It’s the songs I can’t sing that do it for me. I can’t sing many of them; I wasn’t born with that gradient of talent. Talent is a hard thing to come by in this world. As George Carlin wrote in Brain Droppings, “Most people aren’t particularly good at anything.” I’m part of that hive.

It’s OK that I’m not a good singer. Karaoke is founded on the absence of talent. Karaoke translates as “empty orchestra.” We congregate at karaoke bars to hear poor performances. What’s more, we applaud those awful performances. The worse you are, the more you accomplish—because you did it. You couldn’t do it, but you did anyway. In rewarding failure, karaoke, the “empty orchestra,” is unique.

In another regard, karaoke is the same as everything else—and conversely, everything is karaoke. Scripted words guide us along as we perform for that which is external to us. All actions save for the instinctive, i.e. eating, sleeping, reproducing, and ignoring FOX News, are scripted.

We learn language and social behavior from school and by imitation. The way we use language, both verbal and non-verbal, is scripted. We model our external behaviors on those of our family and friends: If we’ve been around them enough, we can’t help but read from their scripts.

Autonomy is make-believe. Every idea is planted by external forces. All day, every day, we’re reading lyrics off of a flickering TV set, singing familiar words so the external, the crowd, can follow along. They know the songs. If they didn’t, there would be no communication.

Imagine standing on stage at a karaoke bar and singing the wrong song, and in Cantonese. The crowd grumbles, sighs, complains about your scandal. They also shuffle uncomfortably in their seats, stare at the walls, and hide behind their drinks. They’re unsettled. Some are frightened. The reaction is innate. We don’t like not understanding. We’re not programmed for it.

Rational creatures have no place for expression without meaning. Our minds have rigid boundaries; we lack wheels and have to stick to the tracks. Our tracks are narrow. We see only partial landscapes; the world is reduced to absolutes, when the world has never been absolute. If there is an absolute, we’ve never seen it. We can’t.

We mistakenly associate words with meaning, even though words only signify meaning. We mistakenly associate our meaning with reality, when meaning is in truth a tool we use to comprehend everything around us—to construct reality.

We’ve imposed our karaoke scripts on everything. But we focus so much on the words, we miss out on the music.

Where does this leave the music? What is karaoke without lyrics? Words without meaning, images without purpose. We tuck them away in art to keep them separate from our supposed reality.

Surrealism, automatic writing, and other experimental arts (David Lynch films) challenge our rationalism. We tend to regard these things with distrust, even scorn. “They mean nothing, so they are nothing.” But they are something.

A splash of random paint on a brick wall can inspire a mind and move a soul. These things can have lasting power. We are willing to embrace abstract, “senseless” art more than ever before. There must be a reason. I posit that reason is that we’re changing—for lack of a better word, evolving.

Art precedes life. What begins in the abstract inevitably manifests inside our narrow tracks. Abstract art, New Age religions, quantum physics … these are stepping stones. Are we shifting? Is simple black-and-white thinking, this need for absolutes, slowly being extricated from our code?

More people are non-religious than ever before. Political models are becoming increasingly intricate and vague. Morality is less defined than ever. Some would deem these things proof of humanity’s decline.

I beg to differ. I believe we’re finally learning to write our own lyrics.

Historically, absolutes have always led to ruin. Religious absolutes have led to holy wars. Our one true god versus your true god—whosever god wins is real! Political parties and ethnic groups have demonized other parties and groups, when all purport to have the greater good in mind. People say we need absolutes else the world will crumble. How can we know that? We’ve never been without our certainties. We won’t be for a very long time, if ever.

We’re different than ever before. The Internet has allowed us to share ideas with more freedom than we dared imagine. Religious faiths and political parties are growing more fluid (some of them, at least). We’re closer to nothing in particular than ever before.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to sing, often poorly, in karaoke bars. It’s in our nature. When I crucify Tom Jones’s “Love Me Tonight” at Macado’s, what I’m doing isn’t anything unusual—I’m following a script and singing along, as you and I always do.

Only worse.

Charles Smith is columnist for the New River Voice who, fortunately, focuses more on his writing than his singing.