This article traces the social, technological and legal factors that, from the 1960s onward, transformed karaoke into a televisual medium. The author shows how the incorporation of the television screen into karaoke performance reveals a cross-section of postwar Japanese anxieties surrounding gendered leisure practices, licensing and storage of emerging media formats, and the regulation of the body within urban space. She further argues that the resultant ambient aesthetics of karaoke background videos encode a particular historical moment in the 1980s, in which karaoke emerged as a leisure activity involving the visually orchestrated somatic reconstitution of ambient space under pressure within Japan’s increasingly mediatized urban environment. The article ultimately suggests that resituating karaoke within television and media studies allows for a more resonant understanding of it as an embodied practice in which a visually driven nostalgia for ambient media alters, if not outright displaces, the affective connection to the audio it accompanies. The televisually mediated space of karaoke performance, then, reframes the nostalgia typically associated with both television and popular audio as, instead, nostalgia for the way ambient media allows for renegotiations of the relationship between the body and its surroundings under the attendant pressures of late capitalism.

中文翻译：

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怀旧盒子之窗：20 世纪 80 年代日本电视与卡拉 OK 的环境美学

本文追溯了 20 世纪 60 年代以来卡拉 OK 转变为电视媒体的社会、技术和法律因素。作者展示了电视屏幕与卡拉 OK 表演的结合如何揭示了战后日本对性别休闲实践、新兴媒体格式的许可和存储以及城市空间内身体监管的焦虑。她进一步认为，由此产生的卡拉 OK 背景视频的环境美学编码了 20 世纪 80 年代的一个特定历史时刻，其中卡拉 OK 作为一种休闲活动出现，涉及在日本日益媒体化的城市环境的压力下对环境空间进行视觉编排的躯体重构。文章最终建议，将卡拉 OK 重新定位在电视和媒体研究中，可以让人们对它有更共鸣的理解，将其视为一种具体实践，在这种实践中，视觉驱动的对环境媒体的怀旧会改变（如果不是彻底取代）与其所伴随的音频的情感联系。那么，以电视为媒介的卡拉 OK 表演空间重新塑造了通常与电视和流行音频相关的怀旧情绪，取而代之的是，对环境媒体的怀旧方式允许在晚期资本主义的随之而来的压力下重新协商身体与其周围环境之间的关系。 。