This article was published in the "Sanlian Life Weekly" No. 19, 2020, the original title of the article "ilem, in the dimensional wall", it is strictly forbidden to reprint privately, infringement will be investigated
In the world of the second dimension and the "post-00s", there are few people who do not know ilem.
Reporter/Chen Lu
In 2019, BiliBili Macro Link, a large-scale offline event hosted by Bilibili, was held at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai
Break the dimension of the million Up Lord
The first meeting with Ilem was downstairs at the agreed interview location. This is an old road in Shanghai that is not modern enough but enough fireworks, and there are many brick red old residential buildings behind the plane trees on both sides. When Ilem came from afar wearing a mask, I had in mind the lyrics of his "Ordinary Disco": "On this ordinary day / I wear ordinary shoes / Walk this ordinary street very ordinary / Pull out ordinary headphones / Find some ordinary feeling / Come to a common music that I love most." ”
He looks more like an ordinary science and engineering otaku who loves music than the title of musician, wearing a plain black coat, carrying a backpack, and a pair of headphones around his neck. Probably because of the long-term facing the computer, his figure is slightly awkward, the words are not a lot of looks, after seeing me, he nodded politely, which is a greeting.
ilem, formerly known as Yang Li, is a young musician born in 1993, because of the virtual song Ji "Luo Tianyi" for VOCALOID has created many popular songs and is deeply sought after by "post-95" and "post-00" fans, has millions of fans on the B station, known as the "Godfather" in the circle, and is considered to be a person who can really break the two-dimensional (anime game) and three-dimensional (real world) dimensional wall.
VOCALOID is an electronic music synthesis software developed by Yamaha Company in Japan, users can call the voice in the software to sing different songs, each sound corresponds to a virtual idol, of which "Hatsune Mirai" and "Luo Tianyi" are the two most well-known VOCALOID virtual singers in China, and others include "Yanhe" and "Le Zheng Aya". The real driving force behind these virtual idols are many creators like Ilem.
Ilem and Luo Tianyi can be described as mutual achievements. Although Hatsune Mirai quickly swept the world after its launch in 2007, vocaloid's Chinese virtual Song Ji Luo Tianyi, developed for the Chinese market in 2012, has not been able to break the circle successfully, only entertaining herself on a small scale until the appearance of "Ordinary Disco".
"Ordinary Disco" is currently the only mythological song Chinese VOCALOID. VOCALOID has its own set of music evaluation criteria: more than 100,000 views of the temple song, more than 1 million views of the legend song, and more than 10 million views of the mythical song. Of the 78 legendary songs that CHINESE VOCALOID has, ilem has created a whopping 21 songs.
In 2015, Li Yuchun covered this two-dimensional divine song at the Hunan Satellite TV New Year's Eve concert, which made "Ordinary Disco" quickly popular across the country. The following year, Hunan Satellite TV, which discovered Luo Tianyi's IP, invited Yang Yuying and her partner to sing another legendary song of Ilem at the small Chinese New Year's Eve party, "Flower Najib". Since then, as some well-known singers such as Xue Zhiqian and Wang Feng have increasingly covered Ilem's songs, he has gradually gained popularity outside the circle.
But are you really on fire? Ilem doesn't think so. At the end of March this year, Zhou Shen sang "Dalabang Bar" created by Ilem on the variety show "Singer", one person played five corners, superb skills, brainwashing lyrics, so that the song quickly became popular on the Internet, the number of plays soon approached 9 million, is a "quasi-mythological song".
That night, their respective fan bases were reveling all night for the cross-dimensional collaboration. Ilem felt that this hilarity did not belong to him, and after making a bowl of instant noodles at home and drinking a bottle of beer after watching the show, he "what should I do?" After all, in Ilem's opinion, "if you ask a person who has not been exposed to [this song] before, mention the title of the song, they will first think of Zhou Shen, if he is willing to dig deeper, he will find that the original song is Luo Tianyi, and then you have to dig deeper to see me."
