One giant postscript that I should’ve added last post is the stuff that happened in 2020 after the world went into shutdown mode in the early days of the pandemic. Well, regarding anime music at least, there were a lot of online collabs in 2020 that are worth remembering and calling out as a result of musicians and similar types who lost gigs from the shutdown and had to make do with online and remote stuff, some free, because what else are we going to do other than Animal Crossing?
This better serves as its own post to remember what happened anyway, so a list. Also, I am not going to remember all the ones worth highlighting so any help in the comments is a great add.
The Seatbelt online project was pretty rocking, and the online Tanabata stream was really frigging good. I can’t understate how good that was. Like, that is once-a-decade level good. In addition to the big show (which has other YK stuff), there were a bunch of Youtube releases of re-recorded songs from the show. I even bought this vinyl, lol.
YOASOBI struck gold late 2019/2020 and Yori ni Kakeru was the third or second-most covered song in anisong-world, in 2020. I don’t know:
- Nozawa-san??? Majide?
- Takahashi Minami (the seiyuu… also check out this Adrenaline cover which is vintage covid)
- Ayasa
- Team Y
- Kradness
- Hikida Yoko (Artsvision channel!)
The First Take did fill a void in 2020 when we were void of the usual variety shows and live performance footage, so check out their channel. Even if they started in 2019, 2020 was a good year for what they do.
Watanabe Keiko’s vocaloid covers are pretty solid! I think the Crypton-sponsored Vocaloid social game launching brought a lot of that stuff back in the fore.
Then there are things like Yamamura Hibiku’s covers, which is in line with what indie artists do, pandemic or not. Maybe the song choice?
If you watched Kurocon, it was quite the covid event and we brought marble to our first show! They had been doing a lot on Youtube during the year. Micco from marble has her own covers during the lockdown here. Acoustic sets from some of their hits are on their official channel.
We can’t omit mentioning Hoshino Gen and the resulting trend/meme if we’re talking about covid covers, I think, so here he is. It is probably the most covered song in 2020 in Japan, because so many people did it on a whim. Unfortunately I would say far majority of covers of my interests were on Instagram or some place that’s hard to search, if it doesn’t even disappear after 24 hours. Instead, have these:
Let me squeeze in some vtubers, because musically they were worth noting in 2020, but maybe someone else can do better justice. Embedding these because, why not.
(Mabuna worked on the songs from Megalobox)
On that note, these three from Hibiki (Thanks, Hibiki!) have their own Youtube channel now and a lot of content! Lots of seiyuu started doing Youtube on dedicated channels during the pandemic, but most post video game lets play streams and comment tracks on the down low. Out of those, maybe Baypex’s were the most amusing I think. Or hearing Watanabe Yui bumming at Matsuzaki Rei’s? When I’m Enterprise and Artsvision each have a Youtube channel now, it means a little more.
Oh, the other thing that happened with Uchideodoru was the layered mixing, as memes do. Such as DAOKO’s and Ishibashi’s:
PS. Yuasa-san!
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