My friend Manlio’s written up some excellent karaoke guidelines, which you should read and take to heart if there’s any chance you’ll be karaoke-ing in the future. Rule #4 is “If you go to karaoke more than once or twice a year, you should have at least 1 song that you know you can nail.” My grad school friends are all about karaoke and so I’ve done enough tour of duties in both Sing Sing and Village Karaoke that I’ve had to not only develop a repertoire but change it fairly frequently. These are my karaoke standards:
In Rotation

• Because the Night (10,000 Maniacs)
• Fever (Rosemary Clooney)
• Hey Jealousy (The Gin Blossoms)
• I Think We’re Alone Now (Tiffany)
• Lala (Ashlee Simpson)
• Mother, Mother (Tracy Bonham)
• No One Knows (Queens of the Stone Age)
• Sk8ter Boi (Avril Lavigne)
• Somebody Told Me (The Killers)
• Ugly Girl (Fleming & John)

New

• Hey Big Spender (Peggy Lee)
• You’re So Vain (Carly Simon)

Retired

• All Through The Night (Cyndi Lauper)
• Brass in Pocket (Pretenders)
• Love is a Battlefield (Pat Benatar)
• One Way or Another (Blondie)
• We Belong (Pat Benatar)

Not sure I can manage Kelly Clarkson’s Since U Been Gone but I’m dying to give it a shot, and I have yet to find a machine with Cyndi Lauper’s Hole in My Heart or Goonies R Good Enough but the day I do you bet I’m going to sing them! You’d think most of Cyndi’s songs would be fantastic for karaoke because we all know the words to them but they actually aren’t because the breadth of her range (5 octaves!) can make it hard to sing along; Madonna’s 80s repertoire should be everyone’s karaoke fallback for the converse reason. You also can’t go wrong if you choose from the ouevres of Bon Jovi or U2!
What songs do you kill at karaoke? What songs slay you? Tell me in the comments!
(The guy in the photo is Brett, a.k.a. ITP‘s prince of karaoke. He can do the Queens of the Stone Age song better than me which would be cause for hatred except he sings in two bands, one on each coast. Respect.)