My Way Killings

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

So what is it about "My Way" and its singers that's so particulalrly enraging? I think this guy - a Philippino singing-school owner - may be on the right track:

“ ‘I did it my way’ — it’s so arrogant,” Mr. Albarracin said. “The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody. It covers up your failures. That’s why it leads to fights.”

It's a song of self-aggrandisment: the perfect expression of that inebriated maudlin state when the feeling that you're pretty damn special and marvellous, but that somehow this fact seems not to be universally acknowledged as it should be, coincides with a regrettable lack of inhibition. In other words, it's the essence of what can make a drunk such a pain in the arse. It's a tribute to the general patience and decency of the human race that My Way murders are not far more common.

Sometimes, though, karaoke killings are a matter of simple justice:

Karaoke-related killings are not limited to the Philippines. In the past two years a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s "Take Me Home, Country Roads”.

Comments

[PooterGeek]

For similar reasons (and also because it's a poor song) I have always detested *My Way*; but I'd like to take this opportunity to distance myself in public from these terrorists. The route to an international *My Way* moratorium continues to lie through peaceful negotiation.

[hehe]

haha