Why I Hate Vocaloid

So today in Math class, Serithaen and lolixNYAFUUN challenged me to explain why I don't like Vocaloid. Well, I accept your challenge, so here is your answer.

(NOTE: If you totally love Vocaloid and are likely to be offended when I tear it apart, leave now. kthxbye.)

NUMBER ONE - The music sucks. Of course, when I say "the music", I am not referring to every song created with the Vocaloid program. I'm only referring to the songs associated solely with the "Character Vocal Series"; in other words, Hatsune Miku and her creepy friends. You know, songs like "Just Be Friends" and "Magnet".

Now I'm not saying my music taste is perfect, or even that it's better than most, but come on. The songs aren't TERRIBLE, but they aren't good either. In fact, the best word my brain has come up with to describe them is "MEH". If any of them actually have a tune, I totally missed it. And the lyrics, MY GOD. I like songs with interesting and/or meaningful lyrics. I'm not claiming to understand Japanese, and who knows? Maybe those awful, clichéd lines are totally meaningful in Japanese, and something was lost in translation. But for those of us who speak Engrish, the lyrics are a joke. Literally - I cracked up laughing when I read the translation of "Just Be Friends" -

"It came to mind in the early morning yesterday
As if I gathered broken pieces of glass

What the heck is this? Drips from my cut finger
Is this what we really hoped for?

I knew it at the bottom of my heart, the hardest choice would be the best
My self-love refuses it and repeats self-contradiction
When can I tell it to you?

In the slowly decaying world, I'm struggling but it's the only way
Carving your faded smiles, I pulled out the plug

I screamed with my hoarse voice, rebound and resonance echo in vain
Nothing is left at the end of the unchained me
Coincidences that sticked us degenerates into the dark and are broken in pieces
"No matter what we do, life is just like that" I mumbled
Somebody's tears flow down the dried cheeks"

In other news, Luka just won the award for the best-ever emo poetry.

NUMBER TWO - It's unoriginal. Soooooooo very unoriginal. Now lolixNYAFUUN disagreed with me when I called them pop stars, but in my opinion, any musical performer (either real or digitalized) can be considered a "musician" (although I'm using the term VERY loosely here =.= )

What's more, the characters are no longer just considered to be a vocal synthesizer program - as a virtual idol, Hatsune Miku performed her first "live" concert during Animelo Summer Live at the Saitama Super Arena on August 22, 2009. Miku also performed her first overseas live concert on November 21, 2009, during Anime Festival Asia (AFA) in Singapore, and on March 9, 2010, Miku's first solo live performance titled "Miku no Hi Kanshasai 39's Giving Day" was opened at the Zepp Tokyo in Odaiba, Tokyo.

Kagamine Len and Rin have also progressed beyond mere programs, and have become "artists" in their own right - their songs were covered by Asami Shimoda in the album Prism, and were credited to "Kagamine Rin/Len feat. Asami Shimoda".

That being the case, I believe it is safe to assume that we can call the Vocaloid characters pop stars, and from there, I would like to accuse them of being hacks.

I'm going to take a little trip back to the 60's now – 1966 to be exact. It was in this fateful year that Robert Rafelson and Bert Schneider created something that would change the music industry forever – the 'manufactured' pop star. The musical acting quartet of The Monkees was created for the American television series of the same name. The world had never seen anything like it – into a music industry that had previously been defined only by real talent, the producers of The Monkees introduced a group that had been created solely for ratings. And unfortunately, to get these ratings, it meant pandering to the wet dreams of annoying tweenage girls, thus making their songs completely unbearable for anyone that didn't fit into the appropriate target audience.

I'm not completely against The Monkees though. Even a bad idea is cooler when you're the first one to think of it. But after they made a comeback in the 90's with a series of reunion tours, the industry for manufactured musicians exploded. To name but a few of the performers who fall into this category, I give you:

- The Jonas Brothers
- Hannah Montana
- The Cheetah Girls
- Justin Beiber

Almost all of whom were created by the Disney Channel. Shuddering yet?

Fortunately for the music world, a saviour came in the form of a musical project created in 1998 by British musician Damon Albarn and cartoonist Jamie Hewlett. This project, known as the Gorillaz, consists of original music, and an extensive fictional universe depicting a "virtual band" of cartoon characters. The project was in fact created as a way to rebel against the manufactured nature of the music industry at the time - "if you watch MTV for too long, it's a bit like hell – there's nothing of substance there. So we got this idea for a cartoon band, something that would be a comment on that," Hewlett said. And that's where their tongue-in-cheek name of "Gorillaz" comes from – they were created to be "bigger than The Monkees".

As to where this ties into my reasoning for calling Vocaloid a hack, well think about it – they've managed to copy both the idea of manufactured pop stars (and in this case, they're LITERALLY manufactured) and the idea of a virtual band. Now because I KNOW lolixNYAFUUN will find fault with this argument, I'm going into further detail here on both points:

1. While Vocaloid the program was intended as a voice synthesizer, Crypton (the company who produced the software) decided that to make the product more appealing, it was necessary to have an image to go with the product, and Hatsune Miku was born. At this point, the target focus for Crypton's Vocaloids changed from high end music studios to the general public, specifically teenagers. If that's not a manufactured pop star, I don't know what is.

2. The "Character Vocal Series" may not be a band as such, but they can definitely be considered as virtual musicians. And as for Hatsune Miku's live performances as a projection, that was an idea directly stolen from the Gorillaz World Tour in 2007-2008.

Now I do realise that in this age, it's very hard to come up with completely original ideas because everything's been done already (In other words, "the Simpsons already did it!"). My problem with Vocaloid's lack of originality comes from the fact that they've managed to take a bad idea like broccoli (or manufactured pop stars) and an awesome idea like ice cream (or a virtual band), and mash them together to create something exponentially worse than both of the original ideas, sort of like broccoli ice cream.

NUMBER THREE – And this one is more my own personal rant. Their voices may be one of the most irritating sounds ever created. Both irritating and creepy. If I listen to it too long, I start twitching. Then I get the urge to smash my computer.

In fact, I have this theory that their voices were programmed according to those binaural codes that mess up your brain. I wouldn't put it past them, the Japanese have already tried it in a kid's game – think "Lavender Town Syndrome" (and they say they didn't do it on purpose, but it's all part of a plan, isn't it? To control kids to do their bidding, like that one South park episode, "Chinpokomon").

There are actually a bunch of other reason why I don't like them, but these would be my main points. And so I would like to conclude with this:

Like Tokio Hotel is a disgrace to European music,

And Justin Beiber is a disgrace to Canada in general,

Vocaloid is one of those things that truly makes you say, "WTF Japan?"