Everything sounds like crying eventually is a project in which we imagine karaoke performances of songs-that-sound-like-crying.
In our continued research for ESLCE, karaoke has again and again revealed its queer resonances, thanks in part to Karen Tongson’s extensive writing on karaoke as a participatory, amateur and repetitive mode of performance. We also want to indulge a utopian reading of karaoke's dynamics that have, from the start, been its appeal for us. At a karaoke night hosted by Bar Notre-Dame-des-Quilles in Montreal, we watched a crowd of lovers, friends and strangers erupt in sync, full-throating “ahhhh, ha-ah-ahh, ohhh, ah” to the bridge of Shallow. We suspected then that karaoke, with its possibilities of social promiscuity, public intimacy and shared embarrassment, held potential to conjure queer space and call into being queer counterpublics.
Across the 4 different iterations of ESLCE so far, we persistently invoke karaoke and crying as twin themes, speculating what a collective public performance of “bad feelings” might do. Crying seems a sentient and appropriate response for queer folx in the current sociopolitical climate. But holding to the reparative mood of Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: a public feeling, we posit that feeling bad publicly together might remake these negative affects as generative and political sites. Heard slantwise, these songs-that-sound-like-crying could also be cries of protest and resilience, of a public rallying, in solidarity and ecstasy.