Secretly Serious? Maintaining and Crossing Cultural Boundaries in the Karaoke Bar Through Ironic Consumption

Abstract

When existing cultural boundaries seem to blur, people will look for alternative ways to express their identities. Recent research has shown that aesthetic dispositions (how one consumes culture) may be more significant than taste preferences (what is consumed). Sociologists therefore wonder whether distinction might be going underground. Elaborating on this issue, we examine the role of irony in cultural consumption through nine in-depth interviews with karaoke participants contacted in two bars in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, as we suspect that the ironic attitude is ideally suited to crossing cultural boundaries and, at the same time, to upholding class boundaries by distancing oneself from cultural activities that are considered enjoyable yet incongruent with one’s identity. We indeed found large differences in how people performed and appreciated karaoke, which aligned with their levels of cultural capital.

Keywords

Introduction

Cultural distinction appears increasingly complicated as many scholars proclaim that class differences in consumption have gone ‘underground’ (e.g. Daenekindt and Roose, 2014; Holt, 1998). One’s preferences may not reveal much about the cultural skills that are supposed to underlie them (Berghman and Van Eijck, 2009; Roose, 2008; Roose et al., 2012). If we agree with Bourdieu (1984) and Lizardo (2008) that cultural capital is reflected primarily in ‘collectively valued styles of symbolic appropriation of cultural goods’ (Lizardo, 2008: 1), the manner in which people appropriate cultural products will reveal more about their cultural skills than which preferences they have. Distinction is then not so much determined by what people do or consume, but rather by how they do this, and therefore scholars are urged to focus more on consumption styles (Atkinson, 2011; Benzecry and Collins, 2014; Daenekindt and Roose, 2014; Holt, 1998; Jarness, 2015; Rimmer, 2012; Van Eijck, 2015).

While many studies are now considering the modes of consumption of individuals, a central question remains: how do consumers perceive modes of consumption that differ from their own and what happens in spaces where different consumption styles co-exist? In this study, we explore what happens when high-status groups engage in an activity they consider to be low culture: karaoke. We base this study in the Netherlands, where karaoke is mostly located in informal working-class pubs that are unlikely to be perceived as prestigious. Because of its implicit amateurism and folksy character, karaoke finds itself in the lower regions of the cultural hierarchy. This idea is supported by previous studies in European karaoke bars that are bundled in Hosokawa and Mitsui (2005).¹ Karaoke originates from Japan, but has also become established in the West. Most cities have one or more karaoke bars, or regular bars that organize karaoke nights. Fornäs finds that in Swedish karaoke bars a mutual relationship exists between ‘the demographic basis of karaoke practices here in terms of (old) age and (not so modern) lifestyle’ and ‘the relatively low status of karaoke and the reluctance among other cultural groups to take it seriously’ (2005: 125). Kelly points out that, in the UK, karaoke is especially popular in ‘working men’s pubs’ and is therefore ‘linked to class’ (2005: 96). Given these particular connotations of karaoke in Europe, we expect people who enjoy ‘bad taste’ to engage with it in a more distanced manner than they would if this tension were absent, as in the latter case engagement would be unproblematic. We propose that irony could be well suited to producing this distance. The use of irony as our primary sensitizing concept is both a theoretical and empirical contribution to research into taste patterns, as ironic consumption has been discussed only sporadically, despite its potential for navigating situations of contemporary status ambiguity.

Despite the lowbrow character of karaoke in the Netherlands, it is not uncommon for highly educated people with a broad and more highbrow taste to participate enthusiastically. We do, however, expect them to participate in karaoke in a different manner. The question is therefore: which styles of consumption and participation do we find among karaoke performers and how can these be linked to differences in cultural capital? We also aim to provide a more nuanced picture of the phenomenon of irony in cultural practices, which is often regarded as mere mockery of a cultural expression. We therefore commence with a discussion of irony’s inherent ambiguity as it is presented in the philosophical literature and how the concept links to sociological research on cultural consumption.

Irony as a Distanced Disposition

Distanced consumption styles have often been associated with the amount of cultural capital a person possesses. Irony as a form of distance, however, should not be confused with the aesthetic attitude that Bourdieu (1984) described as detached and playful, or with terms such as ‘distancing’ or ‘disinterestedness’ (see Dickie, 2011 [1964]). Such approaches to art are often meant to indicate or ensure the purest and most focused aesthetic experience, where the everyday fades into the background and an optimal balance between emotional and cognitive processing is achieved. With irony, the element of distance works in the opposite way; distance is created to avoid a strong engagement with the object itself.

We can expect such ironic distancing from high cultural capital (HCC) karaoke participants who thereby show that they do not take karaoke seriously – its lowbrow status does not allow them to engage with it unconditionally. Irony can communicate the ‘mismatch’ between the activity and the HCC participants’ identities by creating a distance between the two. As a consequence, they will be judged not so much by what they do, but by how they do it.

The difficulty in understanding or identifying ironic consumption lies in the fact that irony can express mixed feelings about the ironized object. This ambiguous relationship between distance and involvement is central in the philosophical literature on irony. In the rhetorical form, irony is not necessarily the opposite of what is said or done, it rather ‘happens’ in the space between the said and the unsaid (Hutcheon, 1994). As we argue below, this ambiguity links irony to both elitism and cultural relativism, and it therefore has the potential to connect Bourdieu’s ideas on homology and status motives with those of eclecticism and omnivorousness (Ollivier, 2008; Peterson and Kern, 1996; Peterson and Simkus, 1992).

