pygmalion's proteges (a commentary on false idols)

Jul 13, 2009 04:12

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Have thirteen minutes to kill? Watch this fascinating Asahi Shimbun-created documentary on Hatsune Miku. Far more than a mere Nico Nico viral, now--and this video provides a rare opportunity to meet the people behind the meme.

The Japanese media is known for being aggressively technocratic, and I believe their bias is evident here. While I'm impressed by their enthusiasm, and am obviously a big Miku fan myself, given the number of her videos I post here, I'm not as optimistic about Miku's Western prospects as her creators are. It's not that the West is behind in the technology aspect--some form of this tech makes it to SIGGRAPH's Emerging Technologies booth every year, and papers presented at the conference no doubt were instrumental to the development of the software itself. It's that we have a cultural concept of musical integrity that is utterly foreign to the Japanese. The power, emotion, and energy that Japan admires in American rock, jazz, and blues, and strives to emulate in its own music, comes from a deep-rooted Western tradition of music as the extension of the self. Music, to us Americans (and to the British and Canadians), is a deeply individual and personal thing--note the truisms about having to suffer to play the blues, or that for punk rock what you lack in musicianship you must compensate for in enthusiasm. Our rock stars aren't just musicians, they're folk heroes. We write contemporary ballads about the tragic suicide of Kurt Cobain, or the doomed career and star-crossed love of Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy, or the world-changing idealism of John Lennon. The memorials to Michael Jackson are scrawled black with magic-markered stories from people he never knew.

It's a strange perception, considering how America is perceived abroad as the origin of the world's most artificial pop music, and how we're known internationally for performance puppets like N'Sync and Britney Spears and Hannah Montana, none of who could sing without Auto-Tune and an army of producers. But the disdain we bear for those artists here in America reveals a belief peculiar to us and the countries we've touched with our musical ideology: that for music to truly be music, it must have soul. Ironic that the country that brought the world the vocoder and the electric guitar--hell, the country that came up with the fucking Archies--perceives the paragon of musicianship to be a single voice in front of a microphone, with nothing between her and the crowd but an instrument, an amp, and a lifetime of hard memories. Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Arethra Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, any minimalist indie rock group like the Moldy Peaches...even the Eminem or Snoop discographies have that autobiographical spirit. These people are more than musicians to us. We speak of them as if we went to school with them, or had been in love with them, or had them as best man at our weddings. We are well versed in the smallest details of their lives, and tell stories about how their songs changed ours. To spend an afternoon with a good Johnny Cash record is like sharing a bottle of fine Kentucky bourbon with a friend.

Hatsune Miku is the absolute inverse of that. She's a sampled voice, a vocal drum machine, pitch-corrected to hit all the right notes, backed by electronic instruments, passed back and forth between an anonymous collective of mixers and producers, her choreography carefully selected from a preprogrammed repertoire of tried-and-true Japanese pop idol dance moves or rigged and animated anew by several different people with vastly different creative directions. She's everything you need for a pop song except the artist. There's no soul, no individual spirit, because that's the point.

The J-pop idol has traditionally never been more than a face for rent--the choreography, lyrics, music, accompaniment, and message are not hers. Even her personal history, romantic relationships, and off-stage persona are created by the record company, in order to maximize publicity. Her music is the collaborative effort of a collectivist hivemind, and she is merely the canvas on which it is painted; her only role is to obey. A lone Japanese producer will make music for dozens of artists; it is no secret that this is why so many J-pop singers sound exactly the same. Miku is the penultimate achievement of this process--the ultimate product of a record industry that values the glory of the many over the pride of the one. With Miku, there is no need to worry about the idol's personal scandals, or errors in her obsessively rehearsed dance steps, or the natural limitations of her singing voice, or an irrepressible desire to express some aspect of her true self. All that inconvenient humanity--poof! Now there is nothing to get in the way of everyone else working hard to make music. Ganbatte!

This, to be fair, is not dissimilar to how pop music is made in America--but the difference is there is no need to hide it from the Japanese. Contemporary Japanese music is relatively divorced from the ideological and political foundations of the American genres from which it was derived. Even Britney Spears has to clothe her music in the vestiges of female empowerment to be accepted in America, and Disney has to market the Jonas Brothers as some kind of countercultural, teen-friendly, Christian conservative reaction to the moral excesses of adult rock 'n' roll. Heartsdales? Gackt? Ayumi Hamazaki? Hip-hop, to the Japanese, is just about wearing your hat backwards, talking quickly, and spinning your legs in a circle. R&B is about long, high notes and melodramatic, insincere outbursts of emotion (this is why Japanese R&B sucks). Country is about twanging a guitar and singing through your nose in a Kansai accent. J-pop is an excuse to hear your favorite producer work his aural pyrotechnics over the artist's carefully reengineered vocals. None of this talk of social justice, personal redemption, or overcoming adversity. Ask a Japanese record industry executive how he felt about John Lennon's "Imagine," and he might answer, "I really liked the piano line."

Can you imagine how Miku would be received in the country that destroyed Milli Vanilli audiotapes in huge burning piles when it came to light that their records were lip-synced? Where we can't talk about Singin' In The Rain without pointing out the hypocrisy of having an uncredited black jazz singer deliver its message through the lips of a white actress? Where the career of Ashlee Simpson, already built on a carefully architected web of artificial premises, was instantly torpedoed when a technical error revealed she was lip-syncing instead of singing on Saturday Night Live? We are not ready for music with heart, but no soul. It's no surprise that techno in America, while popular in the nightclub scene, has never enjoyed the level of success it has in Europe.

The Japanese music industry is flummoxed by this. They can't understand why every year they send some JRock boyband or R&B crooner to Vegas, and instead of gathering screaming crowds of fangirls they get a couple of yawning anime fans who go "that's nice" and pass up the album rack on the way out. The musicians followed the formulas perfectly! All the dance steps, all the chord progressions, even the leather jackets and bandannas--they're exactly like ours! To the letter! The emotions are powerful and true! Why aren't we buying their music? To wit, why is it that the Japanese music we are buying (in significant numbers--be quiet, Morning Musume fans) is all either anime related, or from crazy-ass bands like X Japan who made a name for themselves by being as deviant and industry-incorrect as possible, or from more obscure, subtly produced artists like Singer Songer, the Pillows, and Kung-Fu Generation, who actually get into their music?

No...as plucky and novel as she is, Miku is not going to chart in America without a soul.

That said...it would not be beyond the abilities of the Japanese internet collective to write her one.

Give her a compelling story, niconico and 2ch--not just a background, but a story--and I guarantee you, America will not care that she is not real. The part of her that would resonate with us would be real enough. We need a person behind those wicked techno beats. Otherwise, she's just ScreamTracker 3 with blue pigtails. (Why do you think we've been buying so much anime music? Why do you think we keep making all these anime music videos? Do you have any idea how much we fucking love this song?)

This I challenge you, Crypton Corp., and the rest of the Japanese internet--or I would, if there was the faintest chance that any native Japanese speaker would bother to read this far and still take me seriously--make us a Miku America can love.

music, internet, japan

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