This is the Rhythm of the Night

My late in life love of karaoke

I never thought I liked karaoke. I always assumed it was kind of a talent show adjacent nightmare. The depictions in TV and movies were always depressing, the vibe usually destroyed by someone insisting to bring down the mood with a sad Bonnie Raitt song while everyone else sits around waiting their turn. I only went to a karaoke night once when I was younger. Right after college I was home in Maryland and I went to a Caribbean themed bar/restaurant with a girl I grew up with so she could do a B+ version of “Band of Gold” to prove to everyone in the suburbs that she was a good singer. It was not fun.

Also, I have a terrible singing voice. As much as I have always loved belting pop hits at top volume, I know it’s not exactly an auditory vacation for everyone listening. My singing voice is just like, somehow a louder and deeper atonal version of my talking voice.

Maybe it’s getting older and shedding any self-consciousness, maybe it’s the fact that I don’t go out places that play fun music (mostly because they don’t exist--every bar with a dance floor plays beep bop boop bop robot EDM), maybe it’s that the world is on fire and I just want to go into a room and scream, but these days all I want to do is karaoke. Once I learned about private room karaoke, something I never saw growing up and only know from living in New York for nearly 18 years, I was hooked.

Using the space during my rendition of Roxette’s “It' Must Have Been Love.”

If you have never done private room karaoke, you are missing out. It’s the closest thing in adulthood to a classic high school house party. You shut the door and it’s like your parents are away. Just you and your friends, a giant book of almost every song ever recorded, microphones, and a button you push when you need to order more tequila shots and Budweisers. It’s like getting to grab the aux cord during a joyride. (Is this aging me? Do aux cords still exist or are they of a past era like tiny vests and hope for the future?)

You get to be your own DJ, jumping from genre to genre like a musical bounce house. Ease in with some yacht rock, like Steve Winwood’s “Back in the High Life Again.” Then you can transition to some 90s alt rock, a Gin Blossoms song or two. Get the energy high with “Heaven is a Place on Earth” and then bring it down with a Heart Ballad like “These Dreams.” I like to pick my favorites to sing, but also songs I know will turn the tiny room into what feels like a camp sing-a-long.

There’s also something fun about discovering or rediscovering songs you forgot about. Everyone has their own favorite songs. I’ve done karaoke with friends and freaked out when someone put on “Dammit” by Blink 182 so we could all scream “I guess this is growing up!!!!” together in a room the size of a large SUV, enjoying the irony of screaming that lyric now well into adulthood. A highlight of my last decade was doing karaoke with my friend Josh when he suggested we duet Reel Big Fish’s “Beer” and shocked ourselves by knowing pretty much all of the words after twenty years of not thinking about it once.

But maybe the most important thing private room karaoke provides in a city like New York is the screaming. It’s hard to scream in New York. You can’t scream in your apartment because your neighbors will either hate you or assume you’re being murdered. You can’t scream outside because everyone will stare and possibly call the worst people in the city to get involved (the NYPD). My friend Divya said she used to scream on elevators only then to realize that just because the doors close they are not soundproof. I would love to talk to any of the people who heard her screams whoosh by their floor. You can’t even really scream at a concert because it's honestly rude to ruin everyone else’s time (cue the outrageous clips from Taylor Swift’s concerts with guttural growls and shrieks to her hits). We can do almost anything in this city: see celebrities, eat every kind of food, jaywalk, but we still can’t scream. Except in private room karaoke, where it is not only allowed, but encouraged. I’ve walked down the hall of rooms on my way to the bathroom and heard the wailing of women singing “Shallow,” which in any other context would annoy me, but there I just deeply understand it. Get it out, girls.

