Excellent Review of Karaoke Culture

In the L.A. Times, Carolyn Kellogg has an excellent review of Dubravka Ugresic’s Karaoke Culture — one of the best books I read last year. (And which you can purchase here.)

Here are a few highlights from Carolyn’s review:

Dubravka Ugresic does not like karaoke. That doesn’t stop her from trying it, just as her resistance to celebrity doesn’t stop her from putting her head through a cutout on a Hollywood studio tour so that she can be photographed with Clark Gable. Ugresic, a game and inquisitive critic, looks at culture from all angles, which sometimes means picking up the mic.

Karaoke recycles rather than creates, she argues in “Karaoke Culture,” the 100-page essay that lends its name to the title of her new collection. To Ugresic, karaoke is emblematic of our contemporary moment: She sees it as a sad attempt to adopt the trappings of celebrity, an art that’s derivative without enrichment and a practice that degrades the original because it can never be quite as good. “In all its manifestations karaoke culture unites narcissism, exhibitionism and the neurotic need for the individual to inscribe him or herself on the indifferent surface of the world,” she writes. It’s not just singing on stages: Ugresic traces these themes in reality television, fandom, hobbyists, politics, art and, of course, the Internet. [. . .]

Ugresic writes in short, episodic sections, making surprising leaps. An essay that begins with a Hemingway look-alike contest hops quickly to the arrest of Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic. The connections are electric: It’s an intellect in action, ideas zapping across the page. [. . .]

Despite these small failings, “Karaoke Culture” is an essential investigation of our times. Ugresic’s best moments come when she connects the personal to the universal, when navigating a political storm is illustrated by her mother’s easy laughter in the face of unpleasantness, or when she extrapolates from her own Internet overuse: “Would Marcel Proust have written ‘In Search of Lost Time,’” she asks, “if he had had a Madeleine cookie on the computer screen in front of him?”

Read the entire review here.