Essentially, there are three types of karaoke night that Vietnamese people tend to take part in nowadays.
The first is all-female karaoke, involving a select bunch of girls from the same, or occasionally different, walks of life. As in the West, karaoke is considered a perfect group activity for a hen's night - with one major difference: Vietnamese women never get blind drunk and they often don't drink at all. All-female karaoke tends to be marked by manifest feelings of warmth and togetherness:
Competitiveness is rare and this type of ending:
is unheard of.
The second type is what I would describe as all-male howling
and lechery. Unlike Vietnamese women, Vietnamese men tend to drink very heavily
when they go out for karaoke with their buddies. Unsurprisingly, this tends to increase
the amount of soul they feel they are putting into their performances:
It also of course affects their general levels of continence.
Apart from singing out of tune, they spend a lot of their time daring each
other to goose the waitress who appears every now and then to lay out more beer and snacks.
Once they have had a good howl, they often pack off to a
massage parlour. Or the karaoke studio itself turns into a massage parlour.
That's right, among the many types of karaoke studio that exist in today's Vietnam,
there are places where the waitresses are paid to sit in the laps of the male
clientele, or perform various repetitive operations upon the laps of the male
clientele. . . We are talking about what the Vietnamese call "karaoke ôm".
("Ôm" here means "cuddle" and obviously has nothing to do
with the mystical noise emitted by Buddhist monks in their efforts
to reach wordless realms of spiritual intensity.)
Thirdly, we can say there is co-ed karaoke, which falls
somewhere in between the first two types. It can be anything from fun to agony:
fun, in my experience, when it involves the sort of jaunty display of taste and
talent that karaoke involves in the rest of the world; agony when there are
lots of couples involved, the men get wasted, and their wives/girlfriends
have to sit around and watch.
Now, the key question here for a Western visitor to Vietnam is this: how much should you try to get involved in Vietnamese karaoke? One thing's for sure, if you want to make a massive hit of yourself in Vietnam, then learn to sing a few popular Vietnamese karaoke numbers.
Yes, you can always search karaoke machines for tinny
arrangements of Queen or the Ramones. Some Vietnamese will be mildly impressed
if you can hit the notes and get a bit of expression happening. But except for
a few advanced youngsters, Vietnamese people deeply don't get Western music; they don't understand the lyrics
and they doubly don't understand the attitudes that the music is meant to evoke.
You may think that Bohemian Rhapsody is a masterpiece of
dark lyricism, that Bruce Springsteen is a rough diamond with a deep sense of
social commitment or even that Abba is innocent, clean fun, but you're unlikely
to convince normal Vietnamese people of the truth of these ideas, no matter how
talented an amateur vocalist you are.
So what you should do if you plan on staying in Vietnam for
more than two or three months, is take the plunge and learn to sing karaoke the Vietnamese way.
Before getting started, be advised though - even if you have
considerable musical talent, getting your head around Vietnamese music is hard.
Except for the plainest pop music (Vpop), real Vietnamese music tends
to be melodically quite messy. To Western ears, there are few
simple tunes and even fewer simple chord progressions. So the songs are hard to
listen to, and even harder to memorize.
And then there are the lyrics, which it's going to take you ages to learn properly: the Vietnamese language
has ten different vowels and a range of consonants that look a bit like English
consonants but sound like absolute nonsense when pronounced the English way.
Which is not to say a butchered version of a Vietnamese pop
tune won't win you lots of friends and admirers. But which is to say - if you
want to actually get good at Vietnamese karaoke, then a crash course at a
Vietnamese language centre wouldn't go astray.
The other thing that makes Vietnamese karaoke hard to come at
from a Western point of view is the sheer schlockiness of much of it.
Vietnamese popular music just doesn't express that much of the toughness,
weirdness, rage, boredom or sexual desire that the classics of Western music gave voice to
from the 1960's onwards. Hot sassy women who want to make up their own lives are rare in the Vietnamese music world. So are cool, embittered men who see themselves as refugees from the dominant social order (with one main exception). What Vietnamese music tends to be about are
traditional romantic themes: love, break-ups, separation, plus a whole lot of
fuzzy nostalgic stuff about the natural beauty of your home village.
Unlike Westerners, Vietnamese men quite like to sing songs about the devotion of Vietnamese mothers to the family hearth. And Vietnamese girls really, really like to sing along to the soppy tunes of androgynous Korean boy-men with big hair and tears in their eyes.
Unlike Westerners, Vietnamese men quite like to sing songs about the devotion of Vietnamese mothers to the family hearth. And Vietnamese girls really, really like to sing along to the soppy tunes of androgynous Korean boy-men with big hair and tears in their eyes.
To many Westerners, the result is incomprehensible, both
musically and emotionally. And it's made worse by the way the
songs are packaged in Vietnamese karaoke machines. While the hard-to-listen-to
music plays, an even-harder-to-watch sequence of badly edited images starts up.
Evocative shots of lotus ponds, nobbly hills and flowing brooks (or, even worse,
evocative shots of major Vietnamese infrastructure projects) are spliced
together to produce just the right mix of patriotism and provincial pride:
something many Vietnamese find vastly satisfying, especially once they've put
away half a dozen cans of Heineken. . .
*
Karaoke has become such a big thing in Vietnam over the past 20 years
that many middle class homes nowadays boast a karaoke
room, as well as a more formal guest room. Vietnamese wives tend to like them - partly because of the way they project
economic status, partly, I guess, because they deprive husbands of excuses for
beery evenings at the local karaoke ôm.
The widespread Vietnamese ambition to be a fine karaoke
singer spreads its influence well beyond the middle-class home though. Year
by year, karaoke finds its way into more and more corners of social life.
As we learned a few days ago, once the speeches are over at Vietnamese wedding receptions the mike gets handed to any of the guests who'd
like to make a show of their musical talents. The din that results
often kills all possibility of conversation, in Vietnamese, English or any
other language.
In more advanced form, karaoke takes over Vietnamese tv. In
the absence of sensationalist current affairs, talent shows become the
main point of interest for the majority of the prime-time audience.
In less advanced form, karaoke takes over your local takeaway, when business is slow in the late afternoon:
The popularity of karaoke may have led to the opening of
large numbers of private singing schools, but whether it has increased the
total amount of harmony in the world is doubtful. The music lessons that most Vietnamese kids get at school
are pretty minimal, meaning there are a lot of Vietnamese out there who think of singing as one
of their favourite hobbies, but whose ears and voices have had no musical training whatsoever.
Obviously I'm not saying you need to have gone to the
Julliard School to be a useful addition to a Vietnamese karaoke night. But surely
having a basic sense of tonality couldn't hurt. The songs that get sung during
Vietnamese karaoke sessions may sound a bit off-key to Western ears. But the
fact is the singers are way off-key
themselves a lot of the time.
One thing you'll pick up on, if you stay in Vietnam for a
while, is the surprising number of Vietnamese - mainly boys instead of girls -
who go about their daily business unselfconsciously - and totally tunelessly -
singing tender love-lyrics to themselves. For single Vietnamese men, singing to
yourself seems to be a basic expression of romantic authenticity. But it's hard to
listen to. And even harder to work out why they do it, given how few women are
charmed by men who walk around bellowing in an undertone. . .
The answer of course lies in the institution of karaoke - that soft-edged, beery world which, in their dreams, some Vietnamese men would like to disappear
into and never come out of again.
All the world's a stage?
For the younger generation of Vietnamese men, all the
world's a studio - where you can serenade your sweetheart, memorialize your mum
(and maybe make out with the waitress) - all day, every day, no matter where you
are.
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