"Then will you be lost?" Faced with my question, Ilem immediately shook his head in denial. "It's time for the good times. Push forward 20 years, and only a few people can be known for writing songs. Even now, everyone may have heard of Zhang Yadong and Gao Xiaosong. Xiao Ke is not known to many people, but he is already the top level in the industry. The behind-the-scenes profession of a music producer, like the people in front of the stage, should not be expected of us. Of course it's okay to dream, but it's wrong to make this a goal. ”
Ilem's modesty and introspection exceeded my expectations, the ilem who would wear women's clothes and dance in the live broadcast room, and the black powder on the knowledge, looking a little flam and proud, and the real Yang Li seemed to be difficult to establish a connection. He does have capital to be proud of. Ilem, who has millions of fans in Generation Z, is no longer a traditional musician hidden behind singers, whether it is releasing a single, or chatting in a live broadcast, playing games, his every move can always get huge traffic.
According to the data of Ai Media Consulting, the scale of China's secondary yuan users in 2019 was about 332 million people, and it is expected to exceed 400 million people in 2021, with huge market potential. The A station and B station are still the two main vertical video websites of the second dimension, accounting for more than 50%. In 2016, a label valued the potential value of ilem among the young users of Station B and signed a contract with him. In the face of this gradual commercialization of the road, ilem is very sober: "Do what you can do, the rest is left to the capitalists to think." ”
"I'm already an old man on Station B"
Like many VOCALOID creators, ilem's contact with Lo Tian Yi was purely accidental. In 2014, ilem was a sophomore majoring in precision instruments at Harbin Institute of Technology. He loves music, learned a little electronic keyboard, and when he was in high school, he had a vague idea in his mind - writing songs and composing music, but this is not enough to form a clear future career plan. So, ilem followed the rules and got into a good university and filled out a major that looked good. "The major was chosen casually, and I felt that I should be okay to study engineering." Then I chose a school close to home and a major with the right score. ”
During college, Ilem began to wonder about the future: employment, graduate school, going abroad? It doesn't seem to be what you really want. He wanted to do creative work, so he began to write novels and learn to arrange music on the Internet. "The Same" was born in this state of mind: "Sleepless nights I lie in bed / Lie to myself that the road ahead is still long / Scaled all over / Lost my way / But please believe / It doesn't matter / Because we are all the same / One day it will shine." ”
When the song is finished, who will you look for to sing it? A work that he has worked hard to brew, he does not want to find someone to sing casually, friends suggest, do you want to try Luo Tianyi? They often play the PSP game Hatsune Mirai: Project Katsuhime together. "Actually, at that time, he wanted to learn how to sing with Luo Tianyi, and we both learned it together, but he gave up later." Ilem recalled.
When it comes to who the person who encourages him the most on the creative road, Ilem replied without hesitation, "It is the audience on the B station". Ilem describes himself as a praise personality, and the interaction from the audience is the main motivation for him to insist on creating. "They sometimes write long comments that say they get some fun, strength, or remembering something about themselves from what I write."
For a newcomer, The Up Master (who contributed to videos such as Station B), these interactions were sporadic at first, but they greatly encouraged Ilem. In 2015, after he released the new song "Mr. Yin and Yang", another Up owner, Sammu Marblue, sang the song. Compared with ilem, which had less than 2,000 fans at the time, Sanwu Marblue, who had tens of thousands of fans, became famous on the B station because of its cover songs in Japanese and Chinese. This attracted a lot of viewers for ilem.
Marblue also sang many of Ilem's other songs, successfully helping Ilem gain fandom among many audiences who could not accept electronic synthesis music. For example, Sanwu Marblue's version of "Late Night Poet" was once a single for many ilem fans. "So she was one of the Up Lords who helped me the most, especially when I was a little transparent." Probably because of this gratitude, ilem refers to Marblue as a teacher when he mentions Sanwu Marblue. Later, many other Up owners came to seek cooperation, which made Ilem more and more widely known.
