Karaoke Videos

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1:28Birthdays, family reunions, funerals, Sunday mornings after the Raiders lost, all good reasons to whip out the karaoke machine. And one of the things that I remember most vividly during these formative mid-90s moments was watching the videos that played during the karaoke tracks my parents were singing along to. They were mostly stock footage synchronized to the music. Like, you know, people on a beach, people sailing boats, people in a hot air balloon. Pretty generic stuff. Every time I hear the song, listen to the rhythm of the falling rain, I could still see freestyle roller skaters weaving through cones in an urban park.

2:03These videos were like watching the equivalent of hotel art. Something to look at, not necessarily something to think about. In other words, they were nothing like the karaoke videos that Brian Raftery was watching when he was in his 20s. I definitely remember nights and times when I was singing when everyone would just kind of turn their head toward the video because they were so strange and they're so ambitious and they're so weird. And some of them look really great. Brian is a culture writer and author of the book Don't Stop Believin', how karaoke conquered the world and changed my life. Brian's entry point to karaoke came in the late 1990s.

2:42He and his friends were living in New York City when they discovered a little dive called Village Karaoke. It was during these late-night excursions that he realized the karaoke videos playing at Village were on a whole other level. Like the Benny and the Jets video, you can interpret that song 85 million ways, but the video we remembered, for some reason, was like a mom luring a bunch of kids slowly to a plate full of cookies, and I'm like, what the hell does this have to do with Benny and the Jets? Like, no Benny, no Jets. It wasn't like these videos were unrelated stock footage just thrown over music.

3:14These are all originally produced short films equipped with their own storylines, characters, and tangential interpretations of the song's lyrics. And there are literally thousands of videos like this. There's a very strange video that we used to talk about all the time for Paul McCartney's Ebony and Ivory, which was really, I don't know if it's problematic or not, but it was like there's a black man walking a white dog and then a white man walking a black dog. And then they become friends. It is trying to be true to the spirit of this, you know, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder duet. But it makes no sense that it's a dog park.

3:53Some of these karaoke videos were clearly bananas, but they were not lacking in ambition. Actors were hired, locations were scouted, lighting was designed, and a lot of them were shot on actual film stock. Ryan wanted to know who had made these and why go through all the effort. I was just kind of like, this is weird that like, this is a video that like, we're just here as a goof. And someone put a lot of time and effort to make this video for this Hall & Oates song that we're all drunkenly singing in a tiny room. As it turns out, these weirdo karaoke videos were kind of their own micro-movement of filmmaking.

4:28It only lasted a handful of years and is only remembered by a handful of people, but it gave a generation of aspiring filmmakers something that barely exists anymore. A paying gig where they could just mess around and figure out how to make stuff. It's about as close to an outside-of-Hollywood Hollywood project as you can get. Some videos were good, some were bad, and several were so bad that they were awesome. And I had to know more about where they came from. The story of these videos actually originated about a decade before Brian discovered them at Village Karaoke. Back in the 1980s, the world of consumer electronics was exploding.

5:08Personal computers, the Walkman, camcorders, fax machines, the Game Boy. It was like a shiny new toy was coming out on a monthly basis. And Neil Altnew wanted in. I basically was a sales and marketing exec. And I introduced a lot of products to the United States. One day in 1988, Neil was flipping through the New York Times, and he saw a job ad that intrigued him. And they were looking for somebody, for some sort of a startup in the East Coast. The company that put out that ad was Pioneer, the Japanese Electronics Corporation. They were looking for someone to head up a brand new division, specifically in America.

5:48Neil applied, and when he got an interview, his wife drove down with him to the Pioneer offices in Manhattan. Well, you know, maybe two hours passed. I came down and I said, this is a really interesting product. And she said, what is it? And I said, it's this thing called karaoke. She said, what is karaoke? What is that? Karaoke had been around for over a decade at this point. But back in the 1980s, it was still pretty unknown in the West. It was huge in Asia, though, particularly in Japan, where Pioneer was headquartered. The word karaoke itself is Japanese, meaning empty orchestra. If you go to Japan, every little bar, there was 800 ,000 bars in Japan, believe it or not.

6:29But every bar had to have karaoke in it. And actually, a big reason why karaoke was already so popular in Japan was because of Pioneer's karaoke technology.

6:50A few years before Neil joined the company, Pioneer completely revolutionized the karaoke game by releasing the first ever karaoke Laserdisc player. For those under the age of 37, Laserdisc was one of the lesser known combatants in the home video format wars of the 70s and 80s. Picture a DVD the size of a vinyl record. And I've got one on my hand right now. It's a disc that looks like an LP record. It's silver, and it has information on both sides. Okay, and there's 28 videos on each disc. Back then, when home video was first emerging, VHS, Betamax, and Laserdisc were all battling it out to be the dominant consumer technology.

7:34VHS and beta turned out to be exponentially more popular for the home movie watching experience. The videotape won the war. LaserDisc only was able to capture maybe 1 % of the market. But the video market is so huge, 1 % of the market is very significant. So Pioneer says, you know what, maybe not so much for movies, but karaoke, yeah. Because nobody else is doing it. So we're all alone. So we'll take 1 % of the market all alone. When it came to something like karaoke, Laserdisc had a superpower that gave it an edge over VHS or beta. A Laserdisc could jump around to individual chapters on the disc, again, like a giant DVD.

8:12This made it well-suited for searching for individual karaoke tracks if they were listed as chapters, like you would on a jukebox. It was a technology that fit the art form. Pioneer said, you know what, for a karaoke application, this is perfect. Essentially, all you need for karaoke are two things, a backing track and the lyrics to the song displayed on the screen. But when Pioneer manufactured these discs for the Japanese market, they also decided to include one additional element, a karaoke music video that went along with each track. I think that the original concept of using those videos in Japan was to basically sell Laserdiscs.

8:50Laserdiscs were known for having really good picture resolution, way better than its competitors VHS or Betamax. Pioneer in Japan figured it would be a complete waste not to put a nice-looking video up on the screen. And Neil says when Pioneer decided to expand to the American market and get laser karaoke into American bars, they copied that same formula. They had a lot of success in Japan with it that way, and they wanted to replicate their success in the United States, and they felt that this is the way we did it in Japan, we got to do it in the United States the same way. But it couldn't be exactly the same.

9:24Those videos were shot in Japan, for Japanese songs, for a Japanese audience. You know, you couldn't have a song like, you know, I shot the sheriff with a Japanese video on it. It didn't work. You had to have a production company go out there and shoot the videos. Which is how people like Nori Niven got involved. I always compared it to like that scene in Conan the Barbarian where he has to push that rock in a circle for like 10 years before he becomes a grown man, you know, when he's all strong. Because you shoot a million feet of film and either you fail or you come out of it stronger. In the late 1980s, Nori was actually still in college.

10:05He'd been directing music videos for local artists when the opportunity to work on these karaoke videos fell into his lap. Somehow I wound up on a panel for music videos at Panavision in Dallas, and I'm like 20 years old. And one of the guys on the panel said, hey, I've got these karaoke videos. You want to come shoot some of them? And I would shoot anything. I mean, I love shooting film. And the idea of shooting music videos sounded really fun. And of course I said yes. Pioneer had a division called Laserdisc Corporation of America, also known as LDCA. They contracted production companies and directors from Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, even London.

10:46And Nori remembers early on, there was one specific directive for these videos. They wanted stories. So I remember they really wanted a narrative weave. They wanted a beginning, a middle, and an end. They really wanted you to stick to the storyline of the song. By the time Pioneer got into this, I think they needed to have some sort of story. Brian Raftery again. Because at that point, Western audiences, especially after seven or eight years of MTV, they knew that every video had to have either a wild collage or a very easy to follow narrative. Pioneer wanted these narratives to adhere to the vibe and message of the song, but that came with one big stipulation.

