Make Believe Mailer 10: Virtual Reality

Do I explain what KWANGYA is? Well, you have to open to find out...

A good rule of thumb — anything English-language media deems “wacky” or “weird” about Japan, will either eventually become commonplace within the decade or was a sub-sub-sub-niche activity (see: Bagelheads). We’re reaching a particularly juicy ten-year mark, where once gawk-worthy stories on AKB48’s business model or Japanese people not having sex now…can be applied to a huge chunk of the world.

Add virtual idols to that list, as 2020 has seen an idea once regularly labelled "bizarre” by local news broadcasts become far more normalized, or at lest nudged out of the “wacko Japan” box it was long stuck in. Holographic representations of deceased performers — a concept first unveiled by X Japan digitally reincarnating guitarist Hide — have been “a thing” for most of the 2010s, albeit as novelty through the Tupac and Michael Jackson apparations, though this year they were set to turn even more omnipresent…until COVID-19 shut down the live music industry. Thankfully, Kanye West delivered an especially unsettling birthday gift to remind the world of this technology.

Far more interesting, though, have been “digital artists.” In the west, this has largely played out through “avatars” of existing acts, as detailed in this Ringer piece from September. Whether they are GIF-like TikTok bait or CGI creations geared for video games, they mostly exist as branding exercises, a more interactive, less filling version of the Travis Scott McDonald’s meal (SPRITE WITH ICE. STRAIGT UP!) reacting to an ever-digitizing world…and one accelerated by the pandemic. Hatsune Miku sold Famichiki, too. (I’m not even touching “digital influencers,” though simply looking at this homepage got my head spinning).

Save for whatever Yameii Online is, the unit pushing the whole “digital idol” concept to even more mainstream attention has been K-pop outfit aespa. S.M. Entertainment’s first new girl group since Red Velvet released debut single “Black Mamba” this week, but the hook came much earlier than that. Founder Lee Soo-man — who has never encountered a buzzword unworthy of appearing in any of his presentations — explained how each member also has a virtual counterpart, which exists in the “virtual world,” and how they have “AI brains.” To watch the linked video is to become deeply confused about what aespa is beyond “a pop group,” though based on their videos so far it seems like…The Sims?

So yeah, it’s probably best to think about them as the halfway point between K/DA — a set of video game characters turned pop stars, which inspired other attempts at game-meets-pop advertising across the globe — and the avatars mentioned in the Ringer piece, which are digital brand ambassadors / performers who can always be on…line. It also feels more like a throwback to a very different era…the 1990s, when Japan and Korea both had their own ultimately doomed efforts at virtaul artists (obligatory link to my history of it for Pitchfork).

Then we come to Hatsune Miku, a character/concept still among the most misunderstood by English-language media. The turquoise-haired avatar for Vocaloid software — a program synthesizing the human voice — has been referenced a lot in regards to aespa and the general “avatar” wave. It’s largely harmless “look at that, CGI” links, which…it’s true, sure! Yet it also isn’t really, and you can find a lot of tweets and comments trying to compare the two, or otherwise fine podcasts about the avatar industry completely airballing on what Hatsune Miku.

Yet there’s one similarity between aespa and Miku…which also underlines just how different they actually are.

Far more jarring than any Second Life skins that went through SM training school are the lyrics to “Black Mamba,” which are about…the concept of aespa. “Aespa,” “synk,” “KWANGYA” — I assume this is all part of S.M.’s “Culture Universe,” an effort to replicate the Marvel Cinematic Universe by flooding it with jargon that will one day force fans to buy the K-pop version of The Essential Guide To Droids.

But that’s similar to what the lyrics to the biggest Vocaloid songs — like “Tell Your World,” above — are. Miku is an avatar too, albeit for software that functions like an instrument. If you buy it, you suddenly have access to a singing-synthesizer allowing you to generate vocals and create music all your own. Artists who have been part of the Vocaloid community since 2007 celebrate this by…creating art about the joy of creating art. Like aeaspa, most Miku songs revolve around Miku. Unlike aespa, those songs aren’t coming from a corporation trying to turn BoA into Doctor Strange.

I’ve used up nearly all of my Marvel knowledge….uhhhhh, who is the Ant Man of this world, thanks in advance…so I’ll also admit that, despite being a silly bit of branding that has produced one [3] of a song so far, I’m still intrigued to see if whatever Soo-man is talking about delivers (besides…give me S.M.’s batshit bluster regarding “innovation” over Corden-crush K-pop anyday). Like the Western “avatars” they are partially inspired by, there’s room for something creative to spring up from it (though there’s plenty of ways to make it goofy as hell, too).

Yet as someone who has lived through wave after wave of “look at this! Hologram singers…in Japan!” content, I’m mostly struck by how different the country is when compared to either movement playing with digital acts. All the more surprising because, based on the 2020 charts, Hatsune Miku is the most influential act on domestic music going. I’ve touched on this before, but a whole generation of artists who came up fiddling around with Vocaloid are now creating the biggest hits of the year, largely on their own terms (and still managing to appear in video games). What gets lost about Miku and Vocaloid is that it isn’t an effort to erase humanity from music…but rather, as a tool to empower anyone to create. Nothing weird there.

Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies