45 posts tagged “kttd”

Ordinarily, the halfway point to next year's Karaoke to the Death would be big news.  And, of course, it is big news.  But as it happens, there's other, bigger, news on this particular Saturday.  You see, Rushmore - little Rushmore - turns five years old today.  (Five years.  Wow.  Where does the time go?)  And as much as I love Karaoke to the Death, I think a five-year-old's birthday just might take precedence in this instance.  Congratulations, Rushmore, and I hope you have a very happy birthday!  You're even better than a chance to make fun of all my friends.

This kid sure does have a knack for the birthday landing on the right day, though.  This year is the KttD equinox.  Last year was the Neko show.  That's some great timing.

Despite her strong showing in the polls, Matyas was no doubt hindered in KttD VIII by her outsider status.  And that's no huge surprise.  Dabysan opined after the fact that her performance "seemed a little tank-y."  I can certainly respect the sentiment.  Her ferocious delivery of the inane lyrics of Heart's classic "Barracuda" almost defies description.  But I've known Laura for a long time, and I don't think she tanked.  Vanna knows her even better than I - they were neighbors until just a few months ago - and she astutely observes that Laura sometimes has trouble speaking in key.  Pair a voice like that with a burgeoning illness and alcohol, and you have a legendary performance in the making.

KttD VIII ended with the best of all possible scenarios.  The competition rebounded from a weak outing rife with controversy in year seven with the strongest group of performances to date.  Any one of four contenders could have taken home the Ramsey Cup.  And we are left with some amazing story lines going into next year.  It's like we are at the end of act two.  The cold and calculating femme fatale has whipped and injected her foreign minion into a robotic and lethal efficiency.  Crocodile Dundee has just killed Apollo Creed in the ring.  KttD IX will be the story of a once great champion working out in solitude in the harshest environment imaginable in order to recapture the glorious trophy - and the hearts of the world - from the clutches of unrelenting evil.  Somebody cue the montage music; if you need me, I'll be training in the Outback.

I wrote earlier today about the role that stage presence - or lack thereof - often plays in a triumphant KttD performance.  That's all true, and I stand by those words.  Aussie Bob is a worthy champion because he made a whole lot of people uncomfortable while he was on the stage.  He had the "cringe factor."  But I'm a purist, and Emma's Peel's rendition of Jackson Browne's "Somebody's Baby" most embodied the true spirit of Karaoke to the Death: a song sung loud and proud and wildly off the mark.  For years, Emma's stock-in-trade has been her horrifically monotone delivery.  But she added a new weapon to her arsenal this year - one that certainly does not bode well for us late greats.  On several occasions, Emma can be heard reaching helplessly - hopelessly - to find notes in a higher register.  Her performance in KttD VIII was actually worse/better than her winning performance in KttD VII.  That, there, says it all about the strength of this year's field.

Emma had my vote until almost the bitter end.  I ultimately threw my support behind another contestant once it became clear that Emma didn't have the numbers to win and that my vote was needed elsewhere in a valiant effort to derail the powerful Jengali juggernaut.  I believe she will ultimately be vindicated by history, though.  This was one of the elite performances in the long and proud history of Karaoke to the Death.  This was eighteen and one.

And this is where I dropped the ball.  I had hoped to capture all the major performances on video, but Emma took the stage when my memory card was nearly full.  I only captured a minute of her song.  And then I got cold feet about posting video of myself.  (This was before it occurred to me that I could separate the audio track.)  I'm not going to post videos of others if I'm not willing to post video of myself, so the whole exercise lost some of its luster.  I stopped even trying to record anything until the very end.  So I missed Peter's remarkable effort, among others like Cap'n Crunch's redemptive "Wicked Game" and Jason P's worthless "actual best."  But I have one more to post tomorrow, and it's a doozy.