11:24The footage used in these videos had to be completely original for copyright purposes. Pioneer only licensed the music, not the artist's likeness or any existing music video, so you couldn't reference their vision of the song. You know, if it was a song, if it was thriller, they did not want you to do like the thriller dance. They didn't want you to come to something original. There were, of course, a few other minor ground rules of what you could or could not show. I know they did not want people singing. I think that's one thing is to have no one singing along to the song, almost like not acknowledging that it's there because the focus should be on the singer.

11:56Pioneer also didn't want anything too violent or too salacious. I just had to keep it clean. So I had to be careful with, you know, nothing was too sexualized or whatever it was. Sadna Shelley was a producer at LDCA. She worked with dozens of directors during her time there and was a liaison between the higher-ups at Pioneer and the production companies actually making the videos. It was a wild time where you kind of had free reign. It was scary in a way, but it was also really a lot of fun. Sondha said that aside from those family-friendly rules, they almost never got any creative notes from the company.

12:36I don't think anyone was probably watching them except for us. Which also meant that the people making these videos had near-complete artistic freedom. I don't even think that making a good karaoke video was the thing. It was just making good art, you know, not necessarily for karaoke. I don't think any of us had that in mind when we shot it. It was just making beautiful art. But that beautiful art came with a pretty big limitation. Pioneer was a huge company with capital to throw behind these new karaoke videos, but not like that much capital. In the late 80s and 90s, the average cost of a music video on MTV could run$50 ,000 to$60 ,000.

13:16These karaoke videos, on the other hand, range from$3 ,600 to$10 ,000 because, well, this wasn't MTV. That budget had to cover production costs like locations, camera rentals, film stock and development, props, a crew, actors, and whatever payment you can walk away with for yourself. So these videos became a real filmmaking test of what directors could do with a micro budget, limited resources, and the creative wiggle room to go wild.

13:46I mean, when the idea first came to you, were you kind of like, you're going to pay us to do this thing that it seems very clear that do you really need like a high production video? Like, what were your thoughts when? Never even thought that. Just went, oh, great. Brilliant. Yes. You don't question at all. I wasn't biting the hand that fed. Yeah, I can do that. And I like the sound of it. Let's do that. This is Nikki Smedley. She produced a handful of karaoke videos for Pioneer in London and has had a long career in entertainment. I started out as a dancer and an actress. I ran a cabaret club.

14:24I went on to be a Teletubby. And now I do one woman show for grownups. And that's me. You did hear that correctly. Nikki was one of the original Teletubbies. She played Lala, the yellow one. I always say to people, I'm not famous. I just had one very famous outfit. So yeah, that's what I did. People won't recognize, but they recognize the boy. At the time, Nikki had very little to no production experience. Her friend Neil was hired to direct some videos and brought her on as a producer and choreographer. I found her name on the credits for Pioneer Laserdisc Volume 307, which I was actually holding in my hand during our Zoom call.

15:06That one, I think you've got Ain't Nothing Going On But The Rent. I do. You recognize it from the back of the... Nikki instantly clocked the Laserdisc volume in my hand. It had a song for a video she worked on called Ain't Nothing Going On But The Rent. That's the first one that Neil and I did working together. If you've never heard it, it's an R &B song by Gwen Guthrie about a woman looking for a man who's, at the very least, financially stable. No romance without finance is the refrain. Nikki and her director Neil, on the other hand, plotted out a different story for the video. It was about a couple who throw a house party in order to come up with money for rent.

15:44It's definitely a different interpretation of the song's original meaning, but it works. She broke down the process of how that video was planned. I would have a meeting with Neil and give him a general idea, and we would talk through the different shots that we thought we needed, and yes, and start doing a bit of loose budgeting for what we need. And then at the same time, I would be working with the music and drawing. I have a kind of beat map of the construction of the song. And then we'd meet up with the cameraman and go, this is what we want. Maybe have to make or find some props. And then voila.

