Hatsune Miku is the world’s most famous virtual pop star. And now she’s even more famous, having made her U.S. television debut this Wednesday on “Late Night With David Letterman.” She didn’t come out of nowhere: this summer, the Japanese sensation toured as an opener for Lady Gaga, materializing regularly on stages around the country in a confounding flash.
Hatsune Miku performing live in 2011.
All Miku concert footage makes for strange watching. Legions of fans pump light sticks at every swish of those blue ponytails, as if a virtual star needs the encouragement. The sight is arguably even odder live, as an in-person Miku doesn’t exactly seem worth the fuss. Media outlets routinely mistake her for a hologram, but in fact, she’s less sophisticated than that. She’s a 2D image, rendered onto the stage using mirrors (the technology, called Pepper’s Ghost, is so far from cutting edge, it’s been used for decades at the Haunted Mansion in Disney World). Critics who trek halfway across the world to see Miku rock out invariably leave underwhelmed. She’s more magnificent — and just plain larger — on YouTube than in person, having been enhanced by video editors.
But the deception shouldn’t matter. “People focus on the live show like it’s so bizarre,” says Ian Condry, a professor of Japanese studies at MIT. He blames this preoccupation on a lack of context, coupled with a scenario that requires some explaining — a crowd “cheering at a cartoon on stage.” Without context, the sight, he admits, “doesn’t make sense.”
In fact, fans come mostly for the songs. “They know Miku doesn’t exist,” Condry says. “But they know people on the other side do.”
Hatsune Miku is actually just a mascot for a product: a voice synthesizing software, through which users can write songs. In 2007, a company called Crypton Future Media released the software online, freely available, and built using Yamaha’s Vocaloid technology as well as a database of samples recorded by a voice actress. As with most of Japan’s entities (including the country’s police agencies), this offering came with a cartoon mascot. She was 16, liked pop music, and wore her hair in long pigtails. She was Hatsune Miku, a name that translates to “first sound of the future.”
Crypton’s president Hiroyuki Ito realized that Miku was more powerful the less there was to know about her. The company isn’t interested in creating a franchise — no spinoff anime shows, or prequels that tell her story. In an interview with HuffPost, Ito spoke through a translator about his intention to keep Miku “an empty canvas, a plain piece of paper, because only then, people will project their own feelings and use her as an interface.”
This is what makes the model revolutionary. Every song Miku sings in concert is written by a user of the software. The music videos available on YouTube are also the work of fans. Crypton has developed a licensing agreement that allows MikuP, or Miku producers, to use her likeness without paying royalties. If a creator’s work becomes wildly profitable, however, the company enters into a more traditional licensing agreement.
Condry compares Miku to a sample in a hip-hop track. “If you’re some underground person, you can sample without paying anything. Even if you’re indie level, you can probably get away with it. Girltalk can release albums, even though he can’t put them on iTunes. But if you’re Kanye, you’re going to pay top dollar.”
Writing for Vocaloid software is a bit like pulling the strings of a puppet. Miku does what a composer wants, albeit a little jerkily. The upshot is a sense of freedom: a MikuP can theoretically try anything and see what sticks. One composer, who goes by the name Kz, dedicated himself to writing lyrics about the community of creators that sprung up around Miku, rather than Miku herself. One of his songs, “Tell Your World,” became such a popular anthem for Mikuheads, Google eventually licensed it for a Chrome ad in Japan.
Another Kz song caught the attention of Pharrell, who remixed it for the soundtrack of the recent Takashi Murakami movie, “Jellyfish Eyes.” The attending music video, also directed by Murakami, features Miku, her clan of tertiary Vocaloid avatars, and an animated Pharrell dancing on a high-octane version of the Starship Enterprise.
Speaking to HuffPost through a translator, Kz likened his writing process for Miku to osmosis. “She has no kind of will or ideas herself, so you have the direct message going directly through.”
Plenty of Miku songs are as vapid as any pop hit, with references to her long hair, short skirts, and princesslike demeanor (there’s also a vibrant Miku-based pornographic culture, not sanctioned by Crypton). But the genre has deepened as it’s grown, with narrative lyrics that wouldn’t typically make a top 40 list, from stories of cancer patients to a surrealist set of songs about a single day that progresses like a Haruki Murakami novel, complete with a murdered cat.
Other songs use Miku’s lack of personhood to comment on our own devolution into so many “data packets,” as Condry puts it. “They play with this idea of whether she exists, and how much we exist in comparison,” he says.
He sees the Letterman appearance as a rare misstep in a campaign that’s mostly foregone the old routes to cultural takeover, like late night debuts. “The pathway to Miku’s success in Japan went through a grassroots community before it had a chance to break into the mainstream. If people aren’t impressed by what they see on Letterman, they may have to wait a bit until their kids and grandkids explain what it’s all about.”
