Make Believe Mailer 61: Virtual Reality
Boo, Get Out Of Here, Lil Miquela!
Booting
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, THE FIRST TAKE YouTube channel became one of the platforms dictating the path J-pop goes. Thanks to a team behind the scene intent on pushing the industry towards streaming realities coupled with a captive audience, artists featured on this sparse program belting their hearts out morphed into a new era’s superstars. Even with the nation’s music industry creeping back to something resembling normalcy, THE FIRST TAKE remains influential.
A Virtual YouTuber stepping up to the very-real microphone, then, stands as a milestone. Last Friday, popular personality and music-centric creator Hoshimachi Suisei went on THE FIRST TAKE to sing a stripped-down version of her song “Stellar Stellar,” above. The announcement a few days ahead of its premier caused excitement from fans of Suisei and VTubing in general.
About four days after coming out, her performance has hit six million views, already closing in on passing Harry Styles’ set on the THE FIRST TAKE, and inspiring some spirited reactions on YouTube.
“Am I the only one who believes this is some kind of fever dream? I can’t believe this is real.”
VTubing is an industry expected to grow larger and more profitable in the decade ahead, and has already produced creators and influencers able to stand neck and pixelated-neck with actual humans. The next step, though, is breaking further into the music industry. This has been part of the plan since Kizuna AI brought the form to the mainstream in 2016, and plenty of musical VTubers and even VTuber-focused labels have emerged in recent years. Now a bigger push is underway. Suisei joins Universal-back English character Mori Calliope, who also features on a popular Zutomayo song. There’s enough VTuber music now where Natalie can report on the VTuber Music Awards.
This isn’t slowing down, and 2023 seems set to be a pivotal year for this merger of music with avatar-covered creators. That, however, might set off alarm bells.
Disruption
There’s been a creeping tension…sometimes turning to dread…in English-language music writing about the rise of “virtual artists.” The emergence of “AI rapper” FN Meka signed to a major deal in the back half of 2022 inspired a lot of “what does it all mean” wondering, even as said rapper was let go just as quickly. That coincided with Bored Apes signing with record companies (continuing to release forgettable music in the process) and Reuters exposing the world to Polar, “a metaverse-born singer,” which sparked an entire return to “virtual influencer” Lil Miquela chit-chat.
While one side latched on to all of these developments with an overeager zeal that could only come from someone praying for a huge return on investment, another side expressed massive skepticism of everything about these developments. That’s a result of general distrust of everything in this space — Web 3.0, crypto, NFTs, “Meta announces legs,” AI. Listen to the first half of this edition of The New York Time’s Popcast from last summer confronting these fake artists — there’s an active disgust about everything orbiting any of these names.
Which is deserved — like a lot of tech propositions, everything sounds fake with ridiculous guarantees, and seems inflated. Plus…none of the art emerging from any of these new developments are good, let alone emotionally affecting. When an AI picture stirs actual feelings inside instead of coming off like a lazy meme brainstorm, I’ll worry for the future of art in this brave new world.
Error
Whenever Western media has their half-yearly freakout about virtual artists, Hatsune Miku gets dragged into it. Understandably so, at least on a surface level — the anime-style Miku performs live as a hologram, sings in a wobbly digi-delivery and yeah, isn’t real. She’s always been a source of spectacle, inspiring gee-golly news reports from local Southern California news during some of her first North American dates. But it is, in this context, pretty out there.
Yet even today, people get Hatsune Miku and the software she represents, Vocaloid, all wrong. Just listen to the Popcast again…while never guffawed at in the same way as FN Meka, Miku is grouped in with this current moment. FN Meka is, if we are charitable to what the creator said, a work of AI (or, more likely, a team effort to create a fake AI star). That’s true of all these contemporary Web 3.0 pop efforts — they want to take the unreal and turn them into a musical and/or social hit. It’s all synthetic.
Miku is an instrument. Specifically, Vocaloid is singing-synthesizer software allowing anyone to generate vocals, with a wide variety of characters, tones and accents available to the masses with some money to spend. She’s a tool one can use to get to the heart of their own creative expression, and while the hologram concerts and Family Mart commercials are certainly out of left field, that’s not what made her a phenomenon and, arguably, the most important musical figure of the 21st century in Japan. It’s that she allowed a generation of internet-familiar creatives to create a whole new world, with her and other characters as the foundation.1
The real influence of Miku and Vocaloid became clear in the late 2010s totally IRL. A new generation of artists raised on Vocaloid became stars themselves — Kenshi Yonezu, YOASOBI, Zutomayo, Eve and Ado among others who became interested in music via software, janky message boards and Nico Nico Douga flurries. Nothing ridiculous and weird about any of it unless you consider Fortnite concerts strange…just creators born in one community becoming the voice of a new generation. Though, in one of the sweeter moments of 2022, some were happy to duet with the aqua-haired character that sparked their creativity in the first place, in a totally non-dystopian way.
Singularity
Virtual YouTubers certainly owe an aesthetic and spiritual debt to Miku, but creatively they aren’t quite the same. From Kizuna AI’s start, they’ve been closer to flesh-and-blood YouTubers, which means they are a 21st century update on the Japanese entertainment concept of “talent,” referring to people who do a lot of things but aren’t like…known for being great at one. In the ‘90s, they would host variety shows and man radio programs and write articles and release songs. In the late 2010s, they would stream video game and take part in meme challenges and chat with fans and…release songs.
Which is to say, like the Pewdiepies and Jenna Marbles before them, these creators are personality based, albeit behind an anime sheen. Fans can create their own art or cover VTuber tunes or throw as many Superchats as they want their way, but it’s a one way transaction. Miku allowed everyone to be part of the creative flow.
Yet what they have in common — and what next to none of the “digital pop stars” attracting attention abroad can lay claim to — is humanity at their core. Actual people pour themselves into Vocaloid songs and real people create the personalities behind VTubers. Of course economics and the promise of potential riches probably motivate some…but unlike the nakedly shallow branding exercise that is a Miquela, people actually bring themselves to these projects2.
That’s how it has always been, including with the other vital predecessor to the VTuber — the mixed-media pop group, another J-pop staple best highlighted by the Love! Live franchise but carried on by new entities such as Hypnosis Mic, Strawberry Prince or even an animated band like the one from Bocchi The Rock! Those properties still require songwriters, vocal talent and more to make it all come together. Besides…they actually do perform as humans in real life.
Suisei’s FIRST TAKE (plus recently released album) signals a big development for VTubers in music, and won’t be the last you hear about this in 2023..especially with multiple giant VTuber-centric fests coming this spring. There’s the chance all of this gets picked up in the same weird loop, the Miku-verse of Madness, that makes so many rightfully uncertain of avatar-centric projects and anything happening in a virtual world. Yet this isn’t that…it’s reality, and achingly human after all.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
Also helped by one of the best creative commons licenses devised by a company ever, read the precursor to this piece here to learn more.
And importantly…these projects can suck too, but in a way that feels like a person trying rather than someone trying to trick you into investing in a pyramid scheme.
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