The Decline of Karaoke Videos

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I'm Vivian Le in this week for Roman Mars I was raised in a Vietnamese household, which means I was practically born with a karaoke mic in my hand. Birthdays, family reunions, funerals, Sunday mornings after the Raiders' lost, All good reasons to whip out the karaoke machine And one of the things that I remember most vividly during these formative mid nineties moments was watching the videos that played during the karaoke tracks my parents were singing along to. They were mostly stock footage synchronized to the music People on a beach, people sailing boats, people in a hot air balloon Pretty generic stuff Every time I hear the song listen to the rhythm of the Falling Rin, I can still see freestyle roller skaters weaving through cones in an urban park These videos were like watching the equivalent of hotel arts Something to look at, not necessarily something to think about In other words, they were nothing like the karaoke videos that Brian Rafterterty was watching when he was in his twenties I definitely remember nights and times when I was singing when Everyone would just kind of turn their head toward the video because They were so strange and they're so ambitious And they're so weird U, and some of them look really great. Brian is a culture writer and author of the book, Don't Stop belieelveving', how karaoke conquered the world and changed My life. Brian's entry point to karaoke came in the late nineteen nineties He and his friends were living in New York City when they discovered a little dive called Village karaoke It was during these late night excursions that he realized the karaoke videos playing at Village were on a whole other level The Ban of Jets video. You can interpret that song eighty five million ways video we remembered for some reason was like a mom Luring a bunch of kids slowly to a plateful of cookies and I'm like, what the hell does this do with Benny and the jets? L no Bn, no jets. It wasn't like these videos were unrelated stock footage just thrown over music These are all originally produced short films, equipped with their own storylines, characters, and tangential interpretations of the song's lyrics And there are literally thousands of videos like this There's a very strange video that we used to talk about all the time for Paul McCartney's Ebony and Iivory, which was really I don't know if it's problematic or not, but it was like, There's a black man walking a white dog and then a white man walking a black dog. And then they become friends tryrying to be true to the spirit of this of this, you know, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder do it., but it makes no sense that it's a it's a dog park. Some of these karaoke videos were clearly bananas, but they were not lacking in ambition s were hired, locations were scouted, lighting was designed, and a lot of them were shot on actual film stock Brian wanted to know who had made these and why go through all the efforts I was just kind of like This is weird that like This is a video that like we're just here as a goof and someone put a lot of time and effort to make this video for this Holl and Oats song that we're all drunkenly singing in a tiny room As it turns out, These weirdo karaoke videos were kind of their own micro movement of filmmaking only lasted a handful of years and is only remembered by a handful of people, but it gave a generation of aspiring filmmakers something that barely exists anymore ping gig where they could just mess around and figure out how to make stuff It's about as close to an outside of Hollywood Hollywood project as you can get. Some videos were good Some are bad And several were so bad that they were awesome And I had to know more about where they came from The story of these videos actually originated about a decade before Brian discovered them at Village Karaoke Back in the nineteen eighties, the world of consumer electronics was exploding Personal computers, the Walkman, camcordters, fax machines, the game boy. It was like a shiny new toy was coming out on a monthly basis. And Neil Alttenew wanted in I basically was a sales and marketing execut And I introduce a lot of products to the United States One day in nineteen eighty eight, Neil was flipping through the New York Times and he saw a job ad that intrigued him. And they were looking for somebody for some sort of a startup in the East Coast The company that put out that ad was Pioneer, the Japanese electronics Corporation They're looking for someone to head up a brand new division, specifically in America Neil applied, and when he got an interview, his wife drove down with him to the pioneer offices in Manhattan Well, you know, maybe two hours ped I came down and I said, this is a really interesting product. She said, what is it? And I said, It's this thing called karaoke. She said, What is? Karaoke? What is that? Karaoke had been around for over a decade at this point But back in the nineteen eighties, it was still pretty unknown in the West. It was huge in Asia though, particularly in Japan where Pioneer was headquartered The word karaoke itself is Japanese, meaning empty orchestra If you go to Japan, every little bar, there was eight hundred thousand bars in Japan, believe it or