Today’s discussion will be between
Aaron Dorman
and
Dakota Dunlap McKee
Aaron: Welcome back from Korea!
Dakota: You were there too.
Aaron: Right. Well, anyway, let’s discuss. One of my favorite things about Korea was the private karaoke room, or norebang. It’s one of the cultural things I’m really going to miss. I’m wondering today about the crossover potential, if we could bring over the Pacific IN MY LIFE.
Dakota: No chance.
Aaron: Hold on there! Why not? DON’T GO BREAKING MY HEART.
Dakota: The burden of proof is on you. SHOW ME THE WAY.
Aaron: Well, it was loads of fun.
Dakota: So is rounding up cattle in OKLAHOMA. And yet nobody believes me.
Aaron: So?
Dakota: It’s a localized cultural thing. There’s no crossover potential.
Aaron: But I WANT IT THAT WAY.
Dakota: YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT.
Aaron: You can’t compare the two things. Anything has certain intrinsic value, you just took apples and oranges and said they are both fruit so they are directly comparable.
Dakota: So tell me what the intrinsic value of the norebang is.
Aaron: Well, everybody loves singing.
Dakota: I hate singing.
Aaron: I meant everybody in a relative sense. Singing is almost universal across cultures. THE HILLS ARE-
Dakota: Norebang is not just singing. It is bad singing. It is drunk singing. It is singing for six hours. BLAME IT ON THE ALCOHOL. I love “pawn stars” but I couldn’t watch that for six hours.
Aaron: But that’s why its so great! It starts as a novelty and when it gets a little older than it becomes about nostalgia, or you sing new songs. Maybe you want to sing an OLD FASHIONED LOVE SONG, or maybe you want to sing a SIMPLE SONG OF FREEDOM? We could improve upon the model, make better food, or no food at all. Add windows, etc. I think people would love it.
Dakota: Western people?
Aaron: Well, yeah. I think that norebangs would do great in every DOWNTOWN in America.
Dakota: Well that’s just the problem. When did Western people, who you say love norebangs, go to the norebangs?
Aaron: On the weekend. IN THE MIDNIGHT HOUR.
Dakota: Yes. On the weekend. Norebangs can’t survive with just weekend customers. They survive in Asia/Korea because people go there everyday, at all times of the day, nonstop.
Aaron: Well, it might never catch on as a daily thing, but like I said, it could be a novelty. An event for birthday parties, etc. People didn’t do lasertag on the weekdays either.
Dakota: Yeah, and all the laser tag places went out of business.
Aaron: Not because it wasn’t cool, because the business model needs tinkering. At the normative level, norebangs COULD succeed, even if they were transient and new ones replaced old ones every few months or so.
Dakota: That’s —.
Aaron: Don’t say it!
Dakota: That’s stupid. Now YOU are juggling the apples and oranges, neither of which, I should mention, is necessary for a good diet. I didn’t eat anything but meat until I was 13 years old, and that was only by accident. The problem IS cultural, it doesn’t matter how fun or not fun norebangs are, because as I said above, there just isn’t enough demand for it to work. You can’t simply ignore the demand for something. We live in the real world.
Aaron: Real world? You’re not even a real person.
Dakota: But I live in the real world. Let’s consider where we just came from. On Jeju, there is a conservative culture–
Aaron: What, so karaoke is an Asian thing now? It’s not as if it’s a completely foreign concept. There are karaoke bars in the US. There are karoake nights in bars. There are karaoke nights on cruises. Etc. There is a market waiting to be tapped.
Dakota: No there isn’t. Speaking of things waiting to be tapped, norebangs are ideal for a culture that drinks a lot and divides itself along gender lines, as is what happens in more conservative cultures.
Aaron: So what?
Dakota: Well, you have a bunch of drunk people who aren’t allowed/are too scared to have sex, so they do the next best thing, which for girls is taking pictures of yourself over and over again, for boys is eating lots of meat, which I can totally relate to, and for both, separately most of the time, is to sing your favorite song, and make fun of western songs you hear all the time, by singing drunk and badly. And sometimes there is meat at the norebang.
Aaron: But they like it.
Dakota: They like it because they can’t have sex. In America, the only people who would go to norebang would be people who aren’t having sex.
Aaron: But…(thinks)…yeah…yeah you’re right…I mean…who would have time for the norebang…heh…yeah…
Dakota: I win! (Drives his motorcycle into the ocean)
Culture Time 