After graduating with a bachelor's degree in 2016, Ilem moved to Dalian and began to devote himself full-time to music creation. Did not go to the company to work, all day long do not know what to do at home, although it seems to be able to support themselves, but at first Ilem's mother still feels very incomprehensible, once thought that Luo Tianyi is ilem's screen name. In order to be able to get close to the work done by her son, she always pays attention to the dynamics of ilem on the B station, and there are new songs that will be shared with relatives and friends around her.
"So far, she's all agreeable except for Dalabun, but she thinks maybe young people will like it." Many outsiders' perceptions of Luo Tianyi are similar to the change in the attitude of Ilem's parents. Ilem frankly said that a few years ago, many people would have questioned whether these songs could be called music. The acceptance of electronically synthesized sounds for virtual idols is relatively low. However, in recent years, VOCALOID has gradually entered the mainstream cultural circle from the very beginning of a niche subculture.
Today, Ilem's mother sometimes even gives advice on his creations on the phone. "For example, you will say that you have to write some positive, mainstream songs." She liked the song "Da Yi Song", which carried forward the national style culture, and would say 'Son, you wrote this lyric well', and even showed it to my high school Chinese teacher. On April 26, Tencent Film officially announced "Da Feng Ge" as the promotional song for the movie "Fu Hu Wu Song".
In 2018, ilem was invited to collaborate with Zhang Yadong on an album "2:3". The concept of this album is a contrast between two and three dimensions. There are two versions of the 7 songs: the two-dimensional virtual song Ji version sung by Luo Tianyi, and the three-dimensional live-action version sung by the Shanghai Rainbow Chamber Choir, Sanwu Marblue, Dai Quan and others. The Luo Tianyi version was composed and adjusted by Ilem, and Zhang Yadong would rearrange the music on the original version created by Ilem to make a live-action version.
The name of the album was taken by ilem. At first, he hoped that the title of the album would be "two-way foil", which is an advanced weapon that appears in the science fiction novel "Three-Body", which can cause the three-dimensional universe to collapse into the two-dimensional universe, coinciding with his famous declaration in the circle - "May I have the VC crossing the dimensional barrier in my lifetime, so that this song can resound in every corner of the three-dimensional dimension." But in the end, because of copyright issues, it was replaced by the current "2:3".
On January 26, 2019, Station B held the first BILILI POWER UP Awards Ceremony, and ilem became the only music Up owner from the original music area among the 8 million Up owners who won the "10th Anniversary Achievement Award". These teenagers, who once entertained themselves on the "Little Broken Station", have become the leaders of youth culture, and Ilem is often regarded as a representative of the two-dimensional culture.
When I reminded ilem that it had been 6 years since he released "The Same" on the B station, he seemed to sigh with some incredulity: "I am already an old man on the B station." ”
On July 8, 2017, an anime fan in Sendai, Japan, held a smartphone with an augmented reality (AR) app to watch a performance by virtual idol Hatsune Mirai
The artist who wants to cooperate most is Da Zhang Wei
Toward the end of the interview, probably a little more familiar, Ilem suddenly said to me, thinking that the first question, "Did you start creating because you liked the second dimension?" was tinged with a huge prejudice against the second dimension. I was a little surprised, but he insisted, "Whether it's anime, manga, or games, it's just a way to pass the time."
I thought he seemed a little sensitive, but he was quickly relieved about it. In the past 6 years, with the continuous popularity, ilem has experienced many criticisms. Because he has not received professional training, coupled with the fact that his songs are often known as "ghost animals" and "brainwashing", many critics believe that his "work is not complete enough, the artistic level is not high, and it cannot represent the second dimension". These negative reviews have plagued Ilem for a long time.
