stick around on the charts, have something to say. 

The main problem with music of the last couple of years is reflected in the fact that so many writers are credited on these songs. But it’s not like 20 people are sitting down in a room and coming up with a song like in a board meeting. What happens is you have like four or five people that, by committee, decide to do a Google search – or some equivalent – and put in words they want to include in the song. Then they find lyrics with lines, melodies, harmonies, or instrumentation they like, contact the rights holders to these songs, and ask if they can use these elements if they give credit. The rights holders either decline outright or agree to let them be included in exchange for a percentage of the song’s profits. Music has become this corporate machine, and at this point, there ain’t much soul left.

However, when you have songwriters who are an actual songwriting team that come up with their own original stuff, there’s a completely different quality to the finished product.  You can tell the difference between someone just piecing things together, frankenstitching lyrics into something that seems coherent, but it’s not. You’re stealing hooks, choruses, even entire verses, just frankensteining songs together. 

Many so-called experts, Ph.D. level individuals, think that every song that could ever be written has already been written. That’s ridiculous. Yes, there are only so many chords and words in the English language. If you have monkeys just hitting random buttons on a keyboard, they’ll come up with some lines of Shakespeare here and there. They’d probably still come up with more coherent material than most of today’s Top 40 charts. Anyway, I digress somewhat.

There’s more to music, and more to karaoke, than just the lyrics themselves. There’s more to the songs we love than just the melody itself, the lyrics, the instrumentation, and the blending of those elements. Karaoke is freeing ourselves from artifice, freeing ourselves from the expectations and demands placed upon us in everyday life. Cover art is an inversion of karaoke, where you are pretending to be somebody that you’re not. So, whereas karaoke is freeing yourself, cover art is putting yourself in a cage. Even if it sounds pretty, you’re a songbird in a cage when you do cover art unless you are doing it as your truest possible self.

Many cover artists are not doing that. Some are. The ones that succeed are the ones that are essentially using cover art as a form of therapy, connecting deeper with themselves, as a form of self-care. But if you’re trying to be commercial and profit-focused, you have to go with whatever’s in demand, whatever people are looking for, whatever sounds good at the moment. A true cover artist should just go with whatever song feels good to them now. 

When we are struggling, when our place has been ripped away from us against our will, often the best solution that I’ve found is to reach out and find music that speaks our language. We must gain the ability to take these precious lullabies and make their melodies and lyrics part of our vocabulary. Make them part of our auras.

So, when you find an artist and their oeuvre completely speaks to you and you can just spin their records on repeat constantly, that’s when you know that you’ve found the music for your own personal soul. That artist has become your Personal Jesus. And since each of us has a different soul, even when we share music, even we share musical tastes, that person that you love and adore that loves the song along with you, they don’t love it for the same reason that you love it necessarily. There’s probably a different line or a different melody that stays in their head other than you. People focus on different things based on our own personal experiences. The vibrations within the atoms that make up our bodies and our minds are all somewhat different. Therefore, our minds, infinitely complex as they are, have an infinite number of ways to interpret a given lyric or chord progression choice.

The problem is, there’s all these experts people believe that are saying, oh, all the best songs have already been written, so you might as well just cover them, ad infinitum. That’s such a horribly reductive way of looking at music, looking at art in general. Yeah, we do live in a world where there’s so much content that it does all start sounding the same. But that’s only true if you allow it to sound the same. People need to put themselves back into their art. 

Cover artists, most especially, need to start thinking more like karaoke bar singers. They need to take these songs back from the soulless corporate machine and generative AI overlords taking over social media. I think if you kind of blend the best of karaoke and the best of cover art, we’re probably going to end up in a very different musical landscape than we’re in now. I can’t see how it can’t be better.

Fortunately, I’m starting to see some cover artists choose less popular songs, especially more obscure ones that just aren’t well publicized and overlooked B-sides, often favoring independent artists. This is starting to become a thing, and I love it. People are tired of homogenization. People want to find music that speaks to them, that is different, that allows them to speak a different language more suitable for them through either melody or lyric or instrumentation.

I hope that you have already found your music. And if you haven’t, that’s the first thing you need to do right now. Go find your music. Go back to the artists that you loved in your youth and rediscover them. In doing so, you will discover yourself. Perhaps again for the first time in years, and perhaps, for the very first time.