After taking a few weeks to mull over Dubravka Ugresic\u2019s Karaoke Culture, I took a rainy afternoon and watched a movie with Chinese food. The movie was High Fidelity and I\u2019ve seen it many times, but never have I thought about the final lines so much before. With uncharacteristic selflessness, Rob Gordon explains how to make a good mix tape:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don\u2019t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pardon the vulgarity, but Mr. Gordon has a point: when making a compilation, you have to start hard and strong, go harder still, then back off for a while. He didn\u2019t say this, but you also need to finish just as well as you started, if not better. If the same rules apply to collections of essays, Ugresic is a triumphant follower of the letter of the law. The opening essay introduces us to what a \u201ckaraoke culture\u201d is\u2014and it feels like seeing a liger. That is, it\u2019s just familiar enough that you can follow along and understand, but it\u2019s also got that touch of exotic mystery so everything seems new and intriguing. For example, everyone knows what karaoke is; but in Ugresic\u2019s eyes, it becomes the symbol of our time. Bloggers are karaoke. Asian teenagers writing cell phone novels are karaoke. Men recreating the Hollywood sign in Serbia are karaoke. Minibars are karaoke. Victoria Beckham is karaoke. Even the Yugoslavian political struggles are karaoke. So what, then is karaoke?<\/p>\n
Karaoke is the way communication technology has made it harder for us to communicate with each other. Karaoke is celebrating the amateur instead of the auteur. Karaoke is celebrating pop-culture idols and condemning \u201cthe classics.\u201d Karaoke is the equality of everyone having a voice, and having everyone\u2019s voice be equally loud. Karaoke is when Joshua Bell, a famous violinist, can make huge amounts of money at a concert in Boston, but isn\u2019t even given the time of day performing solo in a subway station. Karaoke is complicated.<\/p>\n
To be honest, I don\u2019t completely understand it yet. To completely understand the concept, you\u2019d have to sit with this collection of essays for some time, first contemplating each one individually and then try to assemble them all into a sort of argument or conclusion. I have been working at this for some weeks and have mostly marveled at the full array of delicious language and interesting assertions. Karaoke culture itself is still mysterious and alluring, and no definite conclusions have been formed; I\u2019ll be pondering this text for some time. Fortunately, that is a pleasurable task.<\/p>\n
According to Ugresic, karaoke culture is to be chronicled, celebrated and criticized\u2014often all in the same breath. She writes in a way that meanders while somehow being simple and direct. At times, she comes straight out with her bits of philosophy, as when she asserts that \u201cthe absence of dialogue in contemporary films is stark proof of the humiliating absence of the need for dialogue,\u201d because today\u2019s women have nothing of value to say. Other times, Ugresic avoids such straightforward statements, preferring instead to tantalize the reader with beautiful language that is better to let stew in your brain. Sentences like, \u201cInvisible files from my archive would fall on me leaves, and at times I thought I was going to faint, lose control, and be forever submerged beneath that lush and invisible pile\u201d have haunted me for weeks. And in still other moments, the text is terribly funny, as when Ugresic recounts many tragic anecdotes about Croatians dying at sea, and then remarks that \u201cupon hearing these brief statistics, a na\u00efve reader might conclude that Croats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century used the sea for nothing but drowning.\u201d These essays touch on Tito, \u201cfan ficcers,\u201d literary festivals and her own experience of being censured without losing any coherence, wit or intelligence in the process. It is a book well in control of itself and in control of its reader, utterly convincing and entertaining.<\/p>\n
Dubravka Ugresic begins her essay collection with a simple phrase: \u201cIt needs to be said upfront: I\u2019m not a karaoke fan.\u201d By the end of these 314 pages, though, you can tell that she confines total ridicule to regurgitated music. Cultural karaoke, on the other hand, is given a far more mixed review. If I were to make a metaphor for the way Ugresic sees our karaoke culture, I picture a city overrun with stray dogs. They can cozy up to your shinbones and give your eager knuckles a lick, or they can rush up snarling and foaming at the mouth. So you treat them with wary reverence, accepting their place in your city, taking the licks with the bites as you can. After all, that\u2019s karaoke. Sometimes you kill a song, and other times you flop. When it comes to Karaoke Culture, however, I can do nothing but tip my hat to a masterful performance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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