Most ethnographers don’t achieve what Kevin Brown did while conducting their research: in his two years spent at a karaoke bar near Denver, Colorado, he went from barely able to carry a tune to someone whom other karaoke patrons requested to sing. Along the way, he learned everything you might ever want to know about karaoke and the people who enjoy it.
The result is Karaoke Idols, a close ethnography of life at a karaoke bar that reveals just what we are doing when we take up the mic – and how we shape our identities, especially in terms of gender, ethnicity, and class, through performances in everyday life. Marrying a comprehensive introduction to the history of public singing and karaoke with a rich analysis of karaoke performers and the community that their shared performances generate, Karaoke Idols is a book for both the casual reader and the scholar: a fascinating exploration of our urge to perform and the intersection of technology and culture that makes it so seductively easy to do so.
Tabella dei contenuti
Acknowledgments
Synopsis
About the Author
Overture
Chapter 1: My Way
Chapter 2: Turning Japanese
Chapter 3: Boys Don’t Cry
Chapter 4: Paint It Black
Chapter 5: Friends in Low Places
Chapter 6: Sweet Caroline
Finale
Afterword: Karaoke as Performance Reactivation by Philip Auslander
Circa l’autore
Kevin Brown is a professor at Lee University. He has published articles on Kurt Vonnegut, Doris Lessing, Tony Earley and Ralph Ellison, in addition to a critical study of authors who attempt to retell the gospel stories: They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. In addition, he has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press), and a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again.
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