Sunday, October 19, 2008

No Karaoke for You ...

Embarrassing confession time:

I was a spaz as a kid. My mom always tells me how much she loved having me and watching me grow up, but I think she’s repressed most of the memories and is left with only a fuzzy timeline including the 10 minutes I behaved in church strung together with the times I finally passed out on my bed at night.

I also grew up with several older siblings who indoctrinated me into the cult that was 80s music. My favorite song through my entire childhood was “Take On Me” by Aha. I loved that song. LOVED. IT. My brother was finally kind enough to record it onto a tape for me, and I nearly wore out my Fisher Price tape recorder listening to it over and over again.

Now, I was an inventive little shrimp. I remember starting to get annoyed every time I had to hold down the rewind button so I could listen to it again. It just took too long, and I didn’t like having to wait every time I wanted to hear the song again.

That was when I had a flash of ingenuity. I realized that if I could somehow get the song on the tape twice, I’d only have to rewind every other song and would get two listenings in a row without any effort.

Here’s where the whole experience went into a tailspin. A smart person would have gone to the same brother who made the tape in the first place. A smart person would have asked him to record the song again right after the first one.

Evidently, I’m not smart.

I had already seen the big red record button on my Fisher Price, and a light bulb went on in my head. I could just record myself singing the song. That’s right … you heard me. I was going to sing the song myself.

Well, I did it. I recorded myself muddling through the words and trying to hit that high note. The really sad part? I totally didn’t even notice the difference between the two versions. I spent years after that happily listening to both, even though on my version, more than half the words were wrong and the synthesizer was replaced with “Nah-nah-nah-nah … nah … nah … nah … nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah …” (you get the idea).

I still have the tape somewhere, and I figure it will turn up at some embarrassing moment, like my 40th birthday.

2 comments:

trublubyu said...

bwah ha ha. have i got the thing for you. have you seen this?

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/e062d7b4d5


go. immediately. and watch this.

Nathan said...

This is AWESOME! I can't think of anything better. Not even Christmas.

My favorite line? "Band Montage"

You know what I'm going to be listening to all day today ...