…and meanwhile, this is the closest the Jukebox gets to covering Nyan Cat, so savor it…
[Video][Website]
[5.70]
Patrick St. Michel: Hatsune Miku is a cartoon character cooked up by a software company to sell something called Vocaloid, a singing-synthesizer program responsible for Nyan Cat’s digi-squeak. She’s also one of the biggest pop stars in Japan at the moment, and hard not to see. This past September, I would head to work and see her image outside of a nearby karaoke bar, plastered over everything at my preferred convenience store and then drawn by various junior high school students. “Tell Your World” pushed Miku even further into the spotlight, as it appeared in a Google Chrome ad that racked up more views than similar spots starring Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. Miku sounds strange at first, but in the hands of a producer like Livetune it’s ultimately just another instrument in a catchy electro-pop song. “Tell Your World” is a driving number indebted to fellow technology-overload J-poppers Perfume – the way Miku’s voice skitters late in the song being one clear influence, while Livetune probably listened to “Baby Cruising Love” a bunch to figure out how to best work piano and strings into a single like this. The words are a celebration of the anybody-can-make-music attitude Vocaloid pushes, but one doesn’t even need to understand them, as Livetune’s attention to detail makes this overproduced in the best way. “Tell Your World” is becoming highly influential — human performers now dress and sing like Miku, while some people are using Vocaloid to make operas — but even stripped of all context, it’s a great blast of technology overload.
[8]
W.B. Swygart: I feel weirdly disinfected. Not in the “my infections are gone” way, more in the “I have been spraytanned with Dettol” way.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: Did you know the singer from Adiemus became a Vocaloid? It’s true! And it’s possibly my favorite bit of music trivia ever! Anyway, this is the logical endpoint of all your defenses of autotune, a tune that sounds like “Call Your Girlfriend” after someone failed to escort it though a helium-bullet shmup, if that someone was Jason Robert Brown. I think I might like the existence of this more than the song itself.
[5]
Will Adams: The technology is certainly impressive, but the song could have kept up with the robo-vocals more.
[6]
Edward Okulicz: Super super kawaii and an impressive use of vocaloid as an instrument, but there’s an even better song waiting to get out even for a mediocre singer, at least one who sounds as excited to be there as the rest of the song clearly is.
[5]
Iain Mew: I’ve listened to enough vocal manipulated pop, and this technology is good enough that if you’d told me this had vocals supplied by a real singer rather than the software behind Nyan Cat, I would have believed you. Miku’s performance, if that’s the word, is fine without really adding much, so the problem is the fact that it’s on such an overstuffed and saccharine track.
[4]
Ian Mathers: I don’t care that Hatsune Miku is a synthesizer application rather than a human. I don’t care that the vocals sound autotuned (regardless of source). I care that they’re fucking piercing. I’m not even sure if I liked the melody, because I kept wincing.
[4]
Anthony Easton: I found this acute enough that it was on the wrong side of obnoxious, but the piano movement in the introduction was an interesting way of reading ballad and delivering something much messier.
[4]
Brad Shoup: This suggests a fantastic direction for Perfume after the incandescent “Spice”: make the vocals match the baroque instrumental production, and narrow the overall aperture. Everything’s hard for me to imagine playing for a crowd, but this especially. Without knowing the text, this sounds like diary music: tinkling pianos, a voice addressing itself, clauses blooming clauses cos who’s going to edit you? Miku ascends the digital peak and crosses a big one off her list; the ending killed me.
[9]
Sabina Tang: On my Amnesty Week playlist, this track sits between the clatter and reverb of Korallreven’s rave cascade and the maximalist gleam of Perfume’s electro polyphony, operating a transition on two levels. Stylistically, “Tell Your World” shares the former’s retro-dance sensibility (if not its precise sub-genre); philosophically, it becomes the latter’s state-of-J-pop-2012 pendant by taking the exact opposite tack. In contrast to Nakata’s human girls rapt away to robot candyland Oz, Livetune provides his full-CG idoru with a piano lead-in to a heartwarmingly standard J-pop melody, as if some enterprising producer in 1999 had fed Matsu Takako through Cher’s “Believe” vocal filter. I don’t think this is the wrong approach, incidentally: to a certain crowd, it may be the most evocative. From Sharon Apple to Rei Toei, the concept of the CG idoru is inextricable from ’90s cyberpunk. But when it finally came about, the good-enough IRL solution had nothing to do with AI, or even the issue of generating a realistic-looking CG girl who doesn’t fall into the uncanny valley. Think of Hatsune Miku, then, as playing Key the Metal Idol dressup (now with crowdsourcing!), the way Lana Del Rey cosplays as Nancy Sinatra or Julee Cruise: borrowing a look from its era of primary potency.
[8]