not But every bar has to have karaoke in And actually, a big reason why karaoke was already so popular in Japan was because of Pioneers's karaoke technology can I L at his Hogg's andyo. There' not girl getting it up. A few years before Neil joined the company, Pioneer completely revolutionized the karaoke game by releasing the first ever karaoke laser disc player For those under the age of thirty seven, Laserdisk was one of the lesser known combatants in the home video format wars of the seventies and eighties Picture a DVD the size of a vinyl record And I've got one in my hand right now It's u Looks like an LP record It's silver And it has information on both sides. Okay, and there's twenty eight videos On each disk B then when Home videoideo was first emerging, VHS, Betamax, and LaserDisk were all battling it out to be the dominant consumer technology VAS and Beta turned out to be exponentially more popular for the home movie watching experience And videotype won the war Laser this only was able to capture maybe one percent of the market. But the video market is so huge O percent in a market is very significant The pioneer says, you know what? Maybe not so much for movies, but karaoke. Yeah. because it's nobody else is doing it. So we're all alone So we'll take one percent of the market allone When it came to something like karaoke, Laserdisk had a superpower that gave it an edge over VHS or beta. A laser disk could jump around to individual chapters on the disc, againg, like a giant DPD This made it well suited for searching for individual karaoke tracks if they were listed as chapters, like you would on a jukebox. It was a technology that fit the art form Pioneers said, you know what? for a karaoke application, this is perfect Essentially, all you need for karaoke are two things, a backing track and the lyrics to the song displayed on the screen But when Pioneer manufactured these discs for the Japanese market, they also decided to include one additional element karaoke music video that went along with each track. I think that the original concept of using those videos in Japan was to basically sell Lesod discks Laser discs were known for having really good picture resolution, way better than its competitors, VHS or Betamax pioneer in Japan figured it would be a complete waste not to put a nice looking video up on the screen And Neil says when Pioneer decided to expand to the American market and get laser karaoke into American bars, they copied that same formula They had a lot of success in Japan with it that way And they wanted to replicate their success in the United States And they felt that this is the way we did it in Japan. We got to do it in the United States the same way. But it couldn't be exactly the same. Those videos were shot in Japan for Japanese songs for a Japanese audience. You know, you couldn't have a song like You know, I shot the sheriff put a Japanese video on it. it didn't didn't work. you had to have a production company go out there and shoot the videos Which is how people like Nori Niin got involved I always compared it to like that scene in Conan in the Barbarian where he has to push that rock in a circle for like ten years before he becomes a grown man, you know, when he's all strong Be you shoot a million feet of film and either you fail or you come out of it stronger In the late nineteen eighties, Nori was actually still in college. He'd been directing music videos for local artists when the opportunity to work on these karaoke videos fell into his lap someomehow I wound up on a panel for music videos at PanavVision in Dallas. and I'm like twenty years old. And one of the guys on the panel said, Hey, I've got these karaoke videos You want to come shoot some of them. and I would shoot anything. I love shooting film and the idea of shooting music videos sounded really fun. And of course I said yes Pioneer had a division called Laser Disk Corporation of America alsoso known as LDCA They contracted production companies and directors from Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, even London And Nori remembers early on, there's one specific directive for these videos They wanted stories. So I remember they really wanted a narrative weave, they wanted a beginning a middle and an end. they really wanted you to stick to the The storyline of the song By the time Pioneer got into this, I think they needed to have some sort of story. Brian Raftertery again because at that point, Western audiences, especially after seven or eight years of MTV, they knew that every video had to have either a wild collage or a very easy to follow narrative. Pioneer wanted of these narratives to adhere to the vibe and message of the song, but that came with one big stipulation. The footage used in these videos had to be completely original for copyright purposes Pioneer only licensed the music, not the artist's likeness or any existing music video, so you couldn't reference their vision of the song You know, if it was a song, if it was thriller, they did not want you to do like the thriller dance. They didn't they want you to comeome something original There are of course, a few other minor ground rules of what you could or could not show I know they did not want people singing. I think that's one thing is to have no one singing