The Future of Celebrity Is a Japanese Hologram Named Miku – Info Gadgets

3. The crowd at the Hammerstein Ballroom is about as cosmopolitan and diverse a crowd as I have ever seen at a live show. There is an ecstatically happy group of preteen African-American girls watched over by the bored eyes of their father. There are twentysomethings from Wisconsin. There are visitors from Japan. There are middle-aged couples dragging their kids along. There are geeks. There are jocks. There are soccer moms. There are pervs. All in all, a representative slice of New York life and thought.

“She is the perfect celebrity, an icon who reflects the audience's desires back to them with no distortion.”

A 19-year-old from Florida named Celeste remembers the software like a friend: “With every update, I would get so excited. She grew up with me, in a sense.” A 21-year-old Brooklyn-based producer started using her in the sixth grade. Miku was an access point to an entire community that sustained him. “What makes her real is us. These are our words. These are our songs. These are our lyrics that we hear up there. At the end of the day, more than anything, she is just us up there. We are seeing each other.” She is the perfect celebrity, an icon who reflects the audience's desires back to them with no distortion.

For the fans, the lack of reality in Hatsune Miku is a feature, not a bug. Celebrities, because they are people, fail. And the failures are painfully consequential when you've invested your identity in them. “Miku's not going to say something racist. She's not going to break down in the middle of a concert. She's not going to flake on you or do drugs,” Celeste from Florida tells me. Every twentysomething I talked to specifically mentioned that one of Miku's greatest advantages was that she wouldn't be caught saying something racist. She is a way of opting out of cancel culture.

By being unreal, she is an error-proof ideal. And by being the ideal, she represents a liberation from celebrity as much as its fulfillment. A pop singer today is, mostly, a beautiful image of a person who sings other people's material, and those other people, the creators, are mostly forgotten. “There are plenty of people who can do great music but who will never get on stage because they're not young, fit, beautiful people,” says Amy Fineshriber, a fan who also occasionally works for Crypton Media.

She has a point. When was the last time you saw a bad-looking pop singer? Hatsune Miku spares the creators the need to have the bodies they cannot have. For the imperfect, the overweight, the shy, the normal kids with regular bodies who just love pop music, Hatsune Miku bears the burden of the perfection demanded from celebrities, so that these kids can make the music they want to hear.

And unlike, say, Ariana Grande fans who love Ariana Grande but have no idea who wrote her music, Hatsune Miku fans know all the creators. “I'm a big fan of Kikuo, who works primarily with Miku. His works are just orchestral,” Mina, 21, tells me, as though Miku were a Stradivarius cello. Other fans are more than eager to share their love for Massa, Mathi, Pinocchio-P, and the latest, greatest contest winner, beat_shobon, a 14-year-old out of Mexicali. These songs percolate up from the fan base; the internet, broadly speaking, is their source, which is just another way of saying they come out of thin air. Kids make them. They throw them up on YouTube or NicoNicoDouga. They pitch their designs for the merch sold at the shows. The market does the rest. Miku is an instrument that is also a character that is also a venue that is also a channel that is also a muse that is also a celebrity that is also a community.

The experience of going to a Hatsune Miku show is, in a way, more real than going to a concert of a flesh celebrity. At an Ariana Grande concert, everybody pretends that the music they're listening to is hers, that its feelings are her feelings. Such fictions don't apply to Hatsune Miku. The audience knows they're projecting. It is literally a projection they are there to see. And they know who made the music they are consuming. In that sense, a Hatsune Miku concert requires less suspension of disbelief than the concerts of many flesh celebrities.

You have to say this for her: Miku may be nothing but a projection, but at least she knows it. As I watch, I remember that David Bowie gave his final live show at the Hammerstein Ballroom. That seems appropriate to me. The world of pop culture and music and celebrity are metamorphosing, moving into the final stages of the process Bowie himself set into motion, leaving behind people for projections. It's all rather vapid and rather marvelous. The music is banal, but it is the most original concert I have ever attended. I'm sure Bowie would approve.