KAREN

Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at USC, and the author of the forthcoming book, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press, August 2011). She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Popular Music Studies (with Gustavus Stadler), and the series editor of Postmillennial Pop at NYU Press (with Henry Jenkins). By night, KT can be found belting power ballads, flashing jazz hands and sipping bourbon at a seedy karaoke establishment near you. In this blog, she writes about one such establishment.

Every time I stroll up to the black curtained entryway of The Smog Cutter, I’m greeted with a tender, if slightly scruffy kiss on the cheek from Mike the bouncer, a Vietnam vet who loves reading Borges and writing poetry to his favorite patrons. As soon as I drift past the pool table, Joann, the chief bartendress—who, along with some of the Smog’s other regulars, makes a cameo in minute 2:10 of Kid Cudi’s “Day ‘N’ Nite” video—pops open an ice cold bottle of Bud Light, sets it up at the corner of the bar and says, “hey, KT!” She always asks if I’m hungry. If I tell her that I am, I’m immediately offered a thin paper plate scattered with anything from homemade pork cracklings, to papaya salad with fish sauce, to slices of American cheese and raw hot dogs, depending on how late it is, and what’s around.

The Smog Cutter is my “Cheers bar.” This is how I preface all my visits to the place with nervous initiates who I somehow hope to convert into intimates once they experience the sordid magic of Virgil Village’s most glorious dive. Unlike other dive bars where nascent friendships and loves come to fruition over stiff drinks alongside cantankerous old regulars, and a shared tolerance for strange stains and scents, the Smog allows me to administer my supreme litmus test for intimacy: karaoke. Over set-lists peppered with Journey, the Carpenters and the Johns—Elton, Olivia Newton, Denver, Waite—I’ve felt the faint stirrings of love struggling to find form. At other times, in the sinews of synths, solo saxophones and careless whispers, I’ve also heard portend of love’s ruinous collapse.

Like any good Pinay, for me karaoke isn’t just a drunken, weekend recreation. It’s a belief system. A world-view. It’s therapy, pedagogy and seduction all rolled into one—though thankfully these things don’t always happen simultaneously. The Smog serves it up six nights a week. Tuesdays are dark, because honestly, how many times in a week can you endure a cocky hipster singing “Sweet Caroline?” The songbook isn’t super expansive, and hasn’t been updated with Top 40 hits since latter-day ‘NSYNC. As a regular, I’ve manufactured clandestine methods to coax more music from the book, not unlike geeks of another stripe who find “cheats” for video games.

I’ll offer a hint for the benefit of tentative lovers among you who are looking to pitch the woo:  If you want to sing Spandau Ballet’s “True,” you won’t find it listed alphabetically in the “Songs by Title” book. Stretch your Spandau knowledge to recall the name of the band’s lead guitarist, chief songwriter, and the older of two brothers in the ensemble. “True” is listed under his name in the “Songs by Artist” book.

Even I still can’t figure out how to access Sarah McLachlan’s “Possession.” I heard someone perform it with breathy, Lilith-era moxie recently, and felt a tremendous pang of jealousy. I suppose I could just ask. But I’d rather keep coming back in hot pursuit, after honing my skills at divination.

As my obsessive, song-hunter ramblings have probably made apparent, the Smogbook features ample selections from karaoke’s sweet spot: the music of the 1980s. In Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, Rob Sheffield remarks that “There is something inherently karaoke-like about the 80s musical style—the overproduced drums, the beer-commercial sax solos, the keytars, the leather-lung vocal melodrama. Eighties songs do not belong to the singer…They don’t sound like a person expressing a feeling—they sound like a gigantic sound machine blowing up this feeling to self-parodic heights.”

Sheffield almost gets it right. He nails it when he describes the “leather-lung” textures that coexist with the plasticine pop baubles of the era in a way that makes it seem like “eighties songs are karaoke-ready.” But—and you’ll have to forgive my academic indulgence here—as any half-assed scholar who dabbles in postcolonial theory could tell you (yes, I’m describing myself): this dearth of “personhood” that purportedly stems from gaudy yawps of power balladry, is actually a gesture to some other way of feeling and being that is truly “Other.” For me singing karaoke, and indulging in 80s balladry in particular, offers a way to unleash the FOBish sentimentality in what I call the “immigrant baroque.” You know what it looks like: gold chandeliers and marble balustrades, accented with carefully curated Walmart Chinoiserie.

The Smog Cutter is what it sounds like.

In my forthcoming book (shameless plug alert), Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, I write about the flows of music through broadcast networks that create remote intimacies and sensations; about the “American pop songs we heard elsewhere foreshadowing the love, heartbreak, rebellion, wealth and sex we’d find once we arrived, only to remind us after we got here that we’re still waiting for all those things.”

Many, though most certainly not all, of the hardened regulars hunkered around the “L” at the front corner of the bar, are first or second generation immigrants from the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and Korea. Each has his or her own repertoire of desire and loss, be it Sinatra, James Ingram, or Richard Marx. And, of course, immigrants aren’t the only ones who nurse their damage and stoke their longings with cheap drinks and song.

The Smog is also amenable to queers, broken thugs, and other lost souls of L.A.’s gentrified eastside—at least on weeknights. Tourists from other parts of town and the rest of the wide world tend to float in on weekends for bachelorette parties and other odious rituals, as if the excursion promises a cheap roll in the hay with something exotic and tawdry. I suppose it does, in some way. But it’s among the Smog’s weeknight stew of earnest lovers, dreamers and hustlers that I learned the edicts of karaoke decorum:

1) Respect a regular’s claim to the songbook, and be attentive to when someone is obviously singing their signature song. Don’t sign up to do it a mere four songs later. (This happens more than you think.)

2) Never try to advance in the cue by paying off the KJ (karaoke jockey), or by bullying him or her like an obnoxious, entitled douche who goes to places with bottle service.

3) Some sing with earnestness, others sing for play, but never disrespect a song by just fucking with it, ironically, to make people laugh. In other words, understand that you are but another instrument in the “empty orchestra.”

4) Never just play to the crowd. Each person who sings does so for his or her own purpose. Even when someone chooses a song that “kills the party vibe,” e.g. Melissa Manchester’s “Through the Eyes of Love (Theme from Ice Castles),” you have to show your love for their fortitude, and whatever has come from the depths to inspire this soft vigil.

There are many other rules of etiquette that can only be absorbed after repeat observances with the mic, brokered by the KJ legends of the Smog: from Sunshine, to Jan, to weekend Wayne, and even the new guy whose name I still haven’t learned. If, after reading this, you’re compelled to check it out yourself, please remember to watch and listen a little before you dive into the smoggy depths, and sound out your own exuberance or heartbreak.

I’m away from the Smog this summer. Work and recuperation require time on other coasts and continents. But I know I’ll have something to come back to. The warm, squalid embrace of a place and its people who make my wait for another shot at Waite all the more worthwhile, reminding us once more of the beautiful lie in the heart of a chorus that insists, “I ain’t missing you at all.”