Aussie Bob's KttD VIII victory is Exhibit A in why presence at the Rock It Grill will always be required to register a vote in Karaoke to the Death.  Listening again to the audio, yes - Bob is terrible.  But he's not that terrible.  You'd be hard-pressed to make a case that he is significantly worse than Daby or me, and you'd really have a tough time arguing that he's worse than the remaining clips to come.  And yet, you can hear in our reactions a strong aversion to what we were witnessing.  KttD is a singing contest, but there has never been any denial that stage presence is an important factor in the voting.  What you can't see in this clip is Bob cowering in the depths of the Rock It stage.  You can't see him curled up into what can only be called a standing fetal position.  You can't see the karaoke monitor filled with interminable "oooohs" and the same two lines ad nauseum.  You can hear it, but it had to be seen to be appreciated in all its uncomfortable glory.

There is a can of Campbell's Chunky Soup in one of the stalls in the bathroom at my office.  This obviously has nothing to do with KttD and even less to do with Aussie Bob, but I thought it was worth mentioning.  Why is it in the stall?

I wonder what George Halas would have made of this year's Super Bowl.  The Chicago Bears owner and Hall of Fame coach didn't invent football - no one person can be credited with the invention of the greatest sport of all time - but he represented the then Decatur Staleys at the meeting which formed the NFL and was instrumental in the sport's early development.  His accomplishments are legion: he was the first coach to hold daily practices, study film, and broadcast games.  He won eight NFL titles and held the record for most victories until Don Shula passed him in 1993.  It's fair to suppose that the game we watch today might be drastically different without "Papa Bear's" influence.  But he'd probably be fired within a season if he were somehow able to coach a team in 2009.

I've been coming to terms since Sunday with the reality that my era of relevance in Karaoke to the Death may be drawing to a close.  But my situation isn't quite as dire as Dabysan's.  Daby has always been at something of a disadvantage because of his teetotaling, but even more tough to overcome is his utter lack of discomfort or shame in front of a crowd.  His voice is undoubtedly terrible, but he's clearly in his element on the Rock It Grill's grand stage; his performances are easily dismissed.  A hopeful contender in the modern era of Karaoke to the Death brings more than just a bad voice.  He (or she) brings also an uncomfortable stage presence and the most tin of ears.  Three yards and a cloud of dust just isn't going to cut it any more.  Daby and I are running around in leather helmets while Peyton Manning is lobbing forty yard touchdown passes to Emma because Aussie Bob is drawing the double coverage across the field.

And yet, that's somehow okay.  To borrow another metaphor - I, too, felt like something of a proud parent this past Sunday.  The sport of bad karaoke does have a couple of names with whom to credit the invention, but as proud as I am to have been part of the beginning, I am probably more proud of what KttD has become.  And it couldn't have become what it has without a lot of help from the George Halas types.  Emma's birthday was the impetus for the second event, which was prompted at Akaijen's suggestion.  Doc Paradox inspired our one and only rule change.  Bill was the first recipient of the trophy, which has long since been christened in his honor.  Vanna and Vrabel founded the increasingly popular KttFILMS.  It's been a group effort.  I just hope they all appreciate that effort as much as I do.

We initially chose Presidents' Day weekend because it was a holiday which we all had off but for which nobody makes any special plans.  But as Crunch astutely notes, KttD helps fill that often crushing void between "the Holidays" and the onset of Spring.  I don't get Presidents' Day off any more, but I take a vacation day anyway.  And I always feel a little guilty about it, but I honestly don't know why.  If you've got a better reason for taking a day off of work than a long-standing party in which you're expected to openly mock many of your dearest and closest friends without fear of reprisal, well then, I'd like to hear it.

I've got some soul-searching to do over the next twelve months.  I've been out of the running before, but never for two consecutive years and never with performances so terrible.  And if you'd told me Saturday that my rendition of "Gloria" would be worse than Sarah McLachlan's wretched dirge, I'd have laughed in your face.  But, sadly, that very scenario turned out to be true.