While the narrow (rhetorical) conception of irony concerns a rhetorical trope, the broader notion designates an entire worldview (Colebrook, 2002; Hutcheon, 1994; Kierkegaard, 1989; Magill, 2007; Rorty, 1989). As in rhetorical irony, it involves contradictions, but according to Hutcheon these are used in a broader sense ‘as a way of counteracting any tendency to assume a categorical or rigid position of “Truth” through precisely some acknowledgement of provisionality and contingency’ (1994: 51). Through this acknowledgement, one must face up to ‘the contingency of his or her most central beliefs and desires’ (Rorty, 1989: xv). Rorty therefore praises the ironist as someone whose thinking is not limited by dogma but rather remains open to diverging interpretations of anything (see also Howey, 1975). The ambiguity of meaning in both the rhetorical trope and the worldview makes the ironist hard to pin down, and therefore, the ironic attitude fits well with a so-called postmodern culture where the belief in ultimate values and truths is ostensibly declining and cultural relativism abounds.

This relativism is also reflected in sociological research into contemporary lifestyles, where it is linked to social inequality. Ollivier described that contemporary elites use ‘a rhetoric of openness to cultural diversity [that] is based on a series of binary oppositions whereby terms such as diverse, open, hybrid, fluid, eclectic, global, and cosmopolitan tend to be associated together and most often to have positive connotations’ (2008: 121). Openness and eclecticism would therefore display distance from a ‘limited’ or univorous taste (Peterson and Simkus, 1992; Van Eijck, 2000).

Still, the omnivore is not simply interested in everything. What can be enjoyed without embarrassment remains a matter of careful cherry picking (Bryson, 1996; Goldberg et al., 2016; Peterson and Simkus, 1992; Van den Haak, 2014). Not all popular culture products are of the desired quality so not everything can be consumed unconditionally. Notions of cultural hierarchy remain and these too can be expressed through irony, as it is expected that the user must possess certain intellectual capacities to ‘get it’. According to Hutcheon, irony possesses ‘an evaluative edge’ (1994: 2). Recognizing that there are no universal laws on which to rely and that any judgment is subjective, preliminary and contextual, may itself become what Colebrook calls an ‘elevated viewpoint’ (2002: 11). Kierkegaard too indicated that irony is associated with feelings of superiority when describing it as ‘an eye for what is crooked, wrong, and vain in existence’ (1989: 256). He compared the ironic use of language with the use of French by sovereigns (see also Elias, 1994), as both were intended to ensure that laypeople did not understand them: ‘it travels around … in an exclusive incognito and looks down pitying from this high position on ordinary, prosaic talk’ (Kierkegaard, 1989: 248; see also Magill, 2007; Moser, 1984).

A preeminent reflection on the tension between openness and elitism in irony can be found in Sontag’s (1964) essay ‘Notes on “Camp”’. Camp is a form of irony, as it is failure that is valued rather than success (see also Schiermer, 2014), which is why it is often seen as a form of ridicule. For Sontag, however, camp is first and foremost an appreciation style. As a form of irony, camp involves distancing, but also a degree of engagement since what is consumed is not bluntly ridiculed: it possesses a certain charm as well. According to Sontag, the camp connoisseur is able to appropriate mass culture in a unique manner which sets her or him apart from others; one that ‘refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness and the risk of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling’ (1964: 11). Thus, ironic appreciation is layered and complex, open yet critical, and can simultaneously include and exclude; a befitting appreciation style for ‘postmodern’ cultural elites.

Empirical studies of ironic consumption are scarce. Perhaps best known is the study conducted by Ang (1985) among viewers of Dallas. She distinguished between those who identified with the characters and those who watched it with ironic distance. Ang suggested that the ‘weapon of irony makes it unnecessary for them [those who are aware of the ideology of mass culture] to suppress the pleasure that watching Dallas can nevertheless arouse; irony enables them to enjoy it without suffering pangs of conscience’ (p. 101). More recently, Ollivier (2008: 133) likewise suggested that irony creates a distance between the self and the object in a way that allows people to legitimize their pleasure and simultaneously confirm that it does not suit them.

McCoy and Scarborough (2014) interviewed viewers of ‘bad’ television and discerned a ‘traditional’, ‘ironic’, ‘guilty pleasure’ and ‘camp’ consumption mode. Traditional viewers limited themselves to programs they straightforwardly appreciated, ironic viewers watched programs they considered ridiculous, but still enjoyed them through mockery. Viewers for whom ‘bad TV’ was a guilty pleasure were ashamed of the fact that they engaged in such ‘trivial’ matters, and camp viewers admired what they saw as a hopelessly failed product. Although this analysis yields noteworthy insights, we argue that some conceptual labels are problematic. First, ‘guilty pleasure’ is a term that is used reflexively and publicly in everyday life – people who are actually ashamed of a cultural preference would be more likely to hide it. Second, interpreting irony as mockery does not do justice to the precise element that is central to irony: its ambiguity. We therefore do not presuppose the analytical distinction made by these authors between irony and camp; we argue that both ironic and camp consumption entail attraction to what is consumed.

An approach similar to McCoy and Scarborough’s (2014) can be found in Drew’s (2005) ethnography of karaoke bars in the US. He labels urban middle-class performances as ironic, a style allowing participants to distinguish themselves from others’ ‘mimetic’ performances, and regards this as an act of symbolic exclusion of the lower classes. Drew builds on Bourdieu’s distinction theory which implies a strong focus on the exclusive effects of irony. However, due to the gathering of different status groups in the karaoke bar, symbolic boundaries might not only be drawn, but in some ways also crossed with the help of irony.

