Seattle Attack Blamed on Karaoke, Coldplay

A 21-year-old woman was arrested and booked last Thursday after she assaulted a man during an karaoke performance. Witnesses reported the man was attempting the Coldplay song "Yellow" when the woman lost control and attacked him.

Personally, I was surprised to find out that attacks on karaoke singers seem to be rare. I had expected to find other adjectives describing them, such as "continual," "savage," or maybe "award-winning."

Telling the singer he "suck[ed]," the woman first pushed him and then started throwing punches to get him to stop singing. "It took three or four of us to hold her down," said a bartender. When she was escorted outside, he said, the woman "went crazy," throwing punches at everyone in the group, including an off-duty police officer. The arrival of on-duty police only made things worse, as the woman head-butted an officer twice before she could be completely subdued.

For once in these kinds of stories, alcohol does not seem to have been a factor. The article stated that, according to the bartender's notes -- one of the more accurate forms of reporting known to history -- the woman had had only one drink prior to the rampage. (It was a shot of Jagermeister, but still.) An expert on karaoke-related violence (namely, me) believes that alcohol alone is unlikely to explain such an attack even if the bartender understated the woman's drinking. It is possible that the woman was actually infuriated simply by the singer's lack of skill, as witnesses suggested. But it seems more likely that it was the fortunately rare combination of karaoke, an untalented performer, and Coldplay that actually triggered violence.

I would bet he didn't get any further than this:

Look at the stars,
Look how they shine for you,
And everything you do,
Yeah, they were all yellow.

I came along,
I wrote a song for you,
And all the things you do,
And it was called "Yellow"

On second thought, he probably didn't get that far.

According to Wikipedia, which is at least as accurate as bartenders' notes, karaoke was created and popularized by Japanese singer Daisuke Inoue in the early 1970s. He also invented a karaoke machine of the kind that is now wildly popular, but failed to patent it. He did receive an Ig Nobel Prize in 2004 for the accomplishment (it was the Peace Prize, for helping people "learn to tolerate each other"). He is shown here accepting the award, showing a remarkably intact sense of humor for somebody who invented but failed to profit from what is now a ten-billion-dollar industry.