In any of the first four years of Karaoke to the Death, my ear-splitting version of Laura Branigan's "mindless disco death rattle" would have been enough to get my name etched in marker on the Cup.  But the new breed of KttD contestants have me seriously wondering if I will ever again be able to bask in the glory of a championship.  Aussie Bob took home the hardware, but it could as easily and justifiably been Emma or Peter or Matyas.  Unlike last year, I don't feel like I could have sung any worse.  It's deeply troubling.

I'll be frank: I didn't see the sing-along coming.  That caught me completely off-guard.  When the thought of singing the treacly ballad "Angel" first occurred to me, I mentioned it to a co-worker who would be a serious threat if she ever took the stage.  Her response was emphatic.  "You can't sing that song!  It means so much to me!  It got me through a really hard time."  That wasn't the reaction I was expecting, but the more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that many, many people find Sarah McLachlan's rancid lament to be deeply meaningful.  And the ones that don't, hate it.  By my reasoning, I had an opportunity either to desecrate a beloved song or to inflict a funereal pablum upon an unsuspecting crowd.  It was the ultimate win-win situation.  But neither of those things are happening if the whole joint is singing along.  The game tape will show me shaking my head after the first verse.  I knew I wasn't getting there.  I had too much ground to make up and I was coming almost shamefully too close to matching Sarah's soaring vocals. I don't know where to go from here.  I really thought "Angel" would get me there.  And at one point during last year's competition, the eventual champion opined that "Gloria" would have been a bruiser if our go-tard DJ hadn't cheated us out of our second songs.  I'm not ready to admit that the game might have passed me by, but I certainly face an uphill battle.  I better get busy.  I have a lot of work to do.

The world's premier bad karaoke tournament crowned its eighth champion last night in a heated competition that came to within a few fiercely contested votes.  Aussie Bob, of Brisbane, Australia, fended off a veritable murderers' row of karaoketeers to take the Ramsey Cup in what was Karaoke to the Death's second closest margin of victory ever.  Bob grabbed the lead early and held on tenaciously as contestant after contestant attempted unsuccessfully to knock him from his perch.  Bob's perseverance, not to mention his svengali Akaijen's relentless lobbying, resulted in glory for the first ever international KttD champion.

The proceedings got off to a somewhat inauspicious beginning.  Early arrivals, mindful of the havoc wreaked upon KttD VII by the worst karaoke DJ in Christendom, were quick to inquire about the evening's DJ.  Fears were allayed, however, when it was divulged that the Master of Ceremonies was to be Slam [sic] - and that Slam was a woman.  But a whole new set of fears reared their ugly head as the hour approached nine o'clock and Slam had yet to show her face at the Rock It Grill.  She arrived not long after nine, but the ramifications of a ten o'clock start to the festivities would be a factor later in the evening.

In the absence of Dan "the Man" - KttD's lead-off batter of recent years - two-time former champion Hotrod was the first to take the stage a mere four songs into the set with an insufficiently off-putting rendition of Laura Branigan's aerobic masterpiece "Gloria," which he was unable to sing in KttD VII.  KttD V champion Dabysan was next in the order with a cloying, yet moderately tuneful, rendition of the Hollies' tribute to Spina Bifida patients: "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother."  And so it wasn't until the third contestant of the night that a performance resonated significantly with the voting bloc.

Aussie Bob took the stage at moderately long odds and was perceived by many as a product of the tireless Akaijen hype machine.  There were even subsequently substantiated rumors that Akai would pull Bob from the competition at the last minute if she didn't believe he could win outright.  Yet with the entire bad karaoke community looking on intently, Bob took the stage and delivered an utterly repulsive version of Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly" that launched him to the forefront of the voters' collective consciousness.

