the GazettE’s Aoi stirs up debate about Vocaloid artists through controversial tweets

One of the things that most people seem to forget about Twitter is that, once you tweet, it’s not only your followers who read your thoughts – it’s the whole world. In less than .01 seconds, millions of people around the world are able to see them.


Unfortunately for visual kei rocker Aoi of the GazettE, more than his 41K of followers saw his initial comment about the fans of Vocaloid, and the artist was immediately swept up in a controversy.

Aoi tweeted on November 14th that he wasn’t too thrilled about how listeners and magazines treat animated singers as “real [artistic] works.” He does admit that the technology behind the software is amazing, but if that is considered music, then “what is the point in us making music?” (‘us’ is most likely referring to his band and/or every band out there). “I could go so far as to say it makes what we’re doing nothing but masturbation,” and “How is it that people can say that those machines are equal to actual artists. I don’t think so.”

When Vocaloid fans caught wind of this, he immediately deleted the tweet. But the damage had been done, and so today he continued to tweet more about it.

“I tried researching a little bit about Vocaloid, but some people told me it’s already too late. It is true that at the beginning I did think it’s like drum sampling. But it’s not the same as a person’s actual expression, and after that, I couldn’t read about it anymore. It’s the same for people, there’s different view points. Thank you^^.”

He also said that he read up on Vocaloid on Wikipedia and that he has heard of Hatsune Miku, admitting that the music was kind of catchy. He added that the melody isn’t bad, but at the key the voice is singing, it’s almost impossible for a human to sing that high. On a good note, Aoi did buy the software and even composed a song on it. Yet he still prefers natural voices over computerized ones.

Famous website, 2ch (ni channel), had a lot of mixed comments. There were people who agreed with him,(“He’s right,” “I agree, ” and “I don’t know who he is but he’s right“),  and then there were others who disagreed with him. Those who were offended by his remarks commented, “They’re a cheaper version of Dir en grey,” “If he’s going to just say and delete it, the he shouldn’t have said anything at all,” and “Visual kei is a desecration to music.”