And as a consummate comedian, it should be no surprise that there are endless ways to do bits during karaoke. You can sing in a strange dialect or “in the style of” a non musician (think Shania Twain’s “Man, I Feel Like A Woman” but sung in a Ray Romano voice). You can use the mic between songs loading to pretend you’re a Bar Mitzvah DJ or Bingo caller. Or, you can do my favorite move, and that is when the lyrics on screen present as “oooooooo” for a long held vowel, you instead do the spooky ghost sound “oooOOOooo.” Kills every time.

Some of the most fun nights of my last few years have been private room karaoke. Sometimes it’s a planned neighborhood hang at my beloved Insa. Sometimes it’s an impromptu third location after dinner at Wu’s and pickle martinis at 169 Bar. Sometimes it’s the night ender for a 41st birthday party on a Sunday night. Whatever it is, I fucking love it. I love karaoke!!!!!

Here are a few of my absolute go-to karaoke songs with no explanation. Just bangers.

We Belong - Pat Benetar

Strong Enough - Sheryl Crow

All For You - Sister Hazel

Unwritten - Natasha Beddingfield

Shimmer - Fuel

Blister in the Sun - Violent Femmes

The King of Wishful Thinking - Go West

I’ll Remember - Madonna

Rhythm of my Heart - Rod Stewart

Madonna ballads often get overlooked.

I asked some of my favorite karaoke friends for a go-to song and why they love it so much. Add these to your lists. (Also, keep a list of songs for karaoke. You think you know what you want to sing and then you get in there and see that massive book and forget what music is and panic.)

JOSH GONDELMAN
My favorite recent karaoke move is one I stole from our friend Jaya Saxena, which is to throw on "It's All Coming Back To Me Now" by Celine Dion "for the room." People age 35-55 go completely wild with it, and Celine Dion's voice is SO good that you can actually bring it down a few octaves and belt it out without feeling like you have to match her range. It's not so popular that people roll their eyes when you throw it on, but people REALLY seem to remember the melody (which is dynamic and dramatic and fun to throw yourself into) when the words are put in front of them.

MARIS KREIZMAN
"Disco 2000" by Pulp. Everyone always does "Common People" but "Disco 2000" is just as rousing and builds up to a big ending and is a little easier to sing. And there's also something about singing "let's all meet up in the year 2000" that feels so absurd 25 years later, even though the song itself is timeless.
[Pre-order her book!!!!]

FARIDEH SADEGHIN
I love love love going to karaoke with friends. Listen, I am not a good singer at all, whatsoever, so I like that karaoke is low pressure in terms of singing ability. I have an entire note in my phone with a list of my go-to karaoke songs bc I was raised a Girl Scout // to always be prepared. The first song that I almost always sing for karaoke is Faith by George Michael. I know all of the words for this one by heart, so there is no need to read off of the screen, allowing me to focus on belting it out and dancing around. It’s upbeat (a must for any karaoke song, imo) and is nostalgic since I sang it at my senior year high school homecoming dance lol.

NATASHA PICKOWICZ
“Constant Craving”by k.d. Lang. First of all, it’s really important to curate a rolling playlist of songs that you would be happy to sing in any karaoke environment. Because I like to live in extremes during karaoke, I either tend to pick songs that are safely within my very limited range (velvety 1990s crooners like k.d. Lang, Tracy Chapman, Chris Isaak, where it’s more about soulful emotion/yearning vs technically acrobatic vocal runs) or something horribly outside of my range (anything Korn or Temple of the Dog are personal karaoke faves even though they’re literally impossible to perform because the respective vocalists had mind-blowing range and power and I have none).

MORE STUFF! MORE STUFF!

This week on Ruined we tackled Hitchcock’s Rope.

We have a live Ruined (online) Sunday 4/27 to do the new Meghan Fahey movie Drop.

All new Welcome to Talk Town with the core crew of me, Greg, and Anthony.

Speaking of Talk Town, come see Anthony tape his new hour at The Gutter 5/9. I’m opening and he’s the best!

Thursday 5/1 I’m at Union Hall opening for my super funny friend Billy Wayne Davis.