Hipster karaoke – it was only okay (part II of II): Singing, and then karaoke.

But, before karaoke, my one (white) friend from Mississippi had been invited to play a few songs as part of a Saturday night lineup at a nearby hipster bar, one of a series of continuing (unpaid) gigs that he got through this guy he met at hipster karaoke and who liked his singing.

The bar was kind of shitty. At first glance it was cool because it was painted all neat and had old music posters up, and they had great beer prices and nice bartenders – the owner was there, this old (white) guy of Swedish descent, and they were selling glogg made from his family’s recipe, and to buy a good beer was only $3.50 (!) – but the bar sucked for several reasons.

First, it was full of (white) hipsters trying to be cool. The bar was packed, and everyone was (white), except for a few Asians, who tend to be (whiter) than (white) anyhow. So many of the hipsters try to make themselves ugly, too, which I’ve been noticing lately – get ugly piercings, not wash their hair and let it grow long, etc. It makes me just want to slap them all and tell them to grow up.

Second, the stage was way up in the front, which is one of the worst places for a stage, and not only could you not see it, but the music was on too loud, so you were bombarded with music from a stage you really couldn’t see and didn’t care about.

We got there at 10pm and left after midnight for hipster karaoke, but though we put songs in right away and stayed for more than an hour till close, we never got to sing.

The worst part was that like half the crowd were these (black) early-to-mid-20s “cool” kids, almost like hipsters...

When I first got there, this one (black or mixed-race) girl was singing Clarence Carter’s “Strokin’” and people were eating it up, only she was doing it in this ironic, repulsive way that no one seemed to notice, probably because the audience was also hipsters.

After that, it was nothing but her and her friends for like the next 7-8 songs... On one a group of (black) guys got up, and the 2 “backup” guys didn’t sing, and the lead guy didn’t have a voice, and all their friends were dancing up close and taking pictures, and on another some (black) girl got up and sang Britney Spears’s “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)”, and on another one a (black) guy and a (black) girl got up to sing and were pretty much just howling into the microphones and clowning around throughout their “duet”.

“What a bunch of bullshit,” I told my one (white) friend from Mississippi, during the girl singing Britney.

“No,” he was like, “She’s not bad, and that guy who sang before was pretty good. It’s nice to see some soul here.”

“You know,” I was like, ‘You’re giving them a free pass at karaoke because they’re black. If that was some white sorority girl from a Big Ten singing now, you’d make a face and roll your eyes because it’s so typical to sing Britney, and the rest of them are just clowning with their friends. They’re karaoke jackasses, but you don’t notice because they’re black.”

That line of analysis made him uncomfortable, but I told him that one of the things I appreciated about krunk karaoke was learning how not all (black) people sing well, and how all these (black) women think they’re divas and put some diva song in and can fuck it up too, they don’t have some magic ability to sing awesome just because they’re black, though maybe they think they do, or think they should be able to.

Later, after last call, and karaoke was still going, I left, because the host called up some people yet again from the huge crowd of early-to-mid 20s (black) kids, and this like 300lb (black) gay dude sashayed up to the microphone with this “look at me” attitude to sing Michael Jackon’s “Can’t Stop Loving You” with 2 (!) of his (black) lady friends, and I had to leave, he was pissing me off so much, I’m not going to stick around and enable some obnoxious dude’s attention-getting complex.

So, I said bye, and then went outside and hopped on my bike and left.