85 Empty Orchestra: The Karaoke Standard and Pop Celebrity Karen Tongson Celebrity has taken a decisive turn toward the ordinary in recent decades (Gamson 2011: 1062), yet karaoke, especially in the United States, is generally construed as so crass an activity that participating in it either constitutes a barrier to fame or — for those who have already achieved celebrity status — risks tarnishing a carefully cultivated star persona. On the Internet, a new genre of “gotcha” video captures celebrities on vacation or in what they assume are private karaoke rooms, slurring off-key to pop hits. 1 Meanwhile, real- ity vocal competition shows — network television’s puppy mills for pop music aspirants — go to great lengths to distance their participants from fans and lay- people who blow off steam by singing karaoke in local watering holes. Simon Cowell, arguably American Idol’s most discerning judge, led the charge in the early 2000s by using the word karaoke to dismiss vocal performances that he considered derivative or sloppy (Meizel 2011: 61 – 63). This essay explores how karaoke came to be a criterion for judgment in star- making media like reality vocal competition shows, particularly the Fox phe- nomenon American Idol. What I call the “karaoke standard” is a paradoxical formulation that measures both singers’ adherence to the essence of an origi- nal and their ability to make a song their “own.” During the early seasons of American Idol, Cowell used the term karaoke to express whether a competitor’s performance sounded like a direct imitation of the original. For Cowell, and for other reality judges who followed suit, comparing a contestant’s performance to karaoke provoked negative associations with earnest wannabes who could only Public Culture 27:1 doi 10.1215/08992363-2798355 Copyright 2015 by Duke University Press 1. For a small but well-curated sample of celebrity karaoke videos, see Kujawski 2011.