The Girl Who Doesn’t Exist

Hatsune Miku is about as famous as a person can get in Japan without being one. A Vocaloid character—a voice synthesizer program wrapped in an avatar with teal twintails and a very specific strain of anime energy—she’s sold out arena concerts as a hologram projection and had more songs written for her than most human pop stars ever accumulate. She’s not a mascot or a toy. She’s a full cultural phenomenon with a dedicated creative ecosystem that keeps producing new material, because she can’t say no and she never gets tired.

The Re:Dialed version of Last Night, Good Night put her in the same frame as Pharrell Williams and Takashi Murakami—Pharrell on production, Murakami on visuals for his film Jellyfish Eyes—and the result is exactly as chaotic as that sounds. Three pop maximalists converging on a single track, each operating at full intensity. Murakami’s color vocabulary (the flowers, the cartoon eyes, the acid-bright flatness) amplifies whatever it touches. Pharrell’s production has that specific quality of sounding effortlessly expensive. And Miku’s processed voice, sitting on top of it all, adds the thing both of them can’t quite provide on their own: something genuinely uncanny.

There’s a version of this that’s pure novelty—a fun crossover, internet catnip, 2014 being 2014. But Miku is interesting in a way that outlasts the novelty. She’s a canvas for projection in the most literal sense, and what people project onto her—desire, parasocial devotion, creative collaboration, the fantasy of a pop star who belongs equally to everyone—says more about the audience than most celebrity culture does. Pharrell and Murakami understood that, which is probably why they made something that doesn’t feel like a stunt.