There’s an All-Night Singing Bar
The excellent London quartet Bas Jan released a new album called Back to the Swamp this past Friday. It’s their best yet, a tentative wandering into the wilderness of change and loss, forging ahead in body if not in mind through late capitalism’s melting circuit board. Moments of clarity feel faraway; moments of confusion are bathed in cool limpid dewdrops of glassine reverb. One of the key tracks, “Singing Bar,” is an after-hours bid for connection in a vulnerable state, in which karaoke is less an uproarious party trick than a way of working out through song choice what’s in your head.
A lovelorn Carly Rae Jepsen, in her video for “Your Type,” drifts onstage to sing, virtually alone among the hot cheap neon and spangle curtains and kenopsia of a seamy L.A. spot, but the “night market in Kowloon” of “Singing Bar” lets us in through other artists’ songs. “Young Hearts Run Free” (“never be hung up like me,” Serafina Steer paraphrases in a near-whisper). “I know all there is to know about the crying game.” An unspecified “you” counters with “Killing Me Softly” and counters with it again, and we’re never sure if the being killed is a flirt-quote of Roberta Flack’s petite mort or a passive enervation from the room as the last of the day’s energy slips into vapor.
I had a fun night out with friends on Friday and it ended at Baby Grand, a karaoke bar we’ve haunted a few times, although we tend to get there very early so we can hog the microphones before the party shows up. On Friday, we stumbled in around eleven, in the midst of a pack of extrovert twentysomethings bidding farewell to a pal who was leaving town. They were all decent-to-great singers and performers! As is everyone who comes to this bar; Baby Grand patrons arrive ready to throw down. Even so, the stakes are low. No crix smirking in a corner and savagely penciling a gleeful slagging. No backline rentals to pay off.
But they’re so young. They’re so goddamn young. With the mantis silhouettes, the shiny hair, the TikTok exuberance. I didn’t even start feeling particularly old until a year ago, and then it hit me like a bullet train. Or a trolley problem set in the Logan’s Run universe, in which the lever puller saves only passengers under thirty. That’s New York right now! In theory age is a powerful folkloric cloak and in reality it’s a strike-slip fault that can send one’s entire selfhood hurtling to a bordering state with no warning.
I was a bit thrown off by the 11 p.m. vibe shift and in the rush to write something down I couldn’t remember my go-to karaoke picks. But I had run into a musician friend earlier in the evening and we chatted about Kirsty MacColl and Sinéad O’Connor — he mentioned tribute gigs to the late vocalists and noted that with daunting high notes in songs like “They Don’t Know” and “Nothing Compares 2 U,” their material can be hard to pull off. I do love a challenge. And come on, they’re not that daunting, e.g., the plosive of the opening B in Kirsty’s capstone “bay-bee” shoots the vowel out loud and clear. So yeah, naturally those two artists were my first searches when I pulled up the Baby Grand book on my phone. I did figure Kirsty would be too obscure for the Gen Z children, who knew big monocultural-classic Goliaths like “Bohemian Rhapsody” but favored newer stuff and it’s doubtful they’d have heard the Tracey Ullman “They Don’t Know” cover that bobbed around MTV in 1983.
Right: Sinéad, then! I very much wanted to try her college-rocker “Mandinka” but it’s not in the bar’s book. Right: “Nothing Compares,” then. It’s a gamble to temper a festive atmosphere with a ballad. Not such a gamble when the ballad is by Prince. You can put some sex into the celestial ache. You can eat your dinner in a fancy restaura-auuunt. Reader, I did the thing. Not to thunderous applause, as they’re too young for Sinéad too, but I was told I crushed it. I sang it for Sinéad, and Prince, and the understanding that it is nice to do whatever I want, and anyway the therapist in that song is right and not a fool.
I also duetted with my friend Kevin on Madonna’s “Deeper and Deeper,” her liberatory yet plangent 1992 disco-house anthem. Because music prevails. Community prevails. You venture out in search of flashes of humanity on weird unsettled nights, risking an alienation worse than any time spent solitary and navel-gazing in the electric blue. You want to die, you forget you want to die, you think you’re dying and it weighs you down with the gravity of a Looney Tunes anvil, you remember those who have died, and on occasion you actively want to live. You flick the silver coin up into the tinsel like a prayer and you keep on flicking.