Emma Peel was the next to take the stage, and she launched a shot across Bob's bow that would set the tone for the rest of the evening.  Between her supremely awkward dancing and her utterly tuneless singing, many observers felt that Emma's interpretation of "Somebody's Baby" by Jackson Browne was - if anything - worse than her award winning performance in KttD VII.  Following Emma were nearly equally wretched performances by Jason P (the Darkness, "I Believe in a Thing Called Love"), Cap'n Crook (Chris Isaak, "Wicked Game"), Mwaanga (U2, "With or Without You"), and Peter (Lionel Ritchie, "Hello").  Late into the competition, Aussie Bob held a substantial lead, with other worthy contenders splitting the remainder of the votes.

Bob's lead seemed insurmountable when first-time performer Laura Matyas took the stage to sing Heart's "Barracuda."  Her screechy, punk delivery shocked the voting populace out of its complacency and rallied the more idealistic, anti-establishment voters behind a cause.  A small but vocal and dedicated "Anyone But Bob" faction arose in opposition to Akaijen's shameless lobbying and push-polling tactics.  Votes previously pledged to Emma, Peter, and Hotrod were re-aligned behind Matyas' unlikely bid for the KttD throne in an effort to thwart Akai and her puppet.  The ABB movement was unexpectedly abetted in the closing moments when KttD VII sensation Allison Kerr suffered the dreaded sophomore slump with Heart's "Crazy On You" and perennial contender Hotrod failed to generate the desired animosity with Sarah McLachlan's maudlin "Angel."

The final tally came down to only a couple of votes, and Bob emerged victorious.  The ABB crowd meekly cried foul, as numerous attendees had cast their ballots for Bob upon an early departure - before, even, all the contestants had sung - seemingly resulting in more than a few Floridian hanging chads.  But the KttD bylaws are clear, in that there are no bylaws.  By a margin of only two votes, Bob was declared the KttD VIII champion.

Aussie Bob has taken possession of the Ramsey Cup, but in a very tangible way, we are all winners.  The integrity of Karaoke to the Death was severely challenged in the wake of last year's debacle.  We suffered through an atrocious DJ (and an even more reprehensible human being), and the faith in the event was noticeably shaken.  It was unclear - as evidenced by our initial trepidation - how we might respond to any potential setback.  That we, as a group, were able to overcome, and flourish, in the wake of tragedy is remarkable.  The Eighth Annual Karaoke to the Death VIII was the most spectacular event in the pageant's glorious history, and the strength of the field as a whole will be remembered and recounted long after the erstwhile victor has faded from our memory.  Excelsior!

On behalf of the KttD Competition Committee and the international bad karaoke community, we would like to extend a laurel and a hearty handshake to Aussie Bob, who eked out a narrow victory in what was perhaps the most heatedly contested Karaoke to the Death ever.  Bob truly represents the worst that karaoke has to offer and takes his rightful place among the pantheon of abysmal karaoketeers.  Congratulations, Bob.  And Excelsior!

In a little over twenty-four hours, we will begin writing the next chapter of the history of Karaoke to the Death.  And so, we would like to take a moment to remember a little of KttD's proud and glorious past.  Earlier today, by a unanimous vote of the KttD Preservation Society, William Ramsey was elected the sole member of the inaugural class of the KttD Hall of Fame.

Bill's KttD career was tragically short - he participated in only two events - but anyone who witnessed those performances knew that Bill was a profoundly special (lack of) talent.  And to deny his importance to the sport would be absurd.  We may never know why - in KttD III - a synapse in his Jaegermeister-soaked brain considered singing Tina Turner's tribute to sex workers to be a good idea, but we do know that we are all richer for his (lack of) judgment.  In one fell swoop, Bill ushered in the modern era of Karaoke to the Death.  Singing one's favorite song would no longer suffice; previously unimagined levels of shame and humiliation would heretofore be required to stand victorious on bad karaoke's grandest stage.  Bill moved to California a mere month after the most lopsided victory in KttD history, and has all but retired from the sport, but his legacy lives on as the namesake of that most hallowed of prizes: Lord Ramsey's Cup.  Excelsior!