People who say karaoke is art are both precious and wrong. Karaoke is a sport. It involves turning art into a very fun and loud game. Like other sports, the premise of karaoke is predicated on an attempt at some Olympic feat, as straightforward as the sprint of Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” or as challenging as the decathlon-while-eating-ribs of Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out Of Hell.” There is endurance, competition, teamwork, and strategy (there is so much strategy). Only in the direst of circumstances is it done alone, like the bleakest Sprite commercial ever conceived. But we cheer on moxie and style, we cheer on failures and successes, we cheer on that guy because you can’t deny he picked a great song, and at the end of the night when we fall out of the room, there are winners and there are losers.
I am part of that small and self-righteous group of idiots who take karaoke Rather Seriously because I crave attention and I will never be on stage doing anything as important as screaming Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back In Anger” among friends with voices hoarse, heads light, and spirits high. And so through the course of many games, I have developed some skill as a player. I am a good singer, not a great singer. Many karaoke legends are awful singers or even tone-deaf, it doesn’t matter. This is one of the only sports where talent is not very important.
Avoiding the black holes of the songbook—like long songs (“Sweet Child O’ Mine”), long guitar solos (“Sweet Child O’ Mine”), long intros (“Sweet Child O’ Mine”), all Eminem songs, the warhorses like “Piano Man” or “Bohemian Rhapsody” and their ilk—is half the game. The other half is discovering the gem that works for you. This is key. After years spent placing an unhealthy amount of stakes on America’s Other Pastime, I’ve found that of all the songs in all the plastic binders, Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart” is a perfectly structured karaoke number that works for me almost every time (receipts). Maybe it will for you, too.
Of course, this Ophelian power-ballad is in and of itself a perfect song. Penned by primo songwriter Diane Warren, Braxton’s hit stayed at the top of the charts for 11 weeks when it came out 20 years ago this week, bolstered by a video of her sensually recalling Twister games with her husband, before he died in a motorcycle accident (this is pretty much the same premise of the Celine Dion“It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” video, except for the Twister part). “Un-Break My Heart” is also the 13th most popular song of all time, according to Billboard, so it’s not exactly some secret karaoke hack (like, doing Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and reading the names of the sailors who died in between verses).
At the time, the song spanned an impressive amount of radio formats, from every variation on Adult Contemporary, to the R&B and hip-hop stations still antiquatedly dubbed “Urban.” “Un-Break My Heart” was everywhere. For months and months, Braxton’s voice culminated the pop station’s Top 8 at 8 countdown. I remember it being piped endlessly through various pharmacies and doctor’s offices. I also remember it being played at middle school dances as I teetered back and forth at arm’s length from someone, knowing nothing of broken hearts. It’s a song you know that you may not remember you know—the main and mercurial component to a great karaoke song.
First, briefly, there are some warnings should you consider before picking “Un-Break My Heart”: It’s a bit too long. The best songs are always in the three-minute range. If you must pick a song at karaoke that’s longer than four minutes, it really better be worth it, and my argument is that this song is worth it. “Un-Break My Heart” would also normally be disqualified because it has a guitar solo—a nylon-string acoustic guitar solo. And while it’s not as long as the one that sinks Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” it’s still something that requires you to fill for time. You can take long, sumptuous pulls from a bottle of Cabernet or recall how you used to play Twister with your dead husband, but never, ever play air-guitar.
Its pros, however, are myriad. There is no one equation for what makes a good karaoke song, but two strong factors include a key change and a big build, and this song has both. The key change into each of its three choruses has all the power of the end of Mr. Big’s “To Be With You,” but without the extremely problematic karaoke arrangement (“To Be With You” seems great, right, but trust me it’s a death trap, I would not recommend putting it in). Each time you lean into the modulation, it feels like an exquisite costume change. By the time you hit the final one, you get to throw your voice to the sky on “love me again,” i.e. the point where everyone’s usually like, “Oh hell yeah this part.” Whether you can sing the final “love me again” is definitely not the point; it’s more about imitating the arc of Braxton’s voice up to that high C.
I am what real singers call a “useless baritone,” so I just fake my way around the really high notes. For Braxton’s big money note at the end (high D), I’m usually doing it in falsetto unless some ill-advised vote of confidence tells me I can sing it in my mix voice (same goes for the end of Journey’s “Faithfully”), but that rarely ever turns out well. I actually think “Un-Break My Heart” is relatively easy to sing (unlike most Prince songs, which are all deceptively hard, especially the breakdown of “Little Red Corvette”). If you get lost in the modulation to the chorus, use the backing track, or plug one ear to hear your voice like you’re Mariah in the booth, and pretend it’s a bit.
I’ve seen Train’s “Drops Of Jupiter” bring the house down, I’ve seen Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” transformed into a very solid piece of comedy, and I’ve been stirred—properly stirred—by Kings of Leon’s “Use Somebody.” In the karaoke room, songs detach themselves from the context of their original artists, landing in the hands of hapless amateurs who still forget their credit cards behind the bar. “Un-Break My Heart” can transcend its candle-wax-as-tears drama and unite the room in a collective cry of a timeless phrase. Diane Warren said she was shocked that no one in the history of contemporary songwriting, from Motown to country, had come up with the line “un-break my heart.” The minting of this expression—to ctrl-z a breakup—is part and parcel its legacy. Long may it live on the all-time charts, and long may it be attempted by bush-league singers across this land.