16:19It has the look of any British synth pop video you might see on MTV in the 1980s. High contrast lighting, graphic wipes, glamorous, melancholy. If you blinked, you might think you were watching a Kajagoogoo music video. And it went down so brilliantly well that they asked us to do more, so we started a little company. In order to keep things within budget, producers needed to get creative. They'd borrow a friend's apartment to shoot in, or work out deals with actors trying to get footage for a demo reel, or stack shoots on top of each other so they could reuse the same sets and crews for multiple videos.

16:52I remember mostly in the early days, you're just getting stuff shoved at you. Nori Nibben again. He says that it wasn't exactly a glamorous life in the beginning. We had a stage, and in order to shoot on the stage, we had to shoot like four in one day, literally not sleeping and trying to shoot in 24 hours. It was just stupid. And why? Because we had a sound stage. But despite the slog of it all, Nori was really grateful for an opportunity like this. Learning how to shoot a film is incredibly expensive, and Pioneer was basically subsidizing the whole process. Nori directed a ton of videos for Pioneer, and he was always experimenting with technique.

17:36His videos always had different types of color grading, or frame rates, or transitions. He took advantage of those three minutes of Laserdisc space to create something interesting. We shot on black and white, on reversal film stocks. We would load the film backwards. We baked the film. We pushed exposures. We did everything you could imagine experimental-wise just to push it, just to see what we could do to try to create different looks and different styles. And really pushed the science of film just to go for it. After the break, the rise and inevitable fall of the karaoke video golden age. Stay with us.

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22:06And they were making a lot of money. Let me tell you, when I started back in 1988, we had zero volume coming in. Two years later, we were in the millions. They just couldn't wait for that next laser disc to come in. They didn't care what was on it. They just needed to have the next one. So I would get 5 ,000 discs in initial order. They were gone. They were already sold before I even got them. It was like watching a serial on HBO. like, you know, Game of Thrones, and you can't wait till the next episode comes. It was the same thing with the Laserdisc. But Neil says that he actually doesn't think the karaoke videos were part of the success of Laserdiscs.

22:49If anything, the videos were kind of an afterthought. His take is that Laserdiscs were flying off the shelves because they were just a good product. Like for one, Pioneer was able to license an incredible library of music. Their discs had tracks for current popular songs, old standards, classics, something for everyone. I got Disc 1, the first one that was ever made. And on side A, they had a really good cross-section of music. On side A was Rock Around the Clock, Great Balls of Fire, Long Tall Sally, Can't Keep a Falling in Love With You, Michelle, Eight Days a Week. These are all Beatles songs that they gave us.

23:28Also, Neil and his division at Pioneer were doing exactly what they were supposed to, marketing this product out in the field. He says that they were going out into the trenches to convince bars around New York City to adopt their karaoke system. And we said to them, look, we got this thing. The customers will be entertaining customers. So they'll be buying drinks, they'll be doing everything. It'll be good for you, good business. And what we're going to do is we'll give you the equipment, we'll give you the software, we'll teach you how to use it. The only thing we ask is if you're successful, we're allowed to bring other people in to show the success that we're having with the karaoke.

24:02Word spread. Karaoke spread. And it got to the point where karaoke was being done seven nights a week in Manhattan. Karaoke was so popular, it was essentially keeping Laserdisc technology afloat in the 90s. It was also generating a ton of work for the production companies. Pioneer printed at least 80 Laserdisc volumes in the original English language series alone, each one with 28 tracks disc. This meant that literally thousands of original karaoke videos needed to be produced alongside those tracks. You know, it had reached a peak and there was a lot of money and there was a lot of stuff going into the production.

24:41Nori and I flew to Paris for one of them. It's crazy, you know, for a karaoke video, but it was beautiful, you know. Culture writer Brian Raftery refuses to call himself a karaoke expert, but he does have a shed crammed full of these discs at his house. and has logged an ungodly amount of hours watching these videos. Oh my God, it's probably, probably one of those things where if I got to heaven or an afterlife and they gave you like a rundown of what you did, I think that would be like the one regret where I'm like, I spent how many hours? I mean, I guess it's in the hundreds of hours range. And it was during these hundreds of hours that he started noticing some bizarre subgenres across the pioneer karaoke oeuvre.