along to the song, almost like not acknowledging that it's there because the focus should be on the singer Pioneer also didn't want anything too violent or too salacious. I just had to keep it clean. so I had to be careful with You know, nothing was too sexualized or whatever it was Sad Nichelly was a producer at LDCA. She worked with dozens of directors during her time there and was a liaison between the higher ups at Pioneer and the production companies actually making the videos It was a wild time where you kind of had free rain. It It was scary in a way, but it was alsoso really A lot of fun Sana said that aside from those family friendly rules They almost never got any creative notes from the company. I don't think anyone was probably watching them except for us whichich also meant that the people making these videos had near complete artistic freedom I don't even think that making a good karaoke video was the thing. It was just making good art, you know, not necessarily for karaoke. I don't think any of us that in mind when we shot it, it was just making beautiful art beautiful art came with a pretty big limitation Pioneer was a huge company with capital to throw behind these new karaoke videos I don't like that much capital In the late eighties and nineties, the average cost of a music video on MTV could run fifty to sixty thousand dollars theseese karaoke videos, on the other hand, range from three thousand six hundredll to ten thousand dollars because This was an emTV Your budget had to cover production costs like locations, camera rentals, film stock and development, props, a crew, actors, and whatever payment you could walk away with for yourself So these videos became a real filmmaking test of what directors could do with a microbudget, limited resources, and the creative wiggle room to go wild I mean, when the idea first came to you were you kind of like You're going to ay us to do this thing that it seems very clear that do you really need like a high production video? Like what were your thoughts when N thought that just went Brilliant. yes. You don't question at all. I wasn't biting the hand that fed. Yeahah, I can do that and I like the sound of it. Let's do that. This is Nikki Smedley. She produced a handful of karaoke videos for Pioneer in London and has had a long career in entertainment I started out as a Dancer U and an actress, I ran a cabaret club, I went on to be a tele tubby and now Id do one woman's show for grown ups and that's me. You did hear that correctly. Nikki was one of the original teletubbies. She played Lala, the yellow one I always say to people, I'm not famous. I just had one very famous outfit U So yeah, that's why I did. P people weren't recognizeed, but they recognize people. At the time, Niki had very little to no production experience. Her friend Neil was hired to direct some videos and brought her on as a producer and choreographer I found her name on the credits for Pioneer Laser Disk Volume three hundred seven, which I was actually holding in my hand during our Zoom call Well, I think you've got ain't nothing going on but the rent. I do. You recogn' from the back of the Nikki instantly clocked the laser disk volume in my hand H had a song for a video she worked on called Ain't notothing goingin on, but the Rnt. That's the first one that Neil and I it working together If you've never heard it, it's an R and B song by Gwen Guthrie about a woman looking for a man who's, at the very least, financially stable. No romance without finance is the refrain. Nkki and her director Neil, on the other hand, plotted out a different story for the video. It was about a couple who throw a house party in order to come up with money for rent It's definitely a different interpretation of the song's original meaning But it works She broke down the process of how that video was planned. I would have a meeting with Neil and give him a general idea and we would talk through the different shots that we thought we needed. and yes, and start doing a bit of loose budgeting coming for what will we need And then at the same time I would be working with the music and drawing like I'd have like a kind of beat map. The construction of the song. And then we'd meet up with a cameraman and go, this is what we want. Maybe I have to make or find some props. And they go, do wna? Yeah. It has a look of any British syynth pop video you might see on MTV in the nineteen eighties High contrast lighting, graphic wipes, glamorous melancholy. If you blinked, you might think you were watching a Kajugu music video. And it went down so brilliantly well that they asked us to do more. so we started a little company In order to keep things within budget, producers needed to get creative. They'd borrow a friend's apartment to shoot in, or work out deals with actors trying to get footage for a demo reel, or stack shoots on top of each other so they could reuse the same sets and crews for multiple videos I remember mostly in the early days, that you're just getting stuff shoved at you. Nori Nibben again. He says that it wasn't exactly a glamorous life in the beginning We had a stage and in order to shoot on the stage, we had to shoot like four and one day, literally not sleeping and trying to shoot in twenty four hours before it was just stupid. Um, and