Sing

Anyone who loves singing has had the frustrating experience of going out to karaoke night and discovering that the song you've been wanting to sing just ...

[Punks in the Beerlight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtA869eH21c)”! [I Believe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVJgmp2Tc2s)” from The Book of Mormon: great karaoke jam.) Love classic rock, and wish you could sing the semi-forgotten FM radio hits that everyone knew when you were a kid? “ [Slack Motherfucker](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c_GX2CYkcQ)”! [Tha Alkaholiks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKzwlSMAXEM)! Rachel delivered a melancholy rendition of Harry Chapin’s “ [Flowers Are Red](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cVpkzZpDBA),” a song she used to play for teachers in the school where she once worked. (It’s a cautionary tale, and by the end we were all near tears.) Ashley had performed “ [I Sing the Body Electric](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi1h-Xpr3qY)” from Fame as her audition piece her freshman year in high school, and she still remembered every word. Matt, it turned out, went to a lot of clubs in the late ’90s and loved singing vaguely Euro anthems like Real McCoy’s “ [Another Night](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pav2f4b-1ZE).” Alia seized the opportunity to sing the songs she loves from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and, as everyone cracked up at “ [Let’s Generalize About Men](https://slate.com/culture/2017/10/crazy-ex-girlfriends-lets-generalize-about-men-beats-wheres-rebecca-bunch-video.html),” she likely earned the show a few more viewers. [remarkable creators](https://www.karaokenerds.com/GlobalKaraokeCommunity) out there, like American hero [Lemmy Caution](https://www.youtube.com/@lemmycaution6144), using vocal-removing processors to create pro-quality karaoke videos of the [types of songs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj0acjWtAng) you’d [never see](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7QPOOgwbDY) in [a karaoke book](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HbQvzbh4Rk). [Ants Marching](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNgJBIx-hK8),” he gave up and sat back down. There were the lyrics up on the screen, and there was Van Halen’s “Panama” blasting through the speakers, and there was me on the microphone—my neighbor, a preschool music teacher, owns a microphone and an amp—doing my best David Lee Roth. Duets were also a problem: Aside from a few specially Apple-indicated songs, most duets on Sing don’t delineate the lyrics by singer, which means you really gotta know which parts of “ Or you plug it into the private-room system, and suddenly you’re trying to get inspired by a chintzy MIDI version of “Purple Rain” that cuts out before the big finish.