The Kazoo, and Vulnerability
Kazoos rule.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, the kazoo is a musical instrument that muffles the tone of your voice via basically wax paper, creating a wacky, buzzing sound as you sing or hum through it.
There are a couple of interesting things happening here, with the kazoo. First and foremost, it has a fun name.
Secondly, the kazoo essentially acts as a filtering system for your voice. Let’s compare this with another popular voice-filtering system - auto-tune. Auto-tone is a win-win for both the performer and the audience. While the performer gets a wall of protection from needing any sort of skill or vulnerability, the audience gets neat, robot-y sounds. The kazoo provides none of these things. To play, it requires an about-as-expected amount of skill, and a surprising amount of vulnerability. One might argue that the kazoo requires even more vulnerability than if you were to just sing with your own voice #nofilter, because of how annoying it sounds to the audience (the kazoo, that is).
If this is starting to sound like one of those kazoo diss blogs, rest assured that it’s not. Quite the opposite, in fact. This is about the kazoo’s surprising, hidden potential to teach vulnerability. Not following? Here’s a challenge for you - complete the following three steps in order:
Play a song on the kazoo by yourself
Play a song on the kazoo to a friend
Play a song on the kazoo at a party
You probably won’t complete this challenge; it is kind of silly. But that's the point. Because if you did, you will have conquered vulnerability, and you will have helped make kazoos as cool as they deserve to be. Kazoos rule.