Freedom Karaoke Songbook (2018)
Yours truly, performing Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” a song banned from certain radio stations in the late 1960’s because, as one DJ wrote, it was “aiding and abetting the enemy” (then the Vietnamese). Photo by Astra Brinkmann for swissnex San Francisco.
How do you create a participatory experience that helps people “embody” an abstract principle such as freedom of expression? That’s the question that lead to the Freedom Karaoke Songbook.
The karaoke booth is, to me, a place where you can really be free: regardless of who is watching, we reward raw, awkward emotion, screaming at the top of our lungs, making fools of ourselves.
By pairing this sense of freedom — the freedom to exercise our freedom of expression — I hoped to make a meaningful connection to what we really take away when we take away that freedom.
The Freedom Karaoke Songbook is a list of 75+ songs that have been censored or banned somewhere in the world. A large number of them came from the BBC, which banned a bunch of nautical-themed songs (ex., “Sailing,” Rod Stewart) back during the battle for the Falkland Islands and later banned songs referencing failed military battles (ex., “Waterloo,” Abba) during the first Gulf War. Stateside, there was the famous Clear Channel memo, which we were careful to note were simply recommendations issued to affiliate radio stations shortly after 9/11.
Numerous other state and corporate actors are included in the songbook. By knowing that a song is on the list because it was banned somewhere else, the act of singing becomes tinged with the awareness that singing Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” is a right — and a right that not only could be taken away, but literally has been taken away (or, in Cyrus’ case, impeded in the Dominican Republic).
The piece was performed on October 5, 2018 at swissnex San Francisco, where it was built into the infrastructure of the swissnex Salon. The Salon is a series of events, workshops, and performances exploring the impact of technology on established democratic values.
To create a space for the Salon, swissnex worked with architects Ortreport and Nele Dechmann to build a curtain-based installation called “Instant Spaces.” It’s a series of extremely tall curtains with bold images that can be rearranged into a series of new “rooms” or backdrops. Each curtain has the image of a liminal space where standard political or social rules are suspended, loosely based on the Michel Foucault’s concept of “Heterotopic spaces,” or Heterotopias, which Walter Russell Mead explains nicely:
“Utopia is a place where everything is good; dystopia is a place where everything is bad; heterotopia is where things are different — that is, a collection whose members have few or no intelligible connections with one another.” — Walter Russell Mead
The Instant Karaoke Booth
The images printed on the Salon curtains are more recent heterotopias, spaces where the rules of society and nation are “just different.” That includes the moon, the Internet, a national border, a speakeasy, and… a karaoke booth. In the catalog for the Salon, I was able to create an argument for the inclusion of each.
For Karaoke:
“At the karaoke booth, punk meets disco, ‘60s folk singers are followed by hip-hop. Here, the hierarchies of taste and class are put aside, along with the rules of social behavior. Sing your feelings as loud as you can, with your boss watching. It’s OK: it’s karaoke.”
The Karaoke Room of “Instant Spaces,” a suspended curtain at the swissnex Gallery in San Francisco, created by Ortreport and Nele Dechmann. Photo by Astra Brinkmann for swissnex San Francisco
The Freedom Karaoke Songbook
The next step to bringing the values of the salon “to life” involved a performance element, a way of connecting the audience to a set of abstract values in a more concrete way. I wanted to make concrete the Swiss democratic value that “only those who exercise their freedom remain free.”
The songbook contains a large number of songs that have been censored or banned somewhere in the world. There are obvious limits, because we also had to hire a karaoke machine, which added an extra layer of conversation. (One interesting parallel: The Clear Channel memo advised against playing “all Rage Against the Machine,” and the hired karaoke catalog also lacked any Rage Against the Machine entries). You can download the catalog below the photos.
Once we identified the company we would hire for the event, we requested a .pdf copy of their catalog. The numbers in the catalog we used correspond to that catalog’s numerical system, so you might need to adjust them if you recreate the performance.
The crowd outside of the Freedom Karaoke Booth, October 5, 2018 at swissnex San Francisco. Photo by Astra Brinkmann for swissnex San Francisco.
The Performance
The performance started after a keynote talk by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Jan Gerlach, and a dance performance by Kinetech Arts. It was a slow start on the microphones, but by the end of the night the Gallery extended the event by an extra half an hour to accommodate the waitlist for performances.
Guests perused two copies of the songbook in hardcover while I maintained a master list of the catalog. As the MC of the event, I took requests, circulated the songbook, paired people up who were too shy to sing alone, and entered the numbers into the karaoke software. But most important was maintaining the connection to the values of the performance, which was to announce why the song had been banned in the first place.
A lot of lurkers just read the songbook, which is intentional. The lurker is an essential piece of karaoke, but the performance was really for the performers. Get up and sing and contemplate that this simple, silly act is illegal — and you’re able to act it out, in this space, by virtue of the strength of our own democratic values (as wobbly as they may be).
“Only those who exercise their freedoms remain free,” says the Preamble to the Swiss Constitution. Or you might say, in the words of the deliberately-chosen final song of the night, “You’ve Got to Fight for Your Right (to Party).”