why? Because we had we had a sound stage W the slog of it all, Nori was really grateful for an opportunity like this Learning how to shoot a film is incredibly expensive, and Pioneer was basically subsidizing the whole process Nori directed a ton of videos for Pioneer, and he was always experimenting with techniques His videos always had different types of color grading or frame rates or transitions We took advantage of those three minutes of laser disk space to create something interesting We shot on black and white, on reversal film stocks. We would load the film backwards, We baked the film. We pushed exposures, We did everything you could imagine experimental wise, just to push it, just to see what we could do to try to create different looks and different styles It really pushed the science of film just to go for it After the break, the rise and inevitable fall of the karaoke videoide Golden Age Stay with us. Insurance isn't one size fits all. 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Don't just clean Lysol clean By the early nineteen nineties, Pioneers' markarketing exec, Neil Altneu, says that the company was doing exactly what they had hoped They were selling a ton of these karaoke laser discs. And they were making a lot of money Let me tell you, when I started back in nineteen eighty eight We had zero volume Cmented Two years later, we were in the millions They just couldn't wait for that next laser dis to come. they didn't care what was on it They just needed to have the next one So would I would get five thousand disks an initial order They were gone. They were already sold before I even got them. It was like watching a serial on HBO. likeike you know, game of Thrones and you can't wait uill the next episode comes. It was the same thing with the laser disc. But Neil says that he actually doesn't think the karaoke videos were part of the success of laser discs If anything, the videos were kind of an afterthought His take is that laser discs were flying off the shelves because they were just a good product Like for one, Pioneer was able to license an incredible library of music. Their discs had tracks for current popular songs, old standards, classics, something for everyone I got disc one, the first one that was ever made And on side A, this is they had a really good cross section of music. On side A was roock around the clock, G Bowls of fire. Long tall, Sally Can't keep falling in love with you, Michelle. Eight days a week. These all beatles songs that they gave us Also, Neil and his division at Pioneer were doing exactly what they were supposed to do Marketing this product out in the field He says that they were going out into the trenches to convince bars around New York City to adopt their karaoke system. And we said to them, Look, we got this thing. The customers will be entertaining customers So they'll be buying drinks, they'll be doing everything. They'll be good for good business And what we're going to do is we'll give you the equipment, we'll give you the software, We'll teach you how to use it. The only thing we ask is if you're successful, we're allowed to bring other people in to show the success that we're having with the karaoke Wd spread, karaoke spread. it got to the point where Karaoke was being done seven nights a week Manhatt Karaoke was so popular, it was essentially keeping laser disc technology afloat in the nineties It was also generating a ton of work for the production companies printed at least eighty laser disc volumes in the original English language series alone, each one with twenty eight tracks disc This meant that literally thousands of original karaoke videos needed to be produced alongside those tracks You know, it had reached a peak and there was a lot of money and there was a lot of stuff going into the production. Nori And I flew to Paris for one of them. crazy, you know for a karaoke video, but it was beautiful, you know Culture writer Brian Raftery refuses to call himself a karaoke expert, but he does have a shed crammed full of these disks at his house and is logged an ungodly amount of hours watching these videos. Oh my god, it's probably probablyrobably one of those things where If I got to heaven in an afterlife and they gave you like a rundown of what you did, I think that would be like the one regret where'm like, I spend how many hours. I mean I guess it's in the hundreds of hours range And it was during these hundreds of hours that he started noticing some bizarre subgenres across the pioneer karaoke Uvre. There were, of course, the things you might expect from your eighties music video, women dancing in fluorescent unitards and brooding men on motorcycles, but Brian also picked up on the fact that a lot of these videos were definitely filmed at the tail end of the Reagan administration There's so many eighties yuppy karaoke videos where it's like guy in a convertible and he's driving to like a bluff to go to his house on Malibu and he's got blondes in his car. It's just like this weird eighties idea of excess and success. I call them serial killers Nori Niven again I thought that all the love songs, the male actors they hired looked like they wanted to kill everyone. when they looked like they were in love It just looked like they wanted to kill everyone There was