DON’T SING THESE SONGS AT KARAOKE (and feel free to sing some of these if you want)
The next 1,000 or so words are me ranting, so feel free to skip those to get to the list of alphabetized artists.
I’ve attended two karaoke gatherings over the last few months. Days prior to the first I’d lost my voice, so an actual performance was never going to happen. Nevertheless, at the end of the night, once most of our group was gone, I groaned in and out of Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls,” a task the audience found almost as painful as I did.
The second wasn’t billed to me as karaoke, just as a friend’s birthday at a bar, and I’d planned on stopping by to say hi, maybe staying for a drink. The karaoke began shortly after I arrived and I was given even more incentive to keep my stay short. Before I left, though, I was asked a question that I’ve encountered before, in personal profiles and on social media and in bad conversation. I knew I was going to be asked and I already knew what I was going to say, because I feel a certain way about it, and I knew that it wouldn’t be a popular answer.
I’d like to think that I’m paraphrasing here and that I’m not the asshole who says things like this, but I’m not and I am, so I (only once the question had gone all the way around, not volunteering my answer but waiting to smugly close out the round like a the…
