EVERY GENRE PROJECT - September 27 - Yakousei

Genre of the Day - Yakousei

Album of the Day - アンチサイクロン (Anticyclone) by 稲葉曇 [inabakumori] (2019)

Japanese nightlife is world-famous, primarily because photos of its neon lights emerging like nightcrawlers after dusk and filling the streets with prismatic splendor are prime Internet currency more than stories of any of the actual nightlife activities. That being said, Juliana’s Tokyo, with its hyper-techno, is up there with Studio 54 and Paradise Garage as now-closed clubs central to a particular genre that also simply sound like a hell of a time. The obsession with its neon lights could be considered one of the more conspicuous causes of “thing-Japanism,” the phenomenon in which western devotees of Japanese culture become easily excited at a particular phenomenon in Japan simply because it is in Japan. 

The word yakousei translates to nocturnal, though its fans aren’t per se club-going nightcrawlers. Yakousei refers to a late 2010s strain of Japanese popular music associated with a few large acts with the word night in their names—Yoasobi, Yorushika & ZUTOMAYO spearheaded the genre. Yakousei saw the promise of vocaloids ascend to a newfound, counterintuitively human role in J-pop musical narratives. You may ask: what is a vocaloid? Is Hatsune Miku-binder Thomas Jefferson reaching too deep into the 2010s Internet iceberg for my predominantly Gen X audience? Most likely. But if you know a singular vocaloid’s name, know hers. Long before AI could synthesize singers’ voices to easily replicate their vocal textures given an input, Japan’s Crypton Future Media funded by Yamaha dropped vocaloid software in 2004, using blended voicebanks of human voices to create a singular robotic program producing singing malleable to a programmer’s preferences. To boost the software’s appeal, they created a mascot named Hatsune Miku with unignorable neon cyan pigtails as something of a virtual idol. She became an instant icon of this new frontier of music, and even performed at this year’s Coachella (I sadly missed her by a matter of minutes). 

Vocaloid software empowered independent producers to create their own mini-worlds separated from themselves and led instead by their own characters. Yakousei represents that burgeoning scene gaining new legitimacy and artistic vision as the 2010s progressed. Producers became more deft at blending vocaloid robotism with rich, human stories of urban isolation, disproving the notion that vocaloids somehow strip the human element of music and blurring the lines between character and reality in pop music. Yakousei also takes cues from evolving J-pop and J-rock trends with subtle grooves drawing from R&B and dance. Yakousei recalls the 1997 film Perfect Blue, often pointed to as the major influence of Black Swan, an incisive exploration of the psychological, manic pitfalls of fame in the realm of the J-pop idol and actress. What level of humanity can the act of performing achieve, if it’s always predicated on idealism? 

The J-rock influence is immediately evident in inabakumori’s アンチサイクロン (Anticyclone), fronted by a character named Osage-chan who one fan characterized as a “procrastinator, play[ing] videogames on her computer way too much time and is failing geography.” The stray about geography is inexplicable, but it helps us appreciate how vocaloids allow fans’ imagination to run wild with their own storylines of these figures. Despite that unassuming description, musically the first thirty seconds of her storyline wallop you with off-the-rails metal riffs as her deceptively sweet, vaguely robotic yet as-close-to-humanity as possible voice filters in and out. The immediacy of “Lost Umbrella” and its splintered, mangled riffs that still manage to sound like sweet ear candy make it a yakousei hit to last into the daylight. “Pascal Beats” offers one of the most fascinating looks into the vocaloid technology; her voice follows the bass and chorus’ melodic line nearly identically, achieving such flawlessly tight synchronization that it’s a technological marvel to behold, much like yesterday’s Moogventures. Beyond the intrigue of the spectral, uncanny vocalizing, incredible production moments like the flashy piano solo and ripping guitars of “Tears Radar” building to maximum power-pop underscore the cross-sectional appeal of yakousei. Investigating these songs lyrically, citybound solitude is a key theme: in “Floating Moonlight City,” Osage-chan chirps of being by “the rotary at the station, waiting for a bus that won't come / to a place nobody seems to understand.” Yakousei suggests that a robot is not an undue conduit but rather the perfect medium to spin our human tales of isolation, probing the questions of what constitutes our humanity in lives defined by technological connection.