In 2016, he personally replied to a post on Zhihu, the title of the post was: "Is there any black spot in the Up main ilem of the B station?" At first, he only replied anonymously, and then added the content back and forth several times under the real name system, and the last time he wrote: "It's almost a year, everyone needs you, are you here?" ...... Even if you are not cold to the voice of the virtual singer, you can also have your own platform on the B station. I submitted articles on the B station so I recommend here, of course, there are many bigger stages, for every young person with a dream and brave to do it... If you haven't done anything in the year and are still happy to spray this and that, then I wish you a lot of fun. ”
"Now I probably don't need everyone to like themselves." Ilem explains, "Which song is finally accepted, which side of you is seen, this matter is not under my control." He said that in "2:3", for example, although the most popular is "Hook Finger Oath", his favorite is "Night Taxi".
"Night Taxi" originated from a midnight experience in Ilem. He went to Shanghai on a business trip that day, couldn't sleep at night, and decided to go out for a walk. Riding a shared bicycle, ilem walked around in the breeze, it happened to rain during the day, the air was rarely fresh at night, and the stars could be seen in the city. When he rode to a construction site near an viaduct, he saw stars in the sky, stars reflected in the water on the ground, and flashing headlights on the streets in the distance, "particularly magical." This experience, combined with the feeling of taking a taxi home later, led to this song "Night Taxi".
In fact, ilem's whimsical songs are derived from these unusually ordinary everyday lives. For example, "Dalabang Bar" is because of a street sign he encountered when he was in Harbin. The street name marked on the street sign is from the Soviet period, long and unsmooth. He thought it was funny and wanted to string these tongue-twisting names into lyrics, so he used the storyline of Dragon Quest and turned it into the lyrics of the lyrics: "Darabong Baba Bande Bedibibibiruruon / He defeated / Kuntu Kuta Kati Katikot Suvasi Razsson / Rescued / Princess Mia Morasuna Dani Shelly Red / Back / Mondaluk Thisper Gubich Bale City".
And "Song of Neurosis", once he was in the school public bathhouse, "at that time, there was someone next to me who was giggling, and I thought, if there is a common language for human beings that can express a common emotion, it is estimated to be hahahaha."
He recorded his life in his creations and became more willing to please himself. A fan once asked ilem if he could write some experimental music. He said: "I don't listen to this myself, and I don't have the desire to write it." I love listening to songs that make me feel happy. Whether or not to contact those particularly artistic music, although objectively speaking, sometimes has limited ability, but this is also my active choice. ”
As for whether he should improve his music professional ability, ilem is not without entanglement. "The knowledge learned is resources, capabilities, but also frameworks. It's hard to say which side will play first, will it provide more power to itself first, or will it make more rules for itself first? ”
He even felt this deficiency, but he found a "foothold" in his creation. Many professionals often express their surprise when they hear about his creations. For example, ilem said: "A friend once heard one of my demos and told me that the plucked strings you use are Indian, the strings are Chinese, and the drum sets are Middle Eastern. That is to say, anyone with a little common sense will not put these things together. ”
Probably through continuous exploration, I gradually built up my understanding of music, so when I asked him about his cooperation with Zhang Yadong, I did not hear the imaginary unilateral praise and admiration. He shared with me the different understandings of "Night Taxi" in the two creations: "Mine is the first half of the night, 9 o'clock to 12 o'clock, but the version arranged by Teacher Zhang Yadong may be the second half of the night, 2 o'clock to 5 o'clock. The situation and atmosphere reflected in the two versions are quite different. My own emotions are more positive, a bit like a taxi out or just back from playing. He seems to have had enough of the first half of the night, and he went with people before, drinking, singing, having a party, and then coming back. At this time, the brain shell may be a little painful, there are no cars on the road, and even the street lights are gone, more like after the enthusiasm has cooled down a little. Of course it's how I feel to myself. ”
"Whose version do you like?" I asked. Ilem replied without hesitation: "That must be my own." ”
I asked him again who the artist he most wanted to work with, and Ilem said it was Da Zhang Wei. "I want to hear a lecture from the big teacher when I have the chance." As for why It's Da Zhang Wei, Ilem's answer seems to be more like expressing himself: "I think he may also be the kind of person who thinks a lot after coming off the stage." So there are some things I still want to ask him for advice, but I haven't found the opportunity. ”