A National Pastime
'Serezha, for fuck’s sake, can you just… not do that?'
The year my mother’s mother, Tanya, turned fifty, my father bought her a home karaoke machine.
It was a grey box roughly the size of a DVD player, with two large holes where the microphones went.
While karaoke is originally a Japanese invention - the word itself comes from “kara” (empty) and “oke” (orchestra), literally, empty orchestra, Russians take it to a whole other level.
Any party, drinks, or bar crawl inevitably ends up in a dimly lit basement, belting out cheesy Russian pop songs from the 2010s until three in the morning. Much like Londoners always, somehow, insist on “Wonderwall”, Russians have their own karaoke canon - songs so mandatory that without them, the night doesn’t count.
You’ve obviously got the eternal “Only Shot of Vodka on the Table” by Leps, the Georgian-Russian singer. Then you’ve got Verka Serduchka, the Ukrainian man-turned-woman-on-stage miracle, yelling that “everything will be alright,” with the small lyrical caveat that this only applies once you’re sufficiently drunk. And then, of course, the undisputed king of Russian karaoke: Valery Meladze, also Georgian-Russian and related to one of Russia’s most famous composers, because of course he is.
Meladze sings in a kind of emotional bleating that feels halfway between a love confession and a mild cry for help. His catalogue includes “Inostranetz” (Foreign Man, possibly Russia’s unofficial answer to “Englishman in New York”), plus sacred karaoke texts like “Salut, Vera!” and “Nebesa” (Heaven). Behind the lyrics, the music videos play on loop: Meladze ringed by a dozen young, beautiful women, shirt aggressively unbuttoned, hair artfully dishevelled, eyes locked into the camera lens like he’s trying to seduce, consume, and spiritually dominate you - all at once.
In short, karaoke might be Japanese in origin, but it’s a Russian national pastime.
“Oh Maxim!” my babushka exclaimed as she took the unwrapped box in her hands. “What am I supposed to do with it?”
My father reclined in his seat behind a table so packed with bottles and dishes you could feed a small army. He smiled weakly, with the confidence of a music producer on the verge of discovering a national pop star.
“Sing, of course,” he said.
The twenty-odd people crammed around the small kitchen table, neighbours, friends, distant cousins, a weird uncle I had never met, raised their glasses of Russian Champagne (that’s the name of the brand) and cheered.
After the celebratory dinner, the machine was placed under one of the four TVs in our apartment.
It was plugged in, tested, and then never touched again.
That is, by the adults.
At the time, we were living with my mother’s parents in a hell in hell called Otradnoe.
Every morning, as the adults disappeared to attend to Adult Business, I locked myself in my grandmother’s living room, turned on the TV, slid in the DVD labelled GOLDEN KARAOKE HITS 2005, and pressed play.
