KttD: The Contenders - Soo Doh Nim

With the Eight Annual Karaoke to the Death VIII fast upon us, the editors at Dabysan in Hammersmith Palais thought it would be a good time take a closer look at some of the main competitors: their strengths, weaknesses and potential obstacles to taking home Lord Ramsey's Cup.

Chalk it up to a stage demeanor that can only be described as "stomach turning." Something about Soo's smug, simpering smile and his strange, arrhythmic dancing makes him a profoundly off-putting presence up there, and that's before he even opens his mouth. When he does, things go from bad to worse.

What makes Soo different from every other KttD competitor is that Soo thinks he's a good singer. He doesn't really want to win KttD; he wants to be loved. He wants strangers -- preferably young, foreign women -- to tell him how great he is. So like a deranged torch singer, oblivious to his own putridity, Soo struts the stage bellowing out his awful songs, casting come-hither stares at the throngs of white trash as if expecting any moment to be overwhelmed by a fusillade of panties. It's revolting and it's consistent, and no serious KttD competitor would ever take Soo Doh Nim lightly.

Strengths: Soo is the hardest competitor to break down into a statistical model. Taken as simply an amalgam of statistics, Soo wouldn't even rate as a serious KttD competitor. No single facet of his performance is legendarily bad. When he sang "You Can Call Me Al" in KttD IV, it wasn't that far out of tune, but boy was it unpleasant to witness. Truly then, Soo is more than the sum of his parts, a natural competitor, whose real strength may come from the fact that he doesn't think he belongs here.

Weaknesses: It's hard to imagine Soo staying up nights, pondering song selection. Although Soo can sing any song badly, he suffers from a kind of complacency unique to the truly (un)gifted. In the modern KttD era, the performances get worse every year, and Soo will have to do more than just fall back on his considerable (lack of) talent if he wants to reclaim the bad-singing world's greatest prize. Perhaps even more troubling, though, was Soo's inexplicable decision in 2007 to openly campaign for Lord Ramsey's Cup from the stage during a musical interlude in his song. It shattered the fourth wall and violated the unwritten compact between KttD competitor and spectator. Soo will have to put that incident well behind him to have any chance for glory at KttD VIII.