Karaoke is Hazardous to Your Health
Karaoke is a major form of entertainment in some neighborhoods in the Philippines. In fact it’s fans are so enthusiastic that fights and stabbings over the way a song is rendered are fairly common.
NYT: By NORIMITSU ONISHI Published: February 6, 2010 – The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”
Karaoke-related killings are not limited to the Philippines. In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
Here in the states, a Seattle woman punched a man because she didn’t like the way he sang “Yellow.”
A friend of mine and I used to listen the Karaoke singers at a local bar and some of them were so bad that we would make fun of them but it was hardly worth getting in a fight over. –In the P.I.s on the other hand, an off duty policeman pulled his revolver when the people at the next table laughed at one of the singers. -I guess the cop was a big fan.
“The Philippines is a very violent society, so karaoke only triggers what already exists here when certain social rules are broken,” said Roland B. Tolentino, a pop culture expert at the University of the Philippines. But even he hedged, noting that the song’s “triumphalist” nature might contribute to the violence.
The lessons to be learned from this: Don’t hog the stage, if you can’t sing stay the hell away from the mic, and if you travel to the Philippines -a country with over a million illegal guns and a reputation for violence- Do Not sing Sinatra.