Method: The Study of Karaoke Participants

Karaoke is an ideal case for exploring consumption styles, since it is not only passively consumed by its audience, but also actively performed on stage. Typically, participants do both and especially the performative aspect leaves plenty of room for personal interpretation and expression. One can pursue a ‘mimetic’ performance in all seriousness, but also parody the songs. Although much of the literature presented above is taken from cultural consumption studies, this participatory aspect is relevant for how we designed our study (see Miles and Gibson, 2016). We kept our eyes open for what this participation consists of and ‘where it might take place and how it is valued as culture, where, by whom and why’ (Ebrey, 2016: 160). As Ebrey further recommends, we conducted careful and exploratory research in order to better understand culture ‘as practiced outside formal institutions and middle class enclaves’ (2016: 160). Thus, in 2013 we regularly visited two karaoke bars in Rotterdam where we talked to singers and staff and performed ourselves in order to mingle and more easily approach participants for interviews, and observed their performances in order to formulate interview questions that lay close to their karaoke practices. The more highly educated performers at the bars were mostly young women. As we were particularly interested in the relationship between cultural capital and consumption styles, we selected only women in the age group of 20 to 35 years in order to prevent possible intersecting influences of age or gender. We interviewed nine participants in their homes: four were highly educated (college or university) and five less highly educated (vocational or secondary education).

The semi-structured interviews took between 45 and 115 minutes. We asked respondents what they liked about karaoke, which songs they chose, how they performed them, how they saw the other people at the bars, and to what extent karaoke fitted with their other leisure activities. In keeping with the bottom-up research design, we used a grounded-theory-inspired (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) coding strategy. Conceptual labels that applied to themes emerged through constant comparison between the interview transcripts. Notwithstanding the inductive character of this process, we especially highlighted statements that concerned the extent of involvement with karaoke shown by the participants.

As we did not want to rely on educational attainment as the sole indicator for cultural capital, respondents also filled out a questionnaire based on the guidelines for cultural consumption surveys by Ganzeboom and Ranshuysen (1994). This questionnaire surveyed the respondents’ affinity with prototypal highbrow culture more directly, through surveying cultural behavior (such as frequency of museum attendance) and the presence of diverse cultural products at home (such as novels).²

Results: Distance and Engagement in Karaoke Performance and Evaluation

We discerned three attitudes towards karaoke that signified degrees of attachment and distancing: serious, ironic, and secretly serious. It soon became clear that among high cultural capital respondents, the level of involvement or detachment was not consistent within the same interview. They walked a tightrope between ‘secretly serious’ and ‘ironic’ and were aware of this ostensible inconsistency. The low cultural capital (LCC) performers were invariably ‘serious’ in their approaches to karaoke.

Consumption Style 1: Serious

Serious engagement with karaoke typified the discourses of our LCC respondents. The term ‘serious’ must be understood as a tendency to evaluate (karaoke) in a sincere and engaged manner. Seriousness was evident from the following: 1) importance given to technical aspects; 2) wanting to improve performances; 3) correspondence between karaoke songs and music taste; 4) valuing others’ judgments; 5) karaoke carried an emotional charge; and 6) karaoke could be cathartic.

First, some LCC participants had a near professional approach to the technical aspects of karaoke, illustrated by their dedication to singing techniques and the great value they attached to the quality of the sound equipment. Belicia³ (32, vocational schooling, little affinity with highbrow culture, participates 2–3 times per week), ‘follows’ her preferred DJs to various bars to be sure that the equipment is in order: ‘When the microphone or sound is not good, then you just feel your voice is being ruined … if the speakers aren’t set up well, you force your voice and that’s just awful’. Jessica (23, vocational schooling, little affinity with highbrow culture, participates once a week) warms up her voice in the car on her way to the bar and takes account of her vocal range – ‘there aren’t many songs which have the right pitch for me’ – and therefore she sometimes has to sing ‘the verse higher and the chorus lower. That sort of works, but the song then isn’t the way it’s supposed to be’.

Second, the LCC participants sought to improve their performances. Although this was not a must, it was certainly worth pursuing. Iris (32, vocational schooling, little affinity with highbrow culture, participates once a week) reflected on songs that put her vocal abilities to the test:

Even though I think, like, this is not going to be good, I’m not going to make this note, people will say, ‘Come on! You can do it!’ That does make me feel good. It also gives me the feeling, ok, next time I’ll do it again, but a little better.

Miranda (21, vocational schooling, little affinity with highbrow culture, participates once a week) who is ‘totally in love with it [karaoke]’ since her first performance, said: ‘I want to be better. From the beginning till now you can notice a great improvement in my voice’.

Third, we considered whether the performed songs match the music that performers listen to outside karaoke. Iris commented that the songs in the karaoke book and what she plays at home are ‘equal, the same’. When asked how she chose songs from the karaoke book, Miranda replied similarly: ‘You look at what songs you play at home’. Jessica, however, did miss some ‘lesser-known songs’ by Jennifer Lopez, but asserts ‘they actually do have everything’. Thus, there is a strong similarity between the LCC participants’ tastes and the karaoke songs selected.

Fourth, this group was also sensitive to the opinions of others about their performances. Iris admitted that she sometimes thinks ‘Oh dear, is this going well?’ when the audience gives her a funny look. Miranda said that ‘anytime you’re going to try a new song or you’re going to sing with someone who sings much better, you’re a little nervous again: how will I sound, will I make an ass of myself’. This seriousness was, however, something she tempered: ‘overall I do think like, it’s about the fun and not the achievement […] Then I think “screw it, it’s karaoke and not a talent hunt”’.