also the genre of videos that Brian describes as the first three minutes of a porno Nothing explicit, just the exposition The whole era of like these couples that were kind of either together or wandering around the city they're either like grand sweeping pastoral nature scenes where they arere both on horses together on the beach. Or they're like walking through and like wearing incredibly boxy suits, both the man and the woman, like very, very boxy late ladies power suits And they're not pornographic or skin flicky, but they're definitely like This is the beginning of their romantic night Looking back now, I've never thought about this, but like people talk about boomers a lot now. If you want to know about like the boomer live from the eighties, like I think these chararac videos, it's like a lot of middle aged guys and convertibles. A lot of couples wearing boxy suits walking around forever. It's like it's' it's an interesting look at boomers did before they found Facebook, I guess. It's like They loveved, they lived, they rode horseback, they you know had satin sheets. they know they had very big lives. And this is why they're so angry now. I get it In Brian's opinion, the very best karaoke videos were the ones that were absolutely uncategorizable. The ones with storylines that were so nuts or so irrelevant to the song itself that you couldn't help but turn your head towards the screen there was some stupid things that We're done Neil Alttenew clearly does not share this opinion Despite Pioneer not really intervening much on creative, Neil says that of course these videos had to at least be reviewed And for the most part, he wasn't super impressed I got to be honest with you. These production companies They made these videos and they really didn't Look at the music that well because a lot of these videos really didn't fit. the music One video for the Cheers theme song, which is a television show about a group of regulars at a bar, had a storyline where a man gets thrown into a jail cell full of scary looking inmates But instead of getting the crap kicked out of him, everyone breaks into spontaneous dance It was one where they had the two Barbie dolls they were showing. And it was a love song and had somebody was holding them in their hand and they had the Barbie dolls kissing each other. There's one where it's just like a woman feeding a goose seductively or something like that and we're just like, what is this gem In one surreal video for the song Israel Lites by Desmond Decker A man in shirtless overalls uses a pickaxe to turn a lump of salt into bread while small children attempt to hoist him into the air with a play parachute Which is so David Lynchian, I half expected Laura Dern to show up conversation between the song and the video, I guess you could say, we're not always in the same Rom tune or key, but they didn't always make sense to the songs they were going along with, but they were amazing to watch While several of these music videos were insane or cheesy or just aged poorly, like don't get me started on the video for David Bowie's China Girl A lot were actually made well Many were shot on film stock well lit. And you could tell that the people who made them took this as an opportunity to practice a craft. And because Pioneer hired production companies from all over the country Lots of different types of people had the opportunity to try this work on for size There were camera people, production designers, grips, makeup artists, actors And some of them eventually went on to do big things in entertainment. I think one of the Dixie Chicks wound up in a video apparently. You know, Dylan McDermott may have been in one, if I remember correctly. Not Derm Dermmal Rononey Dyl Oh my Godd. I mean, Dermmal Rononey may have, too. I mean, Bill Paxon and Bill Pullman may have done these. I don't know producer on a ton of karaoke videos named Paris Barkley was eventually elected as president of the Director's Guild of America. And Nori Niven, who you've been hearing from, has been a successful commercial director for around thirty years now Brian Rftery also spotted a pretty prominent name listed on the credits on a couple of these videos Jay Roach who directed Austin Powers and many other big movies. H name is on one or two of these things, mayaybe more than that I directed two videos. One was based on the Barbara Streisen song, I am A Woman in loveove, and the other was based on my funny Valentine This is Jay Roach. As Brian mentioned, he directed the Austin Powers films, also The Roses, as well as Meet the Parents It's kind of funny because he you would actually go from directing a Barbara Strezand karaoke video to later directing Barbara Strezand herself You know, I worked with her on Met the Fakers later and if I had remembered, I would have embarrassed myself at all that I did that video He was still a grad student at the time when he was given the chance to make a couple of these videos And apparently, these karaoke videos are some of the very first short films he ever directed I'm sure those were my first paid gigs directing anything for sure. So it might have been kind of steps across that threshold because I really never considered myself a director until I just started doing it He says that he had always seen himself as more of a