At first, I was at first very apprehensive at reading Brian Raftery’s DON’T STOP BELIEVIN’: HOW KARAOKE CONQUERED THE WORLD AND CHANGED MY LIFE, mostly from the title. There are a few of us who take Journey very fucking seriously and, as of late, they’ve been co-opted by the hipster crowd, doing their jokey, ironic karaoke versions of Journey’s best.
So naturally, I thought his would be a sniveling hipster’s take on the karaoke phenomenon, and while at times it is, when Raftery digs deep into the history and social aspects of karaoke, it becomes an enthralling history book of a much-maligned art form.
The history of karaoke is one of those esoteric things that we just seem to take for granted, especially in this era where AMERICAN IDOL, basically a live karaoke show, is the highest-rated program on TV. Karaoke is a fun night out where the lines are long and the community vast, but in the late ’80s/early ’90s, it was the stuff of bad jokes and unlikable kitsch, struggling to find an audience in the midst of local newspaper articles basically calling you a “loser” for attempting this.
Raftery deftly encapsulates this time period, meeting with the guy who invented karaoke, to the guy who brought it over to America, to the guys who perform it live onstage. You never really knew how much of a history it had until now. And if this were the entire book, awesome.
Sadly, in the same way that karaoke makes everyone think they can sing, Raftery also thinks that his life is interesting, readable fare. But he is really not as funny or clever as he thinks he is — it’s easy to tell he’s written for SPIN and ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY in the past — dragging the book down one too many times whenever the recollection machine gets going. Every time he gets a nice groove going, he’s got to intersperse it with recollections of his youthful karaoke days, none of which are interesting. When he talks about himself, it’s skim time.
If you can get past this, DON’T STOP BELIEVIN’ is a great book that would have been better minus, oh, 100 pages. —Louis Fowler
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Great, now that song’s gonna be stuck in my head all day. So lemme get this straight: You loved the HOW KARAOKE CONQUERED THE WORLD part, but hated the AND CHANGED MY LIFE part?
If I could have written a one-sentence review, that would have been it.