I Sing the Body Electric
Teen Japanese-pop sensation Hatsune Miku proves corporeal reality isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for fame
MARGARET
WAPPLER
At this year’s Coachella music festival, slain rapper Tupac Shakur was resurrected for a performance with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Projected as a two-dimensional image, abs still ripped in the pixilated afterlife, Virtual ’Pac alternately dazzled and freaked out the crowd 15 years after his shooting. Forget keeping it real; thug life just got surreal.
Kind of creepy but not exactly cutting-edge: Hologram Tupac was actually a 19th-century magic trick called Pepper’s Ghost, an image projected onto glass tilted 45 degrees. Pepper’s Gangsta, if you will, was flashed in high definition on Mylar, but it’s basically the same wizardry used by local community theaters for spectral castmembers. Which prompts the question: Who’s more street—Jacob Marley’s ghost or Tupac Shakur?
’Pac might be the baddest projection out there, but he’s neither the first nor the most audaciously futuristic. The latter distinction belongs to Japan’s virtual pop star Hatsune Miku, a digital-android pixie in aquamarine pigtails and knee-high boots. She performs via basically the same technology as Tupac, with flesh-and-blood musicians as her backup band.
Since 2009, the Japanese-pop divatar has performed shows in her native land, as well as a Los Angeles debut at the Nokia Theater during the 2011 Anime Expo. In March, she sold 10,000 tickets for $76 a pop in Tokyo. Her most viewed clip on YouTube, in which she sings her megahit “World Is Mine,” has gotten more than 15 million hits.
Indeed, avatars, cartoons and holograms are nothing new to pop: to wit, the Gorillaz (joined at the 2006 Grammys by a holographic Madonna), the Archies (whose “Sugar, Sugar” went to number one in the late ’60s). And let’s not forget those perennial Christmas favorites Alvin and the Chipmunks. But to consider Miku just another cartoon act would be selling her—and her fanbase—woefully short.
Created by Crypton Future Media, Miku is the most popular avatar created to sell Vocaloid 2, the singing synthesizer application originally developed by Yamaha. In Japan, it is common to create a character associated with software, and at first glance, Miku may seem like little more than an animated mascot, not unlike the Pillsbury Doughboy or the Snuggle fabric softener bear. But Miku inspires an unparalleled creativity.
Instead of passively worshipping her, fans have mobilized into an interactive artistic community. Using Vocaloid 2, they write melodies and lyrics, sharing their songs on YouTube or the Japanese equivalent, niconico (“smilesmile”). Since Miku’s “birth” in August 2007, amateurs have used her likeness in hundreds of thousands of songs, illustrations, videos, games, animations—and one rather creepy, dead-looking Miku robot. She’s a cosplay (costume role play) favorite at anime conventions and elsewhere.
In addition to having a video-game series—Project DIVA, which has sold more than a million units in Japan—Miku has appeared in commercials for Toyota Corolla, which ran in Asian outlets in the States, and Google Chrome, in her home country. The latter spot has been played on YouTube nearly a million more times than Justin Bieber’s U.S. Chrome ad, a point Miku fans gleefully point out to Beliebers. In fact, the two factions stage virtual throwdowns on the Internet.
Yet it’s not all squeaky clean: You wouldn’t want to meet all Miku lovers in a dark digital alley. In February 2011, Karley Sciortino described the singer’s attire as “slutty” in the English music mag Clash. “There were actually pipe-bomb threats to Clash’s London office,” she wrote on her blog following the story’s publication.
Extreme examples aside, Miku fans mostly just want recognition for their beloved bundle of electrons. A recent poll on the website Top Tens asked who should sing at the London Olympics Opening Ceremony. Miku was topping the list, then she was mysteriously removed from the running. Some acolytes speculated she’d been sabotaged by competitive Korean-pop fans or those darn Bieberites.