Fifth, a high degree of involvement is reflected in the emotional charge that karaoke can carry for the LCC participants. Jessica gave an example:

You sing a song that means something to you and that song sticks in your throat and is accompanied by emotions. You try not to think about it and just sing as good as you can, but it comes out in a stutter.

Iris also emphasized the emotional power of karaoke when she explained why a particular karaoke performer was her favorite:

It’s important that it touches me. They might not be their own songs, but I find it lovely if someone can deliver a song beautifully […] when he sings, I just melt. […] How he just puts on a show, like ‘wow, he’s really going for it’. I think that’s wonderful.

The emotional aspect of karaoke is also evident from the fact that Iris, Miranda and Jessica all occasionally sing a song with a special person in mind, often a lover or ex-boyfriend: ‘One and only by Adele is for someone who I, you know, quite liked. So, yeah, when I sing that song, I do think about that person’ (Iris).

Finally, doing karaoke can also help to cope with unprocessed emotions; it may have a cathartic effect. When we asked Iris why she preferred to sing Whitney Houston songs, she replied: ‘Because it allows me to express myself. Some lyrics, yeah, I can identify with those’. Jessica was more explicit about this cathartic function:

When I’m going to sing, that’s my way of expressing myself, so if I don’t know how to say something, I have a song that can tell how I feel at that moment. […] If you’re fed up, you scream it out of your system. Afterwards, you feel empty, relieved, it’s out of your system.

All in all, the LCC participants were quite serious about karaoke. But that does not mean that humor was completely lacking. There was a lot of pleasure to be found in the silliness of, for example, singing nursery rhymes such as the Kabouterdans [the Gnome Dance], where the text dictates the dance movements. The reason for such entertainment, however, was unambiguously located in the song itself, which could obviously not be taken seriously and therefore gave direct rise to comic performances.

Consumption Style 2: Ironic

Although, like the LCC participants, HCC participants were enthusiastic about karaoke – why else would they participate? – ambiguity was always just around the corner. This ambiguity was expressed in an ironic attitude, which was reserved for HCC participants and, despite irony’s potential subtlety, when asked to elaborate they sometimes articulated a rather overt disdain towards the LCC participants. We illustrate this attitude on the basis of the following eight related issues: 1) fun is paramount; 2) karaoke is not connected to one’s ‘real’ taste; 3) therefore the performed songs cannot truly be good, and thus 4) one does not really have to do one’s best; 5) there should not be any genuine emotional involvement; 6) the emphasis is on form rather than content; 7) sincere performances are designated as funny; and 8) the worse the performance, the better it is.

First, the focus on fun already became clear from the answers to one of our first interview questions: why do you do karaoke? All HCC participants asserted that the reason was entertainment: ‘just fun and having a laugh’ (Simone, 25, higher vocational education degree, great affinity with highbrow culture, participates about six times a year), ‘just a night of fun’ (Joyce, 29, did not finish her higher vocational education, great affinity with highbrow culture, participates monthly), ‘just to have a little fun, get a little drunk, basically just to let yourself go a little’ (Nina, 24, university student, great affinity with highbrow culture, participates about six times a year), and ‘karaoke is about the entertainment value’ (Olivia, 24, university degree, great affinity with highbrow culture, monthly participant). This emphasis on fun already puts the HCC participants at some distance from their LCC counterparts who mostly take karaoke seriously.

Second, clear boundaries were drawn between karaoke and one’s ‘actual’ taste. Asked about the extent to which the songs from the karaoke book corresponded to her own taste, Simone replied that those songs were her ‘karaoke-taste’: ‘For example, in real life I don’t listen to Linda, Roos en Jessica [a Dutch girlband from the nineties] or the Spice Girls on my iPod, but for karaoke I do!’ Emma (28, higher vocational education, great affinity with highbrow culture) claimed something similar when she stated that her ‘karaoke-taste is about guilty pleasures. And I also play those at home. But what I seriously appreciate, you will never encounter in a karaoke bar’. Both participants dissociated themselves from karaoke as being different from their ‘true’ tastes. When Simone claimed that ‘in real life’ she would not listen to the songs she performs at the bar, or when Emma and Simone were talking about a particular ‘karaoke-taste’, they made it clear that their ‘true self’ would not engage with this kind of culture. This is consistent with the idea of Sontag’s that ‘[m]any examples of Camp are things which, from a “serious” point of view, are either bad art or kitsch’ (1964: 3). Armed with the ironic attitude, which stresses their detachment, they can nevertheless wallow in karaoke culture to their heart’s desire.

Third, it follows that the performed songs cannot ‘truly’ be good. Olivia thought it ‘doesn’t really fit with it [karaoke], that you’d be doing a more serious song. […] Yeah I think that would be awkward. Because they aren’t funny songs to me […] It has to be sort of funny’. Emma also believed that ‘doesn’t work as good. Because then it quickly becomes serious. It’s much nicer to do those guilty pleasures […] Then a karaoke bar is the perfect place’. And when Nina mentioned one of her favorite performers, Frank Ocean, she said: ‘I wouldn’t want to sing that at a karaoke bar. That’s more serious’.

Fourth, not taking their own performances seriously entails that the participants do not try very hard. Joyce said, ‘I can’t imagine that I would sing a song seriously. I’m not very good at being serious in general’. The latter statement indicates that, indeed, irony can also refer to a more generalized attitude. Unlike for the LCC participants, the idea that the quality of the performance matters is in itself laughable for most HCC participants. Asked if she would like to improve her performance, Olivia replied: ‘Funny question. Uh, yeah, no, I don’t need to improve anything […] It’s not like I’m done and think: “Shit, this could have been better!” [laughs]’. Emma responded in similar terms: ‘When it goes badly, that’s fine. It’s not like I think beforehand “oh, I hope I reach that note”, no, it all doesn’t really matter much to me [laughs] […] It would be funny if it did! [laughs]’.

Fifth, among the HCC performers we see that, in contrast to the serious participants, there is a reluctance to be emotionally involved. Emma said: ‘It doesn’t happen often that someone’s performance touches me’. Olivia could appreciate it when a performance ‘generates a little sentiment’, but stressed: ‘It’s more like, “aww”. … I think that’s cute to watch’. These participants thus were not against emotional renditions, as long as these were not intended to actually affect them emotionally. Joyce, however, said she ‘always goes for the drama, always. And our friends too. […] I think we just love a little emotion, because we definitely put it in!’ When asked how she puts emotion in her performances, she replied: ‘I have quite a flair for the dramatic. With gestures and ad-libs I can put in emotion’. Emma preferably sang with ‘exaggerated emotion. Ballads are very emotional. I like those the best. Those tear jerkers!’ When asked if she felt these emotions herself, she answered:

Well, no, not in that way, but it’s fun to pretend. I can see the humor in that. If I’d choose a ballad, I wouldn’t go into it very seriously, or, I would, but in any case the goal is that people find it funny. You’re not trying to sing the best you can. […] It’s about making gestures that express that you’re in pain or something. Yes, it is, of course, with a wink-and-nod. I don’t go there as if I’m on stage at the X-factor.

Thus, sixth, when emotions are addressed, these are overstated to emphasize them as a formal aspect of the performance. The performances of Joyce and Emma are ‘over the top’, they theatrically express emotions through the use of voice and deliberate gestures, communicating to their peers that the seriousness of the performance is called into question. Such performances are brought with full commitment, ‘but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is “too much”’ (Sontag, 1964: 7). The distance that is incorporated through this artificiality ‘incarnates a victory of “style” over “content”, “aesthetic” over “morality”, of irony over tragedy’ (Ibid.: 10). While Bourdieu saw putting form over function as part of the elite habitus, here the emphasis on form indicates that the content cannot be taken seriously. The exaggerated performances do not show a temperate approach; emphasizing form is at the service of parody. Cultural capital is shown by not taking the form seriously, as the content does not justify seriousness.

HCC participants avoided performing seriously themselves. Sontag (1964) states that ‘[t]he whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious’ (p. 10). This idea also extended to the performances of ‘others’ at the bars, HCC participants found serious performances funny because of their seriousness:

Everyone there was just waiting their turn on stools, and when it was their turn they would sing really seriously and then sit on those stools again to wait [laughs]. […] And then they do those songs that have those really drawn out notes. I find that really funny [laughs]. (Olivia)

Emma similarly marveled at the ‘serious’ performers. During a visit to the bar, we saw her filming a performance. We asked her why:

I think that’s awesome, because they were younger than we are, twenty years old, maybe nineteen. You would think that these young people would go there to act crazy and drink, but they … were singing super seriously and got angry when the other person didn’t do well. And somehow I am thinking ‘huh? I don’t get it’. And I also find it interesting. I find it comical to see.

For the HCC performers, the assessment criteria for karaoke performances were different from the standards used to evaluate what they appreciate sincerely. Indeed, the worse the performance, the more fun it is. Joyce put it like this: ‘I find it especially funny when someone sings rather out of tune and sings very weighty ballads, or someone who tries too hard’. Olivia, Emma and Joyce in fact appreciated a caricature: they did not seek to empathize with the performer, but found pleasure in an abstract idea of emotion as something silly or as an aesthetic addition: ‘the sensibility of failed seriousness’ (Sontag, 1964: 10). When emotions come into play, they are quickly kept at a distance as artificial aspects through which the HCC participants indemnify themselves against any real identification. Emma referred most explicitly to the classic appeal of irony, ‘the worse the better’: ‘It’s just, the shittier it goes, the more we like it. It really works the other way around. The better someone is, the less fun we find it’. This the-worse-the-better idea extends for her beyond the performance to the whole atmosphere in the bar, because:

It looks terrible! It’s very kitsch, but we like that too, you know. […] I don’t know, the sadder it got around us, the happier we became. That’s really terrible, actually. Yeah, Schadenfreude, maybe a little. That’s what it is, isn’t it? It’s actually a bit of Schadenfreude, karaoke.

Consumption Style 3: Secretly Serious

Despite an unwillingness to identify with karaoke, the HCC respondents were not only or purely ironic about it – they, too, signified seriousness towards karaoke. However, in contrast to the LCC participants, this seriousness was characterized by ambiguity, as they showed a degree of resistance to their own seriousness: they were secretly serious. The fact that they distanced themselves from seriousness was already obvious from the fact that they labeled the other visitors of the bars as serious. Nina remarked that those ‘people were quite serious [laughs]. People who could really sing’. Simone described the ‘others’ as ‘people who do it very seriously […] who for sure aren’t having a laugh and then talk about “that one note that didn’t go so swell” or “what was the matter with you”’. Emma compared her friends to the other visitors at the bar: ‘We don’t take ourselves too seriously. Otherwise you don’t go to the kara … Yeah, there’s people there who take themselves very seriously, but we don’t’. Despite these claims, we found clear indications for 1) their own seriousness about which they felt ambivalent; and 2) embarrassment when catching themselves showing more devotion to a performance than they wanted to.

