Dangerous Karaoke

This is some kind of content attributed to the New York Times, it was already second hand where I found it. It’s all fun, and true as well.

COPIED IN: A 23-year-old Malaysian man was killed on Thursday night after reportedly enraging other customers who felt that he “hogged the microphone” at what Malaysia’s Star Online described as “a coffeeshop-cum-karaoke outlet” in the town of Sandakan, on the island of Borneo.

The Guardian’s Ian MacKinnon adds some regional context:
Karaoke rage is not unheard of in Asia. There have been several reported cases of singers being assaulted, shot or stabbed mid-performance, usually over how songs are sung.
Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” has reportedly generated so many outbursts of hostility that some bars in the Philippines now do not offer it on the karaoke menu anymore. In Thailand this year, a gunman shot eight people dead after tiring of their endless renditions of a John Denver tune.
As The Telegraph reported in March, that maddening John Denver tune was “Country Roads.”

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Malaysia’s official Bernama news agency reports that “two men have been arrested in connection with the murder” in Sandakan.

Last year, Bernama reported that Malaysia’s information minister, Datuk Seri Zainuddin Maidin, had issued a public put-down of karaoke singers by likening them to another group of social misfits: bloggers. Both groups, Mr. Zainuddin said, “take pleasure in their own singing but have no influence.” END COPY

I would have cheered the policeman who was put on his killing spree by “Country Roads.” That song makes me crazy too. And “My Way?” That’s an unsingable horror that should be stricken from the catalog.

And thanks also to Mr. Zainuddin, for his totally gratuitous yet strangely true comment about bloggers.