Karaoke: Mother of Exiles “Once More With Feeling” is a new film just released at the Sundance movie festival to rather lackluster reviews. There is nothing of note in this film except that it happens to center around a karaoke bar. The main characters are various middle-aged to senior bar rats navigating the stormy seas of mid-life crisis and personal despair. In other words, these people are pathetic; with pathetic lives. The karaoke bar, for all you literary criticism students – is a metaphor for a life that has been a long train of inescapable regret, happenstance, and personal tragedy. It is the box we end up in once we have painted ourselves into it, a proverbial “Hotel California,” where you can check in anytime, but you can never leave. Why does Hollywood insist on painting the karaoke bar as this place for lonely, pathetic people? Since when did the karaoke bar become a haven for pathos and despair? And even if it is a sanctuary for the downtrodden can we not revel in the fact that it transforms these emotional malcontents into happy souls? They sing, they dance, they support one another and pull themselves up by each other’s bootstraps. There is freedom up there behind the microphone. The kind of freedom we don’t get in the cubicle, behind the lawnmower, or in front of the stove. Do we not remember that people from faraway lands braved the restless seas to sail into New York Harbor, to reinvent themselves, to escape a pathetic life, to find a new way. And as the poem beneath the Statue of Liberty proclaims, she is the “Mother of Exiles,” so to is the local karaoke bar a refuge for life’s exiles of all stripes and circumstances. So I say “give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .” the mic is waiting. 
Given the bad rap that many give karaoke in America, you may ask yourself is karaoke pathetic? Here is food for thought.