The desire to stand apart from the group they perceived as serious, first led to an ambivalence about their own seriousness that occasionally surfaced. In Goffman’s terms, we could say that the participants aimed towards a certain role distance on stage (Goffman, 1956). They created a distance not only vis-à-vis the songs, but also vis-à-vis the whole notion of karaoke. However, they did not always succeed at this. Joyce told us:

I actually do want to be good at it, secretly. […] That people say ‘I didn’t know you had such a good voice’, that’s what I’m secretly going for. […] I pretend it’s not serious because I kind of make it look like I’m having a laugh, but in the end … I think we all think, ‘haha, funny’ but we’re all a bit more serious than we would like to admit.

Joyce indeed felt the need to apologize for her seriousness:

I know it sounds horrible, but I always find that singing makes me really cheerful […] [At the bar] it doesn’t matter how you sing or what you look like, but, and this also sounds disgusting: you can totally be yourself. Gross! [laughs] But it’s true!

This again underlines how emotional contagion – Joyce becomes cheerful and the bar is like a warm bath where she feels accepted – by karaoke is actually ‘not done’ for HCC participants. It must be concealed.

Second, we saw that the HCC participants sometimes let their guard down, inadvertently crossed the line between covert and overt serious participation, and were subsequently somewhat ashamed of their seriousness. Nina surprised herself about her seriousness during the interview:

Secretly I want to be able to sing for real. So I’m aware of that … I quite enjoy singing, and that’s the only way that I can do it without anyone really judging me […] I really want it to look like entertainment, like fun, and that people believe that it’s not serious, but secretly, somewhere, because you’re quite aware of what you’re doing, even if you let yourself go, it’s somehow also a bit serious. […] There is some sort of self-awareness breaking through here. Fuck! Maybe I am one of the serious ones [laughs]!

Emma offered a similar confession:

Sometimes, sometimes it can happen that you are seriously absorbed by your performance without you knowing it. That you think, ‘ah, this feels nice’ or something like that. And then you’re not busy being funny. Then I’m ready and think: ‘maybe I went for it a bit too seriously’. But it’s also nice when that happens.

Simone explicitly stated that taking karaoke seriously did not suit the people from her social environment: ‘If someone from my group of friends would actually want to take karaoke seriously, they wouldn’t say it. Because, yeah, because we, in our culture, karaoke is not something to take seriously’. Among HCC participants, sincere appreciation of karaoke is surrounded by some embarrassment. Although they suggested that the so-called serious participants ‘go too far’, the HCC participants sometimes caught themselves delivering similarly fanatical performances and attaching more importance to the judgments of others than they believed they should. It was therefore presented as if they let themselves go in an unguarded moment, avoiding to be held fully accountable for this earnestness.

Conclusion and Discussion

The purpose of this analysis is to contribute to the literature on cultural participation by focusing on consumption and participation styles and the implications these have for thinking about cultural preferences, aesthetic dispositions and the relationships between them. In our interviews with karaoke participants, LCC participants did not distinguish between their ‘real musical preferences’ and their ‘karaoke-tastes’ and unambiguously confirmed they could be deeply touched by performances of themselves and others. Not only did it fit their taste preferences; when they talked about emotions in karaoke, they had no need to wrap their seriousness in a discourse giving evidence of distance from the karaoke practice or to conceal or relativize experienced emotions.

HCC participants, however, were ambivalent about their relationship with karaoke. Each one of them found it necessary to contemplate the seriousness with which others or they themselves related to karaoke. The seriousness of others was considered strange, fascinating and hilarious and their own seriousness embarrassing, or something to be veiled by exaggeration. These participants were at one moment ironic and the next secretly, or accidentally, serious in their performances and their perceptions of karaoke, both discourses expressing distance to this cultural form. Whenever their manner of performing or talking about karaoke threatened to become serious, they expressed their awareness of the inappropriateness of this seriousness, talked about it as if they were confessing something, or mocked themselves. Their reflexiveness about the extent to which they were serious about karaoke is in itself remarkable. It shows that they saw seriousness in karaoke as something curious, something that does not suit them and which therefore must be justified, indicating that distinction was still important to them. Indeed, and strikingly so, the differences in style were related to differences in cultural capital. This suggests that distinction in our study is still largely based on underlying class differences, although it is expressed in ‘the “innocent” language of likes and dislikes’ (Jarness and Friedman, 2016: 1). It is the fact that karaoke is truly enjoyed by those with lower levels of education that seems to make it important for the HCC participants to distance themselves from it.

The HCC participants’ use of irony served as a nod-and-a-wink or a raised eyebrow, showing that they were having fun with karaoke, but without serious devotion. It showed that they classified karaoke as low culture meant for people with a different class background, even if they secretly truly enjoyed it. Ironic consumption makes it possible to have it both ways, as it simultaneously expresses cultural openness and cultural superiority. As cultural hierarchies are becoming less obvious, irony can help the consumer to draw class boundaries nevertheless, since most HCC participants still seem to have a pretty clear idea which culture is considered legitimate and which is not. This can be achieved through irony in a manner that is in line with Bourdieu’s ideas on mass culture consumption by HCC participants: ‘[i]n fields where there is great overlap in the objects consumed, to consume in a “rare” distinguished manner requires that one consumes the same categories in a manner inaccessible to those with less cultural capital’ (1984: 282). Although with ‘rare’, Bourdieu here refers to a connoisseurship which is only accessible for cultural insiders, we can also perceive of it as a way of showing that one actually knows better. This is possible by assessing karaoke on the basis of an alternative set of criteria that Sontag described as ‘the sensibility of failed seriousness’ (1964: 10), with which one puts oneself above the average participant or fan through a specific consumption style. Using irony, hierarchies of legitimacy can be temporarily ignored or even reversed. ‘Real’ tastes are left behind as these are not in line with the temporary socio-cultural space that the HCC participants have created for themselves. The context of the karaoke bar provides a sort of bell jar under which the HCC participants may entertain themselves with dubious culture without being ‘contaminated’. The ironic mask gives the wearers the freedom to go wherever they want (Kierkegaard, 1989), which makes the ironic consumption style so well suited to contemporary cultural omnivores, who enjoy crossing cultural boundaries.

