| From the Where2sing.com forum: This came to me via The New York Times:
'Karaoke killing them not so softly with his song'
GENERAL SANTOS, Phillipines:
After a day of cutting hair, Rodolfo Gregorio went to his neighbourhood karaoke bar still smelling of talcum powder. Putting aside his glass of beer, he grasped a microphone and stilled the room with The Platters 'My Prayer'.
Next he belted out crowd pleasers by Tom Jones and Englebert Humperdink.
But Mr Gregorio, 63, a witness to countless fistfights and occasional stabbings erupting from disputes over karaoke singing, did not dare choose one beloved classic: Frank Sinatra's 'My Way'.
'I used to like My Way, but after all the trouble, I stopped singing it' - he said. 'You can get killed.'
The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling 'My Way' in karaoke bars in the Phillipines, but the media has recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and calls them 'My Way Killings'.
The murders have left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the kilings the byproduct of the country's culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there somthing sinister in the song?
Many karaoke bars have removed the song from their playbooks. And the country's many Sinatra lovers are practising self-censorship out of perceived self-preservation.
Karaoke killings are not limited to the Phillipines. In the past two years, a Malaysian man was stabbed for monopolising the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight neighbours in a rage after they sang John Denver's 'Take Me Home, Country Roads'.
Still the odds of getting killed during karaoke may be higher in the Phillipines, if only because of the ubiquity of the pastime.
'The trouble with 'My Way' ' Mr Gregorio said, 'is that everyone knows it and everyone has an opinion'.
Butch Albarracin, the owners of the Centre for Pop, a Manila singing school said 'I did it my way -it's so arrogrant. The lyrics evoke fellings of pride and arrogrance in the singer, as you you're somebody when you're really nobody.......... That's why it leads to fights.'
Defenders of 'My Way' a French song with English lyrics written by Paul aanka, say the real reasons for the violence are breaches of karaoke etiquette.
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