cinematographer, the technical person who hid behind the camera But because the stakes and the budget of these music videos were so low, he was kind of forced to give directing actors a try Directing actors as a young person, as a new person is probably the most intimidating thing. I knew about camera, I knew about sound and editing and everything else, but I hadn't really worked with actors that much. so it also gave me a chance to just tryry that Can we say that if it weren't for karaoke videos, we wouldn't have the Austin Powers films forse Would it be true? Probably not. Jay Roach is a talented guy who would have figured out how to direct either way But talking to him, he seems to have the same gratitude for these videos as everyone else I spoke with for this story everyvery opportunity to make something is a chance to learn. And he's carried a little bit of those early karaoke lessons with him throughout his career You have to develop a little bit of tolerance for misery when you make movies. I mean, it's obviously a lucky thing to get to do, but there's never enough budget, there's never enough time. You're always trying to do something. You know, again, that may exceed your resources and exceed your own capabilities. So it was an accidental film school in a way. It was an accidental opportunity that turned out to be you know, good for everybody involved karaoke video Glden Age couldn't last forever And ironically, a big reason why it was doomed was the very same reason why it caught on The music I say this transition really started to happen in nineteen ninety four where you could start seeing the karaoke business going down. When the Laser Karaoke Division started back in nineteen eighty eight Pioneer was able to license a ton of popular music They only licensed those songs for around seven years Maybe it was because karaoke was so new and unknown to music publishers, but it was a lot easier to secure the rightits at those early stages By the time those licenses expired, publishers either didn't want to renew them or charged way more money to use those tracks We had like I'm looking at disc three. There's twenty eight songs on it. So they had to come out with a disc where they had to take maybe five songs off the disc because they weren't licensed anymore. The final nail in the coffin for Pioneer Laser Karaoke ended up being an emerging media format called CD plus Graphics or CDG. CDG was basically a regular audio CD that was capable of displaying very simple graphics on a screen They weren't advanced enough to show something like a full on movie. they were capable of displaying lyrics sync to a song They were also a fraction of the price of laser disk Video production got hit immediately Oh, it was a train it was a train wreck Nori Niven and So Naslly both had a view from inside the train as it was crashing I remember I was in a loft downtown and the guy came in from LA And, oh gosh. And he was like, u You said we're going to cut the budgets in half And we'd like for you to start using stock footage How much stock footage can you cram into these things? And I was like, o my gosh, red flags everywhere They just kind of got to that point where we were shooting scenic stuff and it just wasn't as fun. There wasn't as much budget anymore. And I was like, I'm out Nothing looked good at that point. so We politely resigned to job eventually they became the worst kind of karaoke video boring J just stock footage of people walking in a park by the ocean on the street kinds of videos that I remember watching as a kid. Pioneer released their last English language karaoke laser disc in nineteen ninety nine and announced the end of all Lzarddc products in two thousand nine You know, flame went out, but it was It was a fun ride. It really was a fun ride New Altneew stayed with the company until two thousand eight thinks that had Pioneer come out with their karaoke products on CDG format from the beginning Karaoke would have probably been just as popular When I was singing or when most people sing, they don't even look at the videos. You know, they're looking at theds because they want to get the right words because nobody cared about the videos Be true. And had Pioneer not commissioned their karaoke videos, they would have saved millions of dollars But in making these laser discs They provided a lot of people with something that seems increasingly rare these days the opportunity to make something cool I think if they were inventing karaoke these days, They'd never even think to put a video there because that wouldn't be the motivation. The motivation would be how to do it the most profitably rather than creating something more interesting. Nikki Smedley again. She was the producer that worked on these videos in London in case you forgot was also a f tell a tubby Nikki still works in the arts, she practically has her whole life, and she says that it was a blessing to receive even a little bit of money to support herself when she was younger. when you ask me about whether or not I questioned it just went No. No, that's great. It's a creative thing. It's working with my pals. It's doing what I love It's making things out of nothing to music ick. Absolutely every single bit of paid work that that I got in those days was Yeah, that was mana from Heaven