Karaoke

We went to the Karaoke Convention this evening. The piece, by RISD’s own Daniel Peltz, turns recorded political speeches into a karaoke speak-along. There were some very inspired renditions of Hillary Clinton, Ron Paul and John McCain. I found the whole experience unexpectedly arresting. Seeing and hearing the words of these speeches out of the context of the “original” speaker seemed to reveal the content of the speech and the character of the speaker more clearly than when they were spoken by candidates. Obama was especially interesting, because although his speaking tempo is restrained each speech has an enormous amount of information.