David and Addict, This is actually quite an interesting issue. From a psych perspective, we'd usually want to do a study on it before pontificating (get a grant, publications, and study tour junket ), so without that I can only speak from observation. There is a Chats RSL staff member who occasionally sings. She is very professional-sounding. She makes a point of never doing the same song twice. There is a regular guy, whom I'll just refer to as 'Jimmy', who more or less follows this policy. Both of these put in some effort and never let you down even with new songs. I can get away with this policy because I genuinely know hundreds of songs from my garage band days and know them by heart. So we do the new ones for the challenge -ie- can I sound like Judith Durham? (answer: the one time I tried Carnival is Over, Marg warned me: 'Never again').

Clinging to favourites ('clingers') is understandable and safe for reluctant or non-singers, so how can we fault them? There is plenty of challenge just tidying up a favourite song -ie- I could keep re-doing Roy Orbison because I always stuff up something.

The hard-to-figure group is those 'lurchers' who, as you say, 'avoid previously sung songs and lurch from one mediocre attempt to the next '.

Freudians would relate this to stages of development, as per Wikipedia: 'From 18 months to 24 months the child is in the anal stage. In this stage they are learning to control the expulsion of faeces so the libidinal energy is focused in their bowel movements. Two types of characters can develop from this. The expulsive character would have been prone to malicious excretion either just before they were placed on the toilet or just after they were removed from the toilet. In this case the expulsive characters can develop if the parents are too lax with discipline. In adulthood it can result in messy or disorganised people who are reckless, careless, and defiant. The retentive character takes pleasure in holding in the faeces in spite of the parents training. These people develop into neat, organised, careful, meticulous, obstinate people often mean with money who are passive-aggressive.'

So Freudians would interpret the 'lurcher' as 'expulsive' and the 'clingers' who hold back unless they can meet a perfect standard as 'retentive'. Marg can probably offer a Jungian counterpart to this. Freud's theories are used more these days as descriptors than explanations but they describe well the extremes. Perhaps the goal of 'karaoke makeover' psychotherapy would be to have us examine a bit more deeply our motivations and how our actions impact on others.


Submitted by Tom on 05-06-2006

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