Make Believe Mailer 06: HoloProject
It always comes back to city pop
Twitter trending topics can be misleading — people sometimes place too much societal importance on the words showing up on the right-hand side of the platform, forgetting that 80 percent of the time it is either something related to a variety show or baseball. A better way to look at the feature is as a discovery tool. It shows what’s emerging out of the digital bog, even if it has little to no impact on IRL.
On a Sunday a couple of weeks back, the phrase “RIDE ON TIME” started trending in Japan. That’s the day the artist behind the city pop staple boasting that name, Tatsuro Yamashita, holds his weekly radio show, so maybe he talked a bit about composing it or even just gave it a spin. Or hey, perhaps ‘90s outfit MAX did their “Ride On Time” as part of some evening programming, let’s be fair.
I clicked, and was greeted with something completely unexpected — a cartoon woman dressed as a shark (is a shark??) covering “Ride On Time”as part of a debut livestream on YouTube.
The intersection of virtual YouTubers and pop music has been a niche interest for me over the last few years. The newest development — or better stated, a corner catching my attention more — has been Hololive, the leading virtual YouTuber agency in the country. Founded in 2016, the virtual influencers this company represents have gone on to establish followings on YouTube rivaling many human YouTubers. Despite being CG, they mostly engage in the same behavior as other content creators — they play video games and talk about it (and themselves).
In recent years, Hololive has followed a path similar to AKB48, by introducing virtual YouTubers geared at audiences in different countries. They’ve expanded to China and Indonesia, while in the last couple of weeks they introduced a series of English-language characters too.
Somewhat bizarre description of one new character, via Hololive website
Its arrival in the English-speaking world has inspired plenty of online “discourse,” the sort surrounding all pop culture offerings in 2020 regardless of where they’re from. Despite largely being a series built around people making jokes while fumbling through Fall Guys, Hololive has managed to attract right-leaning folks obsessed with the sanctity of anime while drawing the ire of those who can’t let a piece of entertainment go by without turning it into a pressing social ill in need of addressing. Imagine the online talk around Cuties, but with anime mixed in, so everything becomes even more heated. It stinks!
Yet I’m far more interested in how Hololive — and other virtual YouTubers in 2020 — approach music and the music industry. The promise of Japanese virtual pop stars has been a point of interest for people both domestically and globally since the 1990s, with the arrival of Hatsune Miku in the late 2000s seemingly filling that void for a wacky holographic pop superstar. When W magazine ran a feature on “global pop” in modern times, they ended with Miku. “As omnipresence and adaptability are part of Miku’s DNA, she is, perhaps, one of the better-equipped acts to navigate the fluctuating perimeters of pop during today’s turbulent, uncertain waters,” Alex Hawgood writes.
The irony, though, is that virtual performers are among the most traditionally music-industry types going. That fluctuation Hawgood praises exists — but it’s through people like Kenshi Yonezu, Mafumafu and Eve, alongside projects such as YOASOBI and Zutomayo. All of those acts came from the world of Vocaloid, built around the singing synthesizer software Miku served as avatar for, and which promoted an artistic freedom that is blooming today.
Yet the non-human people that get so much more attention have far more in common with franchises like Love Live! and Psychosis Mic, largely animated undertakings that have stood as some of the largest pop creations of the past decade, combined with the world of Twitch. Hololive underlines this perfectly — it’s a talent agency, no different than Johnny’s & Associates or UUUM, but representing digital cartoons (though, important to remember, each virtual YouTuber has people operating it...and how they get treated by the agency is a whole different issue).
Virtual YouTubers ultimately resemble traditional “talent” in Japan, referring to a type of entertainer that typically dabbles in a lot of different media platforms. It’s a tag you could apply to internet creators at large — the person holding livestreams, uploading reaction videos and hosting a podcast are just a social media update on the person putting on concerts, appearing on a variety show and hosting a radio program. Music is another skill to use, something to keep viewers entertained with between chat sessions and online challenges. This supermix of Hololive songs largely features covers, and can feel meme-y at times. Which...all good! It’s a perfectly fine way to engage with fans, and if you want to try your hand at a Sheena Ringo tune, give it a go. Still better than RiceGum. Just remember virtual YouTubers are, largely, just people trying to build a career on social media. Japan hasn’t produced something wildly different — it’s the past mixed with the global present.
Sounds like Kitty
(Let’s take a quick detour to revisit shark girl’s “Ride On Time” cover. I can’t stress how, for the most part, Hololive is just something I’m aware of, and I’m not someone who regularly watches any of these characters as livestreams of people chatting are rarely my thing. So...maybe there’s a reason why Gawr Gura covered Tatsuro Yamashita beyond “vaguely ocean themed,” but I can’t find it. This really underlines how much city pop has become a thing online, which maybe shouldn’t be a surprise but still feels like a blindside when “city pop shark” croons the classics.)
Like all talent agencies, though, some entertainers are pushed more towards music than others, and while most virtual YouTubers dabble in a lot, a few specialize in music. The original breakthrough personality Kizuna AI has largely leaned into this, putting out an (actually pretty good) EP earlier this year and recently teamed up with another virtual YouTuber, KAF, who actually might be the purest example of a digital popstar going as singing is her main pursuit. Duo HIMEHINA...remade “Mr. Saxobeat?” Hololive owner Cover Corp. launched INNK MUSIC for proper releases aspiring to be more than stream skits, with heavy emphasis on the character AZKi, who has put out albums of material. While virtual YouTubers have explored this area before, a handful appear to be exploring it more (though maybe they should stick to the Superchat).
Perhaps that will become a new frontier for Japanese pop (or...beyond?). Yet it won’t be the cyberpunk future people like author William Gibson imagined when he wrote Idoru, revolving around a virtual idol. That character was a sort of infinite star, with everybody having their own version of her to stan for. That’s closer to Hatsune Miku, but even that character was more of a creative tool than dystopian plot point. Virtual YouTubers, hoever, act like established celebs, and their music careers are shaped by talent agenices and feature teams of people behind the scenes creating the songs (ranging from netlabel names, heavyweights such as Yasutaka Nakata and…Enon Kawatani, on that Kizuna AI/KAF collab). It’s a familiar model, where a singular persona that fans can follow and develop a connection with…rather than control in someway…emerges. It’s not the future, but a refinement of what has always worked. In the ‘70s, it was Tatsuro Yamashita singing city pop to fans, and today it’s a shark woman on YouTube.