But it turned out to be simpler than that: The Top Tens administrators, based in the U.S., didn’t fully understand that the pixilated princess was a legitimate performer. After receiving angry missives from Miku fans, including Palm Desert resident John Harbort, the main blogger at mikufan.com, Top Tens reinstated Miku, and she won the vote.
“Miku has evolved because of all of us, her fans,” Harbort says. “We all feel we have contributed to getting her here.” He recently wrote a widely shared post titled “Stop Posting ‘Save Miku’ Topics and Videos,” in response to fans fretting that the Top Tens incident, as well as her videos getting temporarily yanked from YouTube, was a harbinger of Miku’s virtual death.
After her sold-out shows in March, Reuters reported she might retire from live performance, but after a flurry of questioning, Crypton clarified that the singer was simply taking a break (cyber-exhaustion, perhaps?). Fans have always been paranoid Miku would vanish as easily as she was born, a theme touched upon in “The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku,” a popular song by the composer cosMo.
Some biographical facts about Miku: Her name translates to “first sound of the future.” She’s five-two and 93 pounds. She has siblings, in a sense: Vocaloid 2 characters Kagamine Rin and Len, who often join her in concert. Last year, she even merged with Hello Kitty to make Miku-Kitty, which nearly destroyed the world with cuteness. Her airy voice is based off samples from Japanese actress Saki Fujita. In April 2010, Crypton added some new shades to her singing voice: “soft,” “dark,” “solid,” “vivid,” “sweet” and “light” (but alas, no “umami”).
So, in the age of highly digitized robopop, is Miku the next logical step? How long have we been hurtling toward an entirely synthetic pop persona? As science-fiction writer William Gibson puts it, “Hatsune Miku’s Wikipedia entry is like some impossibly cool lost artifact of mid-’80s science fiction.”
Gibson, who based his 1996 novel, Idoru, around a virtual media star, sees her as another stage in the evolution of fame. “I think Miku is more about the fundamentally virtual nature of all celebrity, the way in which celebrity has always existed apart from the individual possessing it. One’s celebrity actually lives in others. It’s a profoundly mysterious thing.”
Michael Bourdaghs, associate professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of Chicago and author of Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop, grounds Miku more historically, describing her as a “natural development out of the pop-idol culture that’s been a force in Japanese popular music since at least the 1970s.”
It’s true that Miku is in keeping with Japan’s history of flocking to young, attractive female singers, but this one is baggage free. She has no tumultuous personal life. She has no personal life at all, a fact that comforts Scott Fairbairn, who runs the fansite mikustar.com, based in Ontario, Canada. Looking for distraction during a divorce, he discovered Miku last year and was hooked.
“She doesn’t have an attitude,” he says. “She never asks, only gives, and we know that when the curtain closes, she’s not off at some nightclub snorting cocaine or being arrested for DUI.”
That said, Miku’s creators are smart enough to give her some earthling vulnerabilities. One of Fairbairn’s favorite moments is when Miku was overcome with emotion while performing “When the First Love Ends” at a Tokyo concert last year. Bowing her head and turning away from her adoring audience, she needed several seconds to compose herself. The crowd went nuts.
If only on a musical level, Miku is a glowing gigabyte of perfection. Keyboard player Abe Jun, one of the live musicians who has joined her for a few concerts, including her L.A. outing, attests she “does not make any mistakes during a live performance.” Okay, but is it creepy backing up such robotic excellence? “As you keep playing for Miku,” he says via translated email, “you start to think you are a band member for a human artist…the feeling is very unique.”
Fans are deepening Miku’s image every day with new songs and illustrations—under Crypton’s encouraging but watchful eye. In a translated email, Crypton CEO Hiroyuki Itoh says the company has sold more than 70,000 copies of Miku software in Japan. But with fame can come problems, and Crypton has battled copyright infringements and a media that initially depicted Miku “inaccurately and in an awful way.” Still, he contends the adversity has an upside: “We have overcome many problems, and that is why there is so much affection toward Hatsune Miku. She is the symbol for the freedom of creation.”
