‘Water, asylum, metamorphosis, freak show’: flourishing through streaming karaoke play in China

ABSTRACT

Karaoke has long been understood as an imitative musical practice, popular among the working class in western society. While scholars have noticed the communicative significance of karaoke in generating interpretive creativity and social interaction, they also point out the tendency of offline karaoke practices to strengthen cultural rules and social hierarchies. For this reason, this paper examines vibrant Chinese streaming karaoke practices and explores how Chinese streaming karaoke, as the originator of cultural and social enclave, offers hope for resistance against cultural censorship and social restriction. Through the lens of the theoretical concepts of tactics, affect and human flourishing, the analysis reveals that the karaoke enclave generates an affective field for vernacular creativities that foster personal wellbeing and social publicness in everyday life, through four playful tactics: to ‘water’ the vibrancy of life, to build ‘asylum’ so as to seek more intensified experiential connections and connect with total strangers, to ‘morph’ into unknown spontaneity and set up non-monetary values, and to perform ‘freak show’ to voice political affect and resonate with the most unlikely of people. The emancipatory power of streaming karaoke play, lies in the interdependence and interconnection of those tactics and they as a whole contribute to the human flourishing.

KEYWORDS:

• Streaming karaoke
• human flourishing
• affect
• tactics
• vernacular creativities

Acknowledgements

The author thanks two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their insightful and critical comments. The author is also grateful to Prof. David Hesmondhalgh for providing helpful comments on earlier draft of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the Chinese Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (no.332202312623657), and by the Music Culture in the Age of Streaming—which has received funding from the European Research Council, under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, in the form of an Advanced Research Grant awarded to Professor David Hesmondhalgh, at the University of Leeds (Grant agreement no. 1010020615).