The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival announced Thursday night that Vocaloid sensation Hatsune Miku will be part of the festival’s 2020 lineup.
She’s scheduled to give a holographic performance on April 10 the first weekend and April 17 on the second weekend.
How did Hatsune Miku, a virtual Vocaloid artist that is revered only by anime fans and spawned the Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA video game series, make such a giant leap to one of the biggest music festivals in America?
According to Rolling Stone, Miku made her U.S. debut at the Anime Expo in Los Angeles in 2009, two years after performing her first live show at the Saitama Super Arena in her birth place of Japan. Since then, she performed on The Late Show with David Letterman, headlined for Lady Gaga on her ArtRave: The ArtPop Ball tour in 2014, and was even featured in Big Boi’s 2017 music video for “Kill Jill.”
Miku’s inclusion in Coachella’s 2020 lineup can be attributed to the wave of Asian music groups, as well as artists from other countries, making it big in the U.S. in recent years (especially K-Pop). Fellow Japanese artist Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, notable for the cheery love song “PONPONPON” (which was featured in The Simpsons episode “Married to the Blob”), will also be performing at the festival along with K-Pop staples BIGBANG and hip-hip artist Epik High.
With the U.S. becoming more culturally diverse than ever before, Coachella is becoming inclusive of acts from around the world, even J-Pop acts we never thought would perform at the concert in the first place.
If Hatsune Miku can perform at Coachella, then maybe Utada Hikaru could make it to that stage at some point.
Plus, it’s better for a virtual artist like Hatsune Miku to perform as a hologram as opposed to a hologram of a deceased artist.
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