In an effort to foster that fluid energy, Crypton has designed an environment to encourage Miku’s amateur songwriters while protecting and benefiting its brand. Piapro is the official Crypton community for Miku lovers to upload their creations. Users have to agree with the company’s licensing system, which stipulates that all works are for “unofficial, noncommercial use only”—rules similar to those on Flickr.
It’s an innovative take on authorship. University of Chicago’s Bourdaghs notes this friendly corporate-consumer relationship is more common in Japan than in the U.S.: “Japanese pop-culture image brands have always been willing to allow fans, artists and others to play around with their characters. Hollywood studios tend to see this as an infringement on their properties, but I think Japanese firms see it as a way of increasing the value of their brands, which ultimately leads to higher profits.”
Of course, Crypton has found a way to promote the most compelling material, signing some of the creators and releasing the works on its record label, KarenT, named for the daughter of Future Shock author Alvin Toffler. Some musicians, notably the collective Supercell, have launched careers writing for Vocaloids. Producer Kurousa-P, also known as WhiteFlame, has penned many tunes. His song “Senbonzakura” is one of the most requested karaoke songs in Japan, according to joysound.com. He says Miku singing his tunes is like pulling the strings on a high school crush: “If there is a girl you like, you would want her to wear pretty clothes and put on cute makeup and sing the songs you created.”
And Miku can sing just about anything. Though Crypton lists J-pop and dance-pop as her favorite genres, she has lent her sopranoid to everything from frenetic dance music to mournful ballads to dystopic pop-metal. “There are thousands of creators,” Kurousa-P says via translated email, “but all of them have their own unique Mikus.”
Tara Knight, assistant professor of digital media at UC San Diego, is making a documentary about Miku that’s set for release in December on her website, mikumentary.com. She originally set out to chronicle the increased presence of holograms in the culture at large but switched her focus when she learned of the holographic idol. “Miku stood out as an example of something that combines several technologies—projection technologies, musicmaking software and Web 2.0 user-generated content—to create something fundamentally new,” she says.
Knight is also fascinated by Miku’s pluralism: “Many fans I’ve talked to believe Miku doesn’t have one fixed, single self—she’s not just one pop icon like Lady Gaga—but that she can take on the characteristics of the person making her at that moment. Somehow, she is everyone, and thus becomes an icon of the self-expressive qualities of her fans. I think it is her very ephemerality, her lack of a physical existence, that allows for a different relationship between audience and performer, between user and creator.”
For some, Miku provokes suspicion. DJ Venus X recently said in Artforum she was fascinated by Miku but wondered if the Japanese star was “just continuing the legacy of empty female vessels in pop music,” echoing an accusation leveled at Britney Spears circa “Baby One More Time.” In a Huffington Post blog, Nicholas Graham only half jokingly described Miku as “a terrible omen not only for musicians but the continued existence of the world as we know it.”
No matter what fears it may inspire, the Miku phenomenon is growing. It’s hard to predict if she’ll ever cross over to the U.S., but Crypton is working on an English-language version of the software, due for summer release. And she’s set for more shows in 2013. Keyboard player Jun has noticed a change in the crowds at concerts. “At first, there were mainly ‘otaku’ [geek] male fans,” he says, “but gradually the females increased, and now we have a wide range.”
And since Miku lives primarily through her fans, the more of them there are, the brighter her projection shines.
MARGARET WAPPLER is a carbon-based life-form whose writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, the Believer and Black Clock.
IMAGE: Courtesy Crypton Future Media
Categories: Business / Celebrities / Music / Sound Check
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Margaret,
I have to say, this is one of the most impressive articles about Miku so far. Very well done. Thank You for your support!
Posted by: Sean Mocabee | 06/01/2012 at 07:44 PM
This is perhaps the most detail and amazingly accurate article I've read on Miku so far. You have my utmost admiration. Now if only other journalist actually take the time to do their homework...
