'This one goes out...'

ABOUT THE KARAOKE MACHINE, that most prophetic of postmodern leisure devices, almost any number of intelligent-sounding things can be said: Like the cellphone and the iPod, it seems to have invented us more than we invented it.

You can say, for example, that ours is a karaoke age, in which the arts of mimicry and simulation are more esteemed than originality or sincerity, and the retread preferred to the real thing. You can say that in the trash democracy of global pop culture, where the anonymous soul has been replaced by the undiscovered star and the celebrity-in-waiting, it is karaoke that has ritualized the emergence of this inner performer. And you can talk about tribute bands, "American Idol," and so on.

None of this, however, will get you near the true nature of karaoke. Deeply awful at times, even sordid, it is never less than interesting -- and it can be revelatory. I once saw a friend of mine do Thin Lizzy's "Jailbreak" at the Courtside Pub in Cambridge, and I've never been able to look at him the same way again. At the instant that he sang "See the boys and me mean business . . ." he became legendary to me.

"Karaoke," a new book by Zhou Xun and Francesca Tarocco forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, tracks the westward spread of the phenomenon, from its birth in Japan in 1971 with the low-rent keyboardist and vibraphone player Daisuke Inoue -- who built a little box called the 8-Juke that played backup music for amateur singers -- to the installation of a karaoke machine in an English church, 30 years later, as a replacement for a recently departed organist. ("I'm afraid singing unaccompanied just wasn't the same," explained the vicar.)

As the book suggests, something of the mystery of karaoke is contained in its etymology: The word is a compound abbreviation of two Japanese words meaning "empty" and "orchestra." Karaoke is above all a space, an absence haunted by the missing vocal line. The instrumental accompaniment, generally a synthetic redaction of the original track, is ghost-music, tinkling with its own deadness -- and that unsung melody is spectrally beckoning, beckoning. The heart of the karaoke performer swells: Into this vacancy he must project his beautiful essence, his soul. He -- or she (karaoke knows no gender) -- may be emboldened or confused by alcohol; wild with a private grief; or, worst of all, suffering from a genuine desire to excel before his peers. Regardless, in the performance that ensues, something will be brought to light.

Xun and Tarocco quote from a 2002 article by Dr. Arthur Dun-Ping Mak, of the department of psychiatry at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong, in which the therapeutic potential of karaoke is extolled: Patients involved in a good karaoke session, wrote Dr. Mak, "identify themselves variously with characters and moods pictured and described in the songs they perform, and conversely may project their own feelings onto songs they perform."

As Xun and Tarocco report, karaoke has been resourceful and adaptive in its invasion of the world, taking on the attributes of a variety of host cultures. In Buddhist Cambodia a karaoke DVD featuring the song "Sik Hos Pros Snear," or "Leaving the Monkhood for Love," became a raging underground bestseller in the wake of a government ban. Chinese Buddhists, on the other hand, have produced a video called "Fanbai Kala OK Jiaochang," or "Karaoke Singing Instructions for Buddhist Liturgical Chants." Bangkok has an enormous karaoke sub-industry in morlam, the traditional music of the Issan people of northeast Thailand.

But karaoke yearns always toward the void of the future. Since the 1980s there have been karaoke video games like SingStar Party and Karaoke Revolution (in which players are given scores based on the correctness of their pitch, rhythm, etc.) and in recent years downloadable karaoke tracks have been made available to cellphone users. Total technological consolidation is inevitable: Surely the karaoke iPod cellphone is at hand, the biscuit-sized device on which you can call your fiancee and sing her Paul McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed" to the accompaniment of your own tiny empty orchestra.

Tonight the bars will fill and the microphones will be gripped. The enormous books of songs will be passed around, and their sticky pages explored. So I dedicate this column, the last of the year, to the large man with the round head who will be singing the Bee Gees' "More Than A Woman" in a strange, abstract falsetto. And to the college student who will stamp and scream his way through Skid Row's "Youth Gone Wild." And to the young woman who will make discreet New Wave motions as she shyly performs Pat Benatar's "Love Is A Battlefield."

I dedicate this one to the karaoke-lovers, who will make tonight their own.

James Parker's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail cultural.studies@globe.com.