Given the link between concepts such as omnivorousness, openness, eclecticism and cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and cultural capital on the other (Prieur et al., 2008; Van Eijck and Lievens, 2008), we can surmise that the use of irony, because of its distinctiveness, is also related to social inequality in other areas. The study of humor styles by Kuipers (2001, 2006; see also Friedman and Kuipers, 2013) confirms this suspicion. The highly educated described someone with a good sense of humor as ‘good with language, on the ball, quick with spontaneous witty or humorous remarks, preferably with an ironic, not too emphatic tone. Humor is connected in this perspective with creativity, observation and analysis’ (Kuipers, 2006: 144). Self-mockery and the ability to put things into perspective play an important role, as our HCC respondents show through their ironic and secretly serious discourses.

Apart from distinction, another issue is at stake here. If the HCC participants engaged in activities they did not deem entirely appropriate, were they experiencing a sort of cognitive dissonance? Is their cultural eclecticism a sign of what Lahire (2010) referred to as cultural dissonance? Our analysis does not point towards internal conflicts, or to our HCC participants participating in activities they did not enjoy. Their main worry seemed to be that others might notice how much they actually hoped to deliver a good performance. They really did enjoy karaoke, sometimes in a more serious way than they liked to admit. They did not perform songs they listened to at home, because singing songs they truly appreciated would turn their performances into serious artistic endeavors. Although we would need to know more about their families of origin and cultural lifestyles in order to be sure, it does seem that, rather than indicating a fragmented or conflicted habitus, these young, highly educated women enjoyed this diversity. Jarness, responding to Lahire, argues that ‘[t]here is no reason why an inclination for hybridity and eclecticism cannot be embodied in the habitus’ (2015: 68). This might well describe the habitus of our HCC participants, but we can add that this eclecticism needs to be presented in such a way that it is clear which preferences are consistent with one’s self-image in terms of class, and which are not. Our HCC participants were eager to demonstrate that they differed from the LCC participants; although their activities showed some overlap, it was important to show that the meanings attached to these activities did not – even when they secretly did. Clearly, the HCC participants were more concerned with distancing themselves from the LCC participants than from the activity of karaoke itself. It is acceptable and fun to do karaoke, as long as it is not done in the serious LCC way.

Ways of consuming cultural objects and participating in cultural practices offer little-studied, and possibly very subtle ways to express taste preferences and to define what is meant by legitimate and illegitimate forms of culture. Because distinction today (also) takes the shape of more indirect, subtle practices, we can find new expressions of social distinction that are relevant in contemporary contexts (see also Daloz, 2013). Irony emerges in our analysis as an attitude that is eminently useful for the characterization of what seem to be increasingly elusive culture consumers, as it sheds light on taste and behavioral patterns that show little consistency at first sight. The ambiguity of irony can be used to display intellectual and cultural superiority during popular culture consumption, without being too blunt and direct, which is desirable since being explicitly dismissive of others is a less and less accepted form of snobbery (Holt, 1997; Van den Haak, 2014). Our analysis emphasizes that irony involves not a simple rejection, but a certain love–hate relationship, and this fact encourages researchers working with this term to pay attention to the ambiguity of this concept. Ironic consumption moves back and forth between aversion and admiration, the latter causing our HCC participants to acknowledge, albeit reluctantly, that they are true karaoke enthusiasts from time to time. Therefore, the ironist has different ‘faces’ and she or he is, as Kierkegaard has already suggested, almost elusive; sometimes effectively ironic and sometimes only using irony to get away with preferences that are otherwise hard to defend. In fact, this elusiveness illustrates exactly what irony is about and why it fits contemporary cultural elites so well.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Julia Peters is a PhD researcher at Ghent University where she studies Flemish visual artists’ discourses and aesthetic regimes in subsidy requests. She furthermore studies secular existential meaning-making and post-traditional romantic relationships.

Koen van Eijck is a full professor of Cultural Sociology at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication of Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research focuses on inequality and trends in cultural lifestyles, art appreciation, and talent development.

Janna Michael is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. She researches cultural taste, identity and symbolic boundaries.

References

Ang

(1985) Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London: Methuen.

Atkinson

(2011) The context and genesis of musical tastes: Omnivorousness debunked, Bourdieu buttressed. Poetics 39: 169–186.

Benzecry

Collins

(2014) The high of cultural experience: Toward a microsociology of cultural consumption. Sociological Theory 32: 307–326.

Berghman

Van Eijck

(2009) Visual arts appreciation patterns: Crossing horizontal and vertical boundaries within the cultural hierarchy. Poetics 36: 348–365.

Bourdieu

(1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bryson

(1996) Anything but heavy metal: Symbolic exclusion and musical dislikes. American Sociological Review 61: 884–899.

Colebrook

(2002) Irony in the Work of Philosophy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Daenekindt

Roose

(2014) Ways of preferring: Distinction through the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of cultural consumption. Journal of Consumer Culture. DOI: 10.1177/1469540514553715.

