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So maybe you've already heard all of the hullabaloo or you mabe you even stayed up late enough to catch it live, but in case you didn't, let me tell you something strange: for the first time in the history of late-night TV, David Letterman hosted a hologram as the musical guest on his show last night.
Now, I'm not a total square, I've heard of Hatsune Miku before—there was a big article about 'her' rise to fame in Wired a few years ago. To make a long story short, she’s a hologram, invented by Japanese software company, Crypton Future Media, to show off what their products can do.
And somewhere along the way? The Japanese public accepted her as a real, actual pop star. While she’s been a known entity to a small-ish subculture of Japanophiles here in the U.S. for a while now, last night’s performance on Letterman marked her true American “debut.”
Despite the fact that she’s had a solid “career” for several years now, it still hasn't gotten any easier for me to accept that she's an an actual thing, a cultural phenomenon, and what's more, is being worshiped by people the world over. Her first solo concert ever sold out. She’s partnered with living, breathing DJs and producers in Japan, helping launch their careers; she opened for Lady Gaga this past May.
While I'm normally not the kind of person to dump on other peoples' musical tastes, I'm going to go ahead and draw the line at this one. Hatsune Miku’s mere existence just creeps me right the fuck out.
It's not that she deviates from the norm for pop music in the U.S. (remember Gorillaz?). It's that she very clearly sucks—honest to God, if you're gonna craft a fake pop star from scratch, you have the power to make her do more than just listlessly sway from side to side for three minutes. I can understand supporting her as an inventive advertising gimmick, but she has over 2 million Facebook likes and counting. I know people say music is 'soooo manufactured' these days,’ but is it really so bad that we’re entertaining the notion of holograms now?
There’s also something about Hatsune’s overall ineptitude (dare we say suckiness) as a performer that’s, well, pretty telling about what we expect from our female performers. She basically sounds like a slide whistle overlaid with a Casio keyboard loop.
Maybe I’m reaching here, but is not pretty offensive that when they pulled this pop star out of thin air, they of course clad her with an impossibly short skirt and a disinterested stare, because that's what successful singers wear, apparently. Now, I have no problem with short skirts—I fully support Hatsune Miku's right to celebrate her body, digital or otherwise—but she of course, didn't make this choice to clad herself so scantly. A bunch of other people did. Compound this lack of agency with the obvious cultural celebration of valueing sex appeal over talent and you've got a got misogynistic morass wrapped in the trappings of the "future."
But what scares/fascinates me the most is that, in the context of the United States and probably in several other places, Hatsune Miku exists as an un-ironic parody of everything people find wrong with popular music today. Granted, she’s a little more vigorous in other performances (click if you dare), but the most you’ll ever get out of her are some sultry hip shakes and a few jazz hands if she’s feelin’ a little crazy.
When she does deign to crack a smile, it looks like the kind you eke out when you run into a high school nemesis at the grocery store. And if you search hard enough, you’ll find a secret stash of “music videos” that look like the up-skirt shots that Benson and Stabler confiscate on the reg (Not linking you to that; sorry—got a browser history to maintain here).
Again, there are myriad cultural differences to dissect here (we can talk about the somewhat-socially-accepted Japanese obsessions with schoolgirls and panties some other day), but in the U.S., Miku’s bare-minimum level of talent aligned with blatant sex appeal feels like the oh-so-logical result of the, “Just stand there and look pretty!” advice that has been handed down to women of all vocations for decades.
She—in case I haven’t made my point clear enough—is a shitty performer, but is inexplicably famous. We could be here all day naming celebrities we mock for being famous for no discernable reason (Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, the list goes on and on). But instead of looking at it and examining just what it is people truly value in musicians, her fans have elevated her to goddess-like status. Why do we lambaste Lana Del Rey for her monotonous voice and outwardly bored stage presence, but laud a cartoon for doing exactly the same thing?
So will Americans accept her? We readily embraced hologram Tupac and hologram Michael Jackson pretty easily, but you also don’t see them going on world tours. Mercifully, outside of her small-but-mighty fan base here in America, Miku hasn’t taken off just yet. Maybe I've got too much faith in the American psyche and threshold for kitsch, but I really can’t see her being much more than a novelty over here.
The good news is that Dave seemed just as baffled as I am. “...There she is,” he lilts awkwardly in front of her, just before she disappears in a puff of pixels. There she is indeed.
