Queereoke - The Midway Cafe

The Midway is a dive. Dark and dingy, cheap drinks, and sticky floors.

Queeraoke is a fun collection of mostly female queer people. The few men who do show up take more than their share of stage time singing, but that probably means that men who come to Queeraoke are mostly there to sing rather than to hook up - just as well since they're not likely to succeed. People sing the same old songs too often; I try to break from that pattern and never do the same song twice. The song selection isn't bad but alternative is poorly represented. (But then most of the crowd won't recognize it; one night I sang a Muse song and half the audience didn't even know the band let alone the song!)

The song books are seriously out of date, and each one seems to be incomplete. (Pieces of the alphabet are simply missing and each one is missing a different part.) Some nights they bring a computer that you can use to make requests; it has an up to date database.

The main DJ, Summer's Eve, is OK. The assistant DJ, Erin, always has a big welcoming smile for everyone and she's seriously hot.

To answer a couple of questions in other reviews:

1. Why the cover? So they can afford to pay the DJ. Karaoke recordings aren't cheap - the DJ is paying at least $1 per song and he's got a library of thousands of them. And his time is worth something.

2. Why don't they have song X? First, see the answer to question #1. Second, the song selection of the karaoke companies is somewhat idiosyncratic; the song you really want to sing may not be available, or may only be available in a bundle that is mostly dreck that nobody wants.

this shit is a hot mess. i cannot believe they charge a cover for it. the venue isfine, nothing special, and the drinks are only average, so why the cover?

I've been here a few times, and its a solid night. It's a dive bar, but the best bars tend to be. Five dollar cover, five dollar well drinks, and the cutest female-bodied queer people you can find. Small breaks of pop music between sets of kareoke, and the crowd was very welcoming to the occasional gay man (re: me) so I had a blast.

Granted its in JP so unless you're local you need a ride. If it were closer I'd probably be a regular.