Review Summary: once more, once more, somehow I’m rolling
You’ve probably seen her somewhere on the internet. Whether plastered onto some merch in a tucked away corner at your local Hot Topic, or on the sweatshirt of some random person playing a mobile rhythm game in a coffee shop, you’ve seen the anime girl with turquoise hair in pigtails wearing headphones and throwing up the quintessential peace sign.
I’m sure you scoffed and then muttered something along the lines of “goddamn weebs” under your breath as you continued with your day.
It’s true the
Hatsune Miku brand lends itself well to this kind of surface level reaction. Even if you’ve dipped your feet into the unpredictable waters of Vocaloid before, there’s just something about the whole thing that makes it feel like a novelty at best. The videos of a holographic Miku “singing and dancing” on stage in front of thousands of screaming fans with glow sticks doesn’t do much to ease feelings of hesitation when first looking into the phenomenon.
It wasn’t until I came across the work of the producer going by the name Wowaka that I really began to understand how vocaloid isn’t necessarily a gimmick in the right hands.
It would be easy for a producer to lean too heavily into the vocaloid tool itself, and have the musicality of the song itself suffer; but from the opening piano roll in his now immortalized hit single “Rolling Girl,” to the unpredictable and emotive vocal lines he writes throughout the whole record, I realized that not only is Wowaka’s use of Miku legitimately artistic, but that the music itself is compelling, unlike a lot of the songs I was initially exposed to when diving into the genre.
Take the aforementioned “Rolling Girl” as an example. That opening piano melody will stick in your head long after the track ends. A frantic and “rolling” melody over top of a frantic drum groove sets the stage for the vocals to really shine. You feel the sense of frantic emotional spiraling that Miku is singing about; the genre-defining “Mou ikkai! Mou ikkai!” (“One more time! One more time!”) in the chorus, and the way he’s able to bend and tweak the higher end of the vocaloid’s range to emote the way it does, makes you forget that you’re listening to a MIDI blue-haired anime girl and instead just tosses you right into the shoes of a young girl struggling with isolation and suicidal ideation. It’s powerful stuff.
Throughout his debut collection
Unhappy Refrain, Wowaka changes things up constantly to keep you guessing. Whether he’s taking cues from post-hardcore and math-rock in his guitar leads, going full on shoegaze (“Lineart”), or utilizing a combination of dance drum grooves and cymbal rides (Bokuno Sainou), there’s a smattering of ideas that he just makes work.
While I’m still not necessarily a fan of the way he ultimately uses the extreme upper measures of Miku’s range, there’s no denying it adds a sense of urgency and desperation to the lyrics and compliments the often frantic instrumentation.
As the final seconds of closer “Prism Cube,” a poppy mid-tempo ballad that builds into a post-rock guitar swell finale, comes to a close, you just can’t help but be impressed with what Wowaka achieved; even if it’s not your cup of tea. Not only is it one of the most influential albums in the entire genre, but I’d go as far as to say that a lot of the interesting synth work and production that can be found in today’s alternative music scene in Japan has inspiration in Wowaka’s work on this album.
Tragically, in 2019 he passed away due to heart failure at the age of thirty-one.
His work brought so much life into a genre known for its synthetic qualities, and is ingrained into the genre and culture as a whole. Every single Miku compilation will have either “Rolling Girl” or “World’s End Dancehall” on it, and when she performs live shows one or both of those songs will always make an appearance.
It’s odd to say that watching a hologram of an anime girl dancing and singing “Rolling Girl” to a sold out theater show was genuinely moving, but when Miku played this song in tribute to Wowaka after his passing at a 2019 festival performance, I felt a lot of emotion. The crowd chanting his name and then screaming those lyrics back at the stage was electrifying. That raw connection is often the reason most people engage with art in the first place. To see that connection being mediated by a kawaii anime girl is wild to me, but it’s a testament to how much his work meant to folks.
Connection is all we have at the end of the day, and sometimes the way those connections might be formed are created in surprising ways. Wowaka’s legacy is a testament to that; it’ll continue to impact as long as that blue-haired girl is around, and maybe even beyond.
Mou ikkai, Mou ikkai.
