MAYCOTTE: Kaptivating the krazy karaoke audience

I spent most of the summer in Ithaca, meditating on the fact that student visas don’t allow graduates to work here in the United States or to go back to their home countries for the summer, essentially rendering us foreign students bums for three months. One of the aforementioned months I spent on a road trip. The other two, for cheapness’s sake, I spent wandering around a mostly empty college town trying to figure out what to do with my time.

So obviously, I spent a lot of time at the local bars. At the bars, I learned that the most popular night of the week was surprisingly Monday. Because Monday, God bless it, was karaoke night at Rulloff’s. And it got packed with townies.

I mean, I was at Rulloff’s every day during senior year. Monday karaoke was always crowded, but during the academic year it was mostly sorority girls emulating Janis and frat boys emulating Fiddy. The rest of us would huddle in the basement, either begging the bartender to turn up the radio down there to drown the warbling American Idols upstairs or drinking faster so we wouldn’t have to hear.

Then came summer and the student exodus, and Mondays were absolutely bursting with locals, clad fully in leather and spikes, each singing the hell out of some Def Leppard track. Occasionally, they’d sing Poison. Me? I made for another bar, where a couple of friends and I played doubles pool with a very bored bartender.

But a stirring of curiosity got to me. There had to be something to this whole karaoke business. I admit I wasn’t the biggest fan of the whole thing. People are going to butcher Neil Diamond anyway, screaming the lyrics every time the song comes on in a bar because they need to prove that they totally know this song! And it is awesome! But at least you can still hear poor Neil in the background, struggling to be heard. With karaoke, you get only muzak and the refined wailing of some drunk coed itching to be just a small-town girl.

So I still tended to avoid the karaoke bars. But then two things happened — each momentous, each complementary of the other and together the birth parent of what is going to be a new era in everyone’s auditory experience.

I was surfing through channels on TV and happened upon American Idol — and the people on it sucked. I had epiphany No. 1: Most people don’t realize they suck at singing.

The other thing that happened was that I was in the shower. (This is a frequent occurrence. The fact that I was in the shower isn’t what is noteworthy. What is noteworthy is what happened in the shower. I’d get to it if you let me finish. Can I finish?) Anyway, I was in the shower and wanted to see if I could remember all the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody. So I started to sing it, solo and a capella, and it was awesome. I mean, if I could, I’d put it on my iPod, and I’d totally listen to it while working out on the elliptical. This is when I had epiphany No. 2: I am an awesome singer.

And it hit me like several tons of bricks. That’s what was wrong with karaoke! People who don’t realize they suck at singing always sing at karaoke night! People who can really sing never sing karaoke. I mean, think about it. I’ve never seen Pavarotti, God rest his soul, or Meat Loaf or Bono at a karaoke bar. And they are spectacular singers, as am I. Good singers just don’t do karaoke. Bad ones do.

It is my duty to save karaoke from itself. So what if some people cover their ears when I sing? What if people sometimes explicitly tell me that they don’t want to hear me sing? I look at it this way: You know how people say that it sucks to see heaven, because once you do that and return to Earth, you just want to go back to heaven? I imagine a similar thing happens here: If people hear me sing, then nothing else will ever be adequate. People are naturally afraid of perfection. That’s also the reason I don’t have a girlfriend. But that’s beside the point.

There’s nothing left for me to do but start frequenting karaoke bars and booing everybody else off the stage until they let me sing. Because wouldn’t you rather hear one good singer than hundreds of terrible ones? I do it for them, not for me. It’s the law of the jungle. And if one should come who fancies himself or herself better at karaoke than me? Remember that I’m none other than Karlos the Karaoke King. Bring it.

Carlos Maycotte,a first-year student in the School of Law, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at maycotte@bu.edu.