Another Protest Song: Karaoke

multimedia performance, karaoke system, video monitors, edited karaoke song book 2008–ongoing

The November 2008 elections were approaching near our first iteration, and we were interested in providing a mediated space in which participants might feel comfortable getting on their soapboxes and professing their political interests and dislikes. In the era of competitive singing and innumerable karaoke bars, everyone is a singer, and the choice of a song speaks about the performer, particularly if that song includes political content. In the context of protest karaoke, while the song choice might communicate history in the present, it also speaks of a history attached (or newly considered) to a political situation rather than one consumed primarily as a popular cultural product.

What is key for us, is the enunciative act of singing, the politically performative moment, the scale of which is up to each singer. What or who are they protesting? At times participants share that information, at others it becomes more about the joy of singing. Over a two-day period in September of 2008, as part of the Creative Time project Democracy in America: The National Campaign, we organized a karaoke suite of protest songs and a performance stage in two parks in New York City (Prospect Park, Brooklyn and Corona Park/Flushing Meadows, Queens). For six hours each day, pedestrians, park-goers, cyclists, and the general public sang songs of protest, sober and under the warm sun.

Since 2008, Another Protest Song: Karaoke has traveled to a street corner in Toronto, the Sculpture Garden at MoMA, archives, museums,and performance spaces, as well as a couple of bars in New Haven, CT and Brooklyn, NY.