Posted by: Linh Le | 06/02/2012 at 05:50 PM
Brilliant !
I thought I'd read another undocumented & close minded article about Miku, but this one is awesome.
Most of the article just take it too lightly, here we understand the real extend of the phenomenon.
Posted by: Thibaut Victor Dumont | 06/03/2012 at 02:18 AM
I have to agree with Margaret, that was an excellent read! I've learned so much more about Miku thanks to this article. Thanks and keep it up!
Posted by: Radkennster | 06/03/2012 at 02:31 AM
Very accurate and informative. Nicely done.
Posted by: artvertex | 06/03/2012 at 02:42 AM
Definitely a very, very well-informed article. Just from the sold-out concert in the Nokia Theater last year, it goes to show that Vocaloid has a fairly solid following in the West.
Miku and the other Vocaloids are definitely one path for the idols and divas, being able to be improved in terms of technology and aesthetics. Individuals themselves ultimately reinforce and/or remold Vocaloids into whatever they wanted. This is just not possible with today's idols/divas/pop-sensations.
Posted by: SakuyaFM | 06/03/2012 at 03:07 AM
Ah, it's nice to read something accurate and complete about Miku for a change, that focuses on her creation and doesn't describe her as a sugary-sweet shell of a pop idol.
My only gripe is that her "siblings," the other Vocaloids, are also very important to the fans and probably should have gotten a little explanation. Or at least Vocaloid2, the other singers from Miku's generation: Kagamine Len/Rin, Megurine Luka, Gackpoid, and Megpoid.
But really, great article, and I was finally made clear about the relationship between Crypton and KarenT/Piapro :)
Posted by: Mars | 06/03/2012 at 04:49 AM
I must say, that was quite an impressive article.
And as always, all publicity that goes to Miku-sama, makes me happy.
Good job.
Posted by: Smithius Smith | 06/03/2012 at 05:44 AM
As an avid Miku fan in the US I think it's great that she is getting recognized for how cool this is. Her presence is an enigma, but she somehow still seems to fit into the mold I call a "pop star". When I heard about the use of a holographic Tupac a month or two ago on NPR, I was almost outraged that even though they made a huge deal over it, they failed to even mention Miku, the princess of virtual idols. Needless to say, this article has restored my faith that maybe someday the US will be just as full if cheering fans like me, avidly waiting for her next virtual concert.
Posted by: Selena Grant | 06/03/2012 at 05:57 AM
Excellent Article. It tells perfectly how protective and enthusiatic her followers and fans are. The fact that her growing popularity is due to her fans promoting her music and way of performing is really spot on.
I tended to call it a guilty pleasure, but it's more than that. This is genuine musical satisfaction.
Posted by: Frederik | 06/03/2012 at 06:34 AM
Margaret,
Best Miku article I've ever read!! I usually find that most articles dig into the Idol aspect but miss the main point of Crypton's goal: Developing the sharing community that creates Miku content through collaboration via Piapro.
Very nicely written. Thanks!
Posted by: Mike | 06/03/2012 at 06:37 AM
In the future, they won't have to pay musicians anymore. They'll all be machines. Just stupid.
Posted by: Stephanie s. | 06/03/2012 at 06:56 AM
This has got to be the most in-depth, well-researched, well-informed, and well-written article about Hatsune Miku and the Vocaloid phenomenon that I have ever read. Cheers.
Posted by: Khairuddin Hj. Mohamed | 06/03/2012 at 07:52 AM
I must say that I'm surprised that Miku got an article in LA Times! I'm so amazed that she gained so much popularity over the years and continues to grow. I'm so happy! Thank you for this wonderful article about Hatsune Miku!
