Reviewing Airhead by Picon and also some ramblings about Vocaloid

I've been listening to Airhead on repeat ever since I found it a couple days ago. I've recently uploaded a bunch of photos to the cloud, and managed to create enough space to redownload Project Sekai: Colorful Stage! It's a fun rhythm game by Sega, who owns Sonic and also Vocaloid (you might know Hatsune Miku). Incidentally, this makes Sonic and Hatsune Miku siblings, or so I'm told. Anyways, Project Sekai is my rhythm game of choice because I genuinely like the songs, which consists of Vocaloid songs (Airhead being one of them) and Vocaloid covers of popular Japanese songs. The music that I listen to primarily consists of J-pop and J-rock, and after playing Project Sekai, I've been listening to a lot of Vocaloid as well.

I think Vocaloid is an amazing invention. It allows more producers to become songwriters, without actually having to find singers to sing their songs. There are so many amazing Vocaloid producers, like Kikuo (my personal favorite), DECO *27, Mikito P, Inabakumori (another great producer), to name a few. However, artificial singing obviously has its drawbacks, of which I think Picon's songs illustrate well.

Listen to the original piece (https://youtu.be/SXC2wO1XdMI), then, I highly recommend also listening to Eve's cover of song. (https://youtu.be/AC98Q39t4HY) Compared to when sung by a human voice, Hatsune Miku lacks breadth, sustenance, soul. It has its charms, but I prefer Eve's cover more than the original. Rebirth, another Picon song, is also featured on Project Sekai. Listen to the ProSek version! The human emotion behind each word is something that no Vocaloid can add.

(As an aside, when a Vocaloid song gets popular enough, it is bound to get covered by people known as Utaites, singers who are well-known for their Vocaloid covers. Eve, who you might know for singing the first opening to Jujutsu Kaisen, started his career off as an Utaite. Airhead matches Eve's style very well, specifically Literary Nonsense from his album, Bunka, which is about insanity, or at least, I'm pretty sure this is the album about insanity. Coincidentally, his cover of Airhead was made around the same time. Check out Literary Nonsense, it utilizes similar nonsensical filler words in the song!)

Though that is not to say that having a "soulless" singer is a bad thing. I think Inabokumori does an amazing job of producing songs that work well with the sound of a Vocaloid. (Some good samples of Inabokumori include Lagtrain and Lost Umbrella. When I listen to covers of certain Vocaloid songs, I find myself disliking the amount of emotion and flair in the human voice. I like the emotionless eerieness of Vocaloid here (Kikuo utilizes this well). I also conjecture that Vocaloid works well with upbeat songs and especially songs that have a catchy instrumental backing, so the vocals is no longer the main focus of the song.

On top of that, I think it's also the Vocaloid being used. My favorite voices are Kaai Yuki, which Inabokumori uses, and flower. Hatsune Miku just sounds too artificial, which is great for classics like The End of Hatsune Miku, whose entire purpose is to illustrate how inhumanely fast machines can sing, but not so much in the case of Picon. Rebirth by Picon is a sad, lamenting song, and the singers at Project Sekai did it justice with their cover. The emotion behind Airhead is a bit more subtle, and Eve has brought out the subtleties in exactly the way I think Picon would have liked.

That was a lot of writing about something that is only tangentially connected to the song. Alright, let's jump into the song.

The overall style of the music video reminds me a lot of Penguin's Detour by Hayashida, another favorite of mine. The original music video has been essentially erased off the face of the earth, along with Yuu Miyashita's amazing cover (Yuu Miyashita has the perfect, soulless voice for this song). A reuploaded version of it still exists on YouTube (by Kraffee), though the quality is not as high as it used to be, nor is it the version that I am thinking of. The version of the music video that I'm referencing can be seen in a reuploaded video of Sou's cover (another great Utaite), but the video has been blurred. Hayashida tweeted that he was unsatisfied with the music video (I thought it was a great music video), and that it is in the process of being reworked. I hope it will still be in the vein of the original.

Anywho, I like the rustic, old-timey newspaper print graphics style. Pay attention to when the young boy shows up with respect to the lyrics. "I'm complicitly, messily, indifferently getting by" and "It's fine like this! I wander, wander, wander" and don't forget "HAHAHAHAHA." It reminds me of the Great Depression, which might be around the same time these pictures originated. In conclusion, I think the music video is a great stylistic choice.

It's funny how I somehow get drawn to songs with these kinds of bizarre, fragmented lyrics with a general theme of mental illness. The only Japanese I know are some small phrases I've picked up from consuming way too much anime. When I listen to Japanese songs, I just think to myself "ah this sounds good."

In these moments, I wish I was fully fluent in Japanese so I can understand the innuendos behind each word. When you read the different translations of the lyrics of these kinds of songs, you'll find there are many different interpretations. I think Japanese is a more contextual language compared to English, at least.

I write poetry like the lyrics of this song. I love assonance, and Picon abuses it (like I do in my writing, though I've had more professional writers than me tell me that I can't just write words that sound good but don't make sense). Any language outside of English has a wealth of assonant and rhyming words, and Japanese is definitely one of them. There are a lot of vowel songs that get stretched and accented really well in Eve's cover. Anyways, I really commend Picon for forsaking sense (yeah fuck making sense, all that matters is that the song sounds good!) for really cool sounds.

The chorus is very fun and a really good example of really cool assonance. Let's talk about it. The repeated similar-sounding words just drives the song to the local maximum of "Even when I think about it now." This is why I love repeated assonance! I know a lot of people who dislike slant rhymes, but I have no problems with them, especially when Eve accents it just right (yes, I will fangirl about Eve) to pass as a slight rhyme (another reason why performative poetry is superior). Sorry definitely does not rhyme with lonely, but I don't care!!! 人 (nin) is the Japanese word for man, and I love the "wise man? sick man?" duality here (which matches really well with the stick man in the background). Honestly, these few words illustrate the theme of the song so well: being alone and going crazy.

Fun fact: 10884 sounds a lot like suicide in Japanese! This is followed by references to the forbidden fruit, which is the only thing in the entire music video with color. I'm sure the apple is supposed to be symbolic of suicide, a too-tempting solution to the suffering. The singer is "dancing" with it though, and it creates a very cool picture in your mind.

Oh and the guitar that plays in this section is simply sublime. It sounds like whine, or a scream. It makes me uncomfortable and I love it like a thriller fan loves thriller. I'm a big fan of psychological horror RPGs, and this guitar riff gives me the same feeling that I get when I encounter the dark, twisted secret underlying the game. AHHH I love it soo much <3.

Well, I think that's all I have to say about this song. This really isn't much of a review, but rather me gushing over Airhead. I mean, the instrumentals are superb, the whole direction (rise and fall) of this song is really well made, the music video is really fitting, and Eve's a genius singer. Oh yeah, the beatmap on Project Sekai is also pretty fun. It's the first Expert that I full combo'd. Listen to Airhead!!!!

And no, this is not a cry for help. I just happen to enjoy songs like this (remember, I don't know Japanese, and I decide I like a song before I look at the lyrics!)

100Days: 5, 7