- DoctorWho
A small clique of people, all friends, were basically the only ones at karaoke last night—they were really the only people in the bar. Faced with this crowd of strangers my friend considered his options—Judy Garland? Johnny Cash?—but eventually discarded them. Meanwhile the strangers were tag-teaming the open mike. One man sang, unfortunately, “Hallelujah,” the most gratuitously covered song in history. I read an excellent analysis purporting to offer “scientific proof” of the greatest diva of the last 25 years, in which the author claims that Whitney Houston bests other contenders—Mariah Carey, Aretha Franklin—by virtue of the fact that she “broke” the national anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl (“While Aretha pretty much broke every song she ever performed, leaving it smoking on the stage, never to be touched again, Whitney broke our goddamn National Anthem”). Everybody knows Jeff Buckley broke “Hallelujah”—of course its author, Leonard Cohen, didn’t do too badly either—and I think all these pretenders need to back the fuck off. You want a karaoke song? Here, try Bon Jovi.