Daloz

(2013) Rethinking Social Distinction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

10.

Dickie

(2011 [1964]) The myth of the aesthetic attitude. In: Cahn

Meskin

(eds) Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 455–465.

11.

Drew

(2001) Karaoke Nights: An Ethnographic Rhapsody. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

12.

Drew

(2005) Once more, with irony: Karaoke and social class. Leisure Studies 24: 371–383.

13.

Ebrey

(2016) The mundane and insignificant, the ordinary and the extraordinary: Understanding everyday participation and theories of everyday life. Cultural Trends 25: 158–168.

14.

Elias

(1994) The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

15.

Fornäs

(2005) Filling voids along the byway: Identification and interpretation in the Swedish forms of karaoke. In: Hosokawa

Mitsui

(eds) Karaoke Around the World: Global Technology, Local Singing. London: Routledge, pp. 115–134.

16.

Friedman

Kuipers

(2013) The divisive power of humour: Comedy, taste and symbolic boundaries. Cultural Sociology 7: 179–195.

17.

Ganzeboom

Ranshuysen

(1994) Handleiding publieksonderzoek culturele instellingen. Amsterdam: Boekmanstichting.

18.

Glaser

Strauss

(1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago, IL: Aldine.

19.

Goffman

(1956) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Center.

20.

Goldberg

Hannan

Kovács

(2016) What does it mean to span cultural boundaries? Variety and atypicality in cultural consumption. American Sociological Review 81(2): 215–241. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1063/1.2756072.

21.

Holt

(1997) Distinction in America? Recovering Bourdieu’s theory of taste from its critics. Poetics 25: 93–120.

22.

Holt

(1998) Does cultural capital structure American consumption? Journal of Consumer Research 25: 1–25.

23.

Hosokawa

Mitsui

(eds) (2005) Karaoke Around the World: Global Technology, Local Singing. London: Routledge.

24.

Howey

(1975) Some reflections on irony in Nietzsche. Nietzsche Studien 4: 36–51.

25.

Hutcheon

(1994) Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge.

26.

Jarness

(2015) Modes of consumption: From ‘what’ to ‘how’ in cultural stratification research. Poetics 53: 65–79.

27.

Jarness

Friedman

(2016) ‘I’m not a snob, but …’: Class boundaries and the downplaying of difference. Poetics. Epub ahead of print 7 December 2016. DOI: https://dx-doi-org.web.bisu.edu.cn/10.1016/j.poetic.2016.11.001.

28.

Kelly

(2005) The adaptability of karaoke in the United Kingdom. In: Hosokawa

Mitsui

(eds) Karaoke Around the World: Global Technology, Local Singing. London: Routledge, pp. 81–98.

29.

Kierkegaard

(1989) The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, Together with Schelling’s Berlin Lectures. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

30.

Kuipers

(2001) Goede humor, slechte smaak: Nederlanders over moppen. Amsterdam: Boom.

31.

Kuipers

(2006) Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke. Berlin: De Gruyter.

32.

Lahire

(2010) The Plural Actor. London: Polity Press.

33.

Lizardo

(2008) The question of culture consumption and stratification revisited. Sociologica 2: 1–31.

34.

McCoy

Scarborough

(2014) Watching ‘bad’ television: Ironic consumption, camp, and guilty pleasures. Poetics 47: 41–59.

35.

Magill

(2007) Chic Ironic Bitterness. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

36.

Miles

Gibson

(2016) Everyday participation and cultural value. Cultural Trends 25: 151–157.

37.

Moser

(1984) The factual in fiction: The case of Robert Musil. Poetics Today 5: 411–428.

38.

Ollivier

(2008) Modes of openness to cultural diversity: Humanist, populist, practical, and indifferent. Poetics 36: 120–147.

39.

Peterson

Kern

(1996) Changing highbrow taste: From snob to omnivore. American Sociological Review 61: 900–907.

40.

Peterson

Simkus

(1992) How musical tastes mark occupational status groups. In: Lamont

Fournier

(eds) Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 152–186.

41.

Prieur

Rosenlund

Skjott-Larsen

(2008) Cultural capital today: A case study from Denmark. Poetics 36: 45–71.

42.

Rimmer

(2012) Beyond omnivores and univores: The promise of a concept of musical habitus. Cultural Sociology 6: 299–318.

43.

Roose

(2008) Many-voiced or unisono? An inquiry into motives for attendance and aesthetic dispositions of the audience attending classical concerts. Acta Sociologica 51: 237–253.

44.

Roose

van Eijck

Lievens

(2012) Culture of distinction or culture of openness? Using a social space approach to analyze the social structuring of lifestyles. Poetics 40: 491–513.

45.

Rorty

(1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

46.

Schiermer

(2014) Late-modern hipsters: New tendencies in popular culture. Acta Sociologica 57: 167–181.

47.

Sontag

(1964) Notes on ‘camp’. Available at: www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/sontag-notesoncamp-1964.html (accessed October 2013).

48.

Van den Haak

(2014) Disputing About Taste: Practices and Perceptions of Cultural Hierarchy in the Netherlands. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.

49.

Van Eijck

(2000) Richard A. Peterson and the culture of consumption. Poetics 28: 207–224.

50.

Van Eijck

(2015) Culturele leefstijlen: It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it. Sociologos 36: 26–44.

51.

Van Eijck

Lievens

(2008) Cultural omnivorousness as a combination of highbrow, pop, and folk elements: The relation between taste patterns and attitudes concerning social integration. Poetics 36: 217–242.