Posted by: Alfhonse Buscaino | 06/03/2012 at 08:36 AM
I am impressed - as a fan, I sincerely commend you on a very good job with this article. Until now, I have not read one remotely decent article about Hatsune Miku in any kind of mainstream press. Most simply joke and make fun of her, things like "nonexistant", "not even real", "fake", "look at this wacky Japanese hologram thing!" etc...
Posted by: Zach McElroy | 06/03/2012 at 08:49 AM
Thanks Margaret for this very complete description of Hatsune Miku. I started following her the second she appeared on youtube when an acquaintance from a beat inspired flash game website told me of her coming. Since then I've watched most of the fan made videos and am part of Club Animé Québec, a none profit student association at Laval University. We've started up even a convention on Japanese culture (half anime con, half more traditionnal culture festival) as well and even if we don't have the backing to bring such an embodiment to us, many of our members certainly would love to have her come to Quebec one day soon...I am personally amazed, touched and inspired by her story and hope to offer a little poem/haiku in thanks that she could maybe read out for me when I finally plunge into the Japanese language.
Posted by: Maxime Girard | 06/03/2012 at 09:54 AM
I agree with sean. This is one of the best written articles about Miku I have ever seen.
Posted by: Tony T. | 06/03/2012 at 10:12 AM
This is a very well written, and more importantly, well researched article. I'm glad to see that great journalists still exist. Keep up the good work!
Posted by: James | 06/03/2012 at 01:41 PM
That article was great ! But Crypton has already made a bi-lingual vocaloid the languages being Japanese and English, her name is Megurine Luka, she has a bit more mature sound than Miku, so I prefer her most because Miku's is more high pitched. She was released ('born') on January 30, 2009 . She is 5'4 and weighs 99 lbs, 20 years old, while Miku is 16.
Posted by: Araceli | 06/03/2012 at 02:07 PM
This article was amazing. I love how you mentioned that Miku and Vocaloid is not some cartoon star made by a big company, but the collective creative efforts of all of the fans and producers.
I myself am a Vocaloid user. I don't use Miku very much (I prefer to use Kaito, Big Al, and Oliver) but I love being part of a fandom that essentially never dies and only keeps growing, since its the fans that keep it going.
Unlilke a TV show or a book, Vocaloid can never end. As long as people keep writing songs, drawing fan art, and companies keep making new Vocaloids, it can only keep growing and will never die.
Bravo!
Posted by: Melanie | 06/03/2012 at 03:34 PM
Thanks for this wonderful article! I've seen so many half-assed ones around that had spliced and incorrect information that it's just been ridiculous. I'm definitely sharing this all over!
Posted by: Steph | 06/03/2012 at 04:18 PM
I agree this is one of the best articles I've ever read about her. Great job. <3 Miku
Posted by: Justin Whiteside | 06/04/2012 at 12:26 AM
Good read. It's about time someone did their proper research before writing an article about Miku. It's amazing how much misguided, judgmental, disinformation there is about her in the mainstream media.
Posted by: John Simpson | 06/04/2012 at 09:02 AM
Hello,
I am a longtime Hatsune Miku (and VOCALOID in general) fan, ever since seeing the footage from the 2010 concert...
I can't tell how many news articles I have seen which have misinformed the reader in some way, shape, or form, or indeed clearly have no idea what they are talking about.
I am pleased to say that this is one of the few articles I've seen that accurately depicts the VOCALOID software, characters, and culture surrounding the phenomenon. I very much enjoyed reading this article, and I thank you for publishing the true information.
Also, I appreciated that you cited excerpts from Abe Jun's interview. I had heard about that on the Internet, but I was unable to find anything from it translated into English (I am learning Japanese, but I am still not fluent enough to keep up with the spoken word.) It is really interesting to hear a take on the concerts from the band member himself, especially since his band seems to have so much fun performing with Miku and company.
Again, thank you (39), this quite possibly was the most entertaining article I have read to this day.
Posted by: alcexhim | 06/04/2012 at 09:09 AM