Several weeks ago, my friend Allison asked about my availability for an "elaborate karaoke scheme." Allison is a formidable observer of media, and she had, it emerged, hatched a plan to evaluate karaoke songs by their own merits, divorced from the merits of the performance.
As it happens, this idea dovetails with some hypotheses I've begun to develop after several years of cover-song gigs. A number of songs—even giant hits, even by songwriters I otherwise adore—are secretly boring, relying on production magic* or performer charisma.** Throw in a different performer and an unvarnished vocal, and the song reveals itself as a dud. We've all seen people figure this out on stage in karaoke bars, blanching at the realization that there are five more verses exactly like this.
Allison, though, went farther than I ever have, developing an NCAA-style seeding system and researching the most popular karaoke songbooks. She assembled a group of performers, most of us with backgrounds in theater and hardcore karaoke experience, and she had us all submit lists of our own top songs, the songs we didn't necessarily want to sing ourselves but that we thought were good karaoke choices in general, and the songs we would automatically downvote. ("Love Shack" received the most downvotes, and so was excluded. Most of us quite like the B-52s, but we do not ever need to hear another group of drunk strangers shout that song in the general direction of a mic.) Then she booked a private karaoke room, and we got to work.
There was a play-in bracket, with spirited discussions of the songs in terms of degree of difficulty, perceived degree of difficulty, length, lyrical surprises, opportunities to showboat, opportunities for audience participation, the elusive quality of "keep-pumping-ness," and other merits. Votes determined which songs would advance; a song that did advance would be performed by a different singer in the next round, so that we could consider the song apart from its original performance. The bartender—intrigued, after her initial surprise at our quantity of office supplies***—gave the tie-breaking vote in at least one contest.
This was a lot of singing and discussing, for all of us. There were props and costume changes. There was dancing, obviously, and there were impressions of Elvis, Britney, and Miley. We winnowed the list down to the Sweet 16; those competitions will happen in another couple of months.
Even though we do not yet have a winner, we've reached some interesting results:
So! Further study is needed! But this is a gloriously goofy endeavor. It needs a much bigger dataset. You should probably do it with your friends.
*AutoTune is obviously a big culprit here, as is the recent-ish production technique known as The Surge (creating an exciting chorus through a synthy crescendo rather than a change in melody or chord progression). Mainstream pop in the past couple of decades has also seen a decline in melodic variation as producers try to formulate songs that will game algorithms and feel just familiar enough to listeners.
**"One Way or Another" and "Brass in Pocket" are both on this list for me, though I know many people who love them, and I am not here to convince anyone not to love them. Different things bore different people.
***Shout out to Thomas, who lent me a lab coat.
As it happens, this idea dovetails with some hypotheses I've begun to develop after several years of cover-song gigs. A number of songs—even giant hits, even by songwriters I otherwise adore—are secretly boring, relying on production magic* or performer charisma.** Throw in a different performer and an unvarnished vocal, and the song reveals itself as a dud. We've all seen people figure this out on stage in karaoke bars, blanching at the realization that there are five more verses exactly like this.
Allison, though, went farther than I ever have, developing an NCAA-style seeding system and researching the most popular karaoke songbooks. She assembled a group of performers, most of us with backgrounds in theater and hardcore karaoke experience, and she had us all submit lists of our own top songs, the songs we didn't necessarily want to sing ourselves but that we thought were good karaoke choices in general, and the songs we would automatically downvote. ("Love Shack" received the most downvotes, and so was excluded. Most of us quite like the B-52s, but we do not ever need to hear another group of drunk strangers shout that song in the general direction of a mic.) Then she booked a private karaoke room, and we got to work.
There was a play-in bracket, with spirited discussions of the songs in terms of degree of difficulty, perceived degree of difficulty, length, lyrical surprises, opportunities to showboat, opportunities for audience participation, the elusive quality of "keep-pumping-ness," and other merits. Votes determined which songs would advance; a song that did advance would be performed by a different singer in the next round, so that we could consider the song apart from its original performance. The bartender—intrigued, after her initial surprise at our quantity of office supplies***—gave the tie-breaking vote in at least one contest.
This was a lot of singing and discussing, for all of us. There were props and costume changes. There was dancing, obviously, and there were impressions of Elvis, Britney, and Miley. We winnowed the list down to the Sweet 16; those competitions will happen in another couple of months.
Even though we do not yet have a winner, we've reached some interesting results:
- Length can doom a song. Allison posits that five minutes is the cutoff point. (Again, standards for karaoke are way different from standards for radio or streaming or albums.)
- Most of the songs that advanced are on the old side. I suspect that karaoke operates by a different rule of familiarity than pop radio (where hits often adhere to the MAYA principle Derek Thompson describes in Hit Makers, essentially a balance between familiarity and newness). But mainstream pop has also seen a widespread shift from major key to minor, as well as a general slowing of tempos—which means that older songs are just going to do better in terms of keep-pumping-ness. (This is something I've noticed in cover gigs, too; the directive is often "uptempo and fun," and it can be a struggle to find newer songs that meet those criteria.)
- Most of the successful songs were in the alto-tenor vocal range, relatively singable regardless of the performer's gender. Several with higher tessituras ("Dancing Queen," "Party in the USA," "Good Luck Babe") were eliminated in the first round.
- Often, the better karaoke song is not the better song.
- There has to be a whole separate bracket competition for best duets and group songs.
So! Further study is needed! But this is a gloriously goofy endeavor. It needs a much bigger dataset. You should probably do it with your friends.
*AutoTune is obviously a big culprit here, as is the recent-ish production technique known as The Surge (creating an exciting chorus through a synthy crescendo rather than a change in melody or chord progression). Mainstream pop in the past couple of decades has also seen a decline in melodic variation as producers try to formulate songs that will game algorithms and feel just familiar enough to listeners.
**"One Way or Another" and "Brass in Pocket" are both on this list for me, though I know many people who love them, and I am not here to convince anyone not to love them. Different things bore different people.
***Shout out to Thomas, who lent me a lab coat.
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