It goes without saying that creating the sound of a world that doesn’t exist brings challenges.
On the enthusiastic advice of a zoomer friend, I recently watched the Netflix animated show Arcane. It’s a lively sort of thing with a lot of fighting and young people behaving in frustratingly stupid ways in order to advance the plot, so for someone like me who was raised on a diet of VHS-age 1990s anime, it went down easy. One thing bothered me about it though: why does the music in this steampunk-tinted retro sci-fi fantasy world sound like Imagine Dragons?
Obviously there’s a smug, simple answer to that question (because the music in Arcane actually is Imagine Dragons). More broadly, there’s a marketing reason in the way many of the wider music choices evoke 2010s fan-made derivative content in the League of Legends video game FMV community. But in-world, the music made no sense to me. In our world, the 1920s saw the earliest theoretical writings about music composed specifically for the gramophone, anticipating the emergence of musique concrète; it saw the invention of the theremin; programmable music existed in the form of piano rolls for the player piano; the roots of rock’n’roll were beginning to send out vibrations from blues and religious song; German sprechstimme, Brecht and Weill, jazz and various traditions of improvised music were all present and offered era-consistent routes not only into our future but perhaps many fantastical musical possibilities besides. If world building is your thing, the music of a roughly-circa-1920s world is a fun space to play in.
The music of future world sci-fi is not such a different beast. The only material the composer tasked with creating it really has to play with is that which already exists. This is fine in the sense that sci-fi is famously not about the future so much as about an exaggerated present, but this reliance on the present is why the in-world music of so much speculative fiction on film sounds so lame, dragging you back to the familiar present rather than provoking a disconcerting sense of otherness about the distorted new place you’re in. It’s also why Shinichirō Watanabe made one of the best decisions in the history of science fiction by hiring Yoko Kanno to create the music of his and Shōji Kawamori’s future world in Macross Plus.
In particular, I’m talking here about the music of Sharon Apple — that is to say the music attributed in-universe to the virtual pop star, and which represents contemporary pop music as experienced by the people of this future world. To do this, I put together and sequenced a playlist of all the music Sharon Apple performs in the OVAs and film to make what I imagined a more or less coherent album of her music should sound like — eight songs, running to 48 minutes. So what did a pop star of the future sound like in the head of a composer of the early 1990s, with only access to the tools and trends of that era, plus the engine of her own oddball imagination?
As a music writer who grew up in Britain in the 1990s, I can almost smell the drugs in Sharon Apple’s music. The bleed over of acid house, techno and progressive house, the ambient sounds of the chill out room — the atmosphere of the UK rave scene runs through the whole album. The slow, stoned grooves of trip-hop run through the beats of Pulse, while The Borderline blends together seedy, eerie jazz with trippy electronica (in an interesting coincidence, Portishead’s celebrated debut album Dummy and the first episode of Macross Plus were released within three days of each other in 1994). There are echoes of drugged-out British indie music too, particularly the Cocteau Twins, in the ethereal dreampop and folk-tinted melody of Wanna Be An Angel and in the made-up languages of Pulse, Santi-U and A Sai En.
That’s not to say there aren’t Japanese pop fundamentals to a lot of the music as well, of course. The combination of techno/house beats and pop melodies catches onto the important thread of the then-contemporary J-Pop boom being driven by Tetsuya Komuro and his cheesy dance factory. In a classier vein, the song Idol Talk recalls elements of Yellow Magic Orchestra, and particularly some of the 1980s spinoff projects such as Sakamoto and Takahashi’s avant-pop solo works and Hosono’s production work with Miharu Koshi.
But composing music for a future world like Macross Plus does differ a little from the music of a retro fantasy world like Arcane. The shifting trends and technologies that will drive music’s journey into the future are unknown to the composer and, as much as sci-fi is about the present, the passage of time gives those of us actually in the future the opportunity to look back and see what it got right.
The idea that sci-fi is really about the present has a certain poignance for me when it comes to the music of the 1990s given that this was when I grew up as a music fan. Musical and cultural critics like Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher have written about how this era after the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the moment when, in Fisher’s words, “the future has been cancelled” — when liberal capitalism became the only game in town and we (or at least the Western imagination) lost our ability to conceive of the future as anything more than “this but worse”. One cultural consequence of this, together with the flattening of history that putting everything online brought, was a “long 90s” in which new things stopped happening while old things were endlessly remixed. The extent to which this still holds true might be up for debate (Fisher’s The Slow Cancellation of the Future came out in 2014 and Reynolds’ Retromania came out in 2011), but I think it’s broadly true that a clued-up music fan in 1994 would have to tools to understand more or less anything musicians in 2025 were doing, while that same sort of fan from 1963’s brain would have melted into a sticky puddle of goo at the sound of what a lot of people were doing in 1994. Something slowed down from the 1990s onward, which means Yoko Kanno’s Sharon Apple songs were created using a musical and technological vocabulary that we haven’t moved on from all that much.
That said, things at the time were moving extremely fast: musicians in the early 1990s didn’t know the future had been cancelled, because they felt they were still building it. Especially in the electronic scene things were racing forward so fast that white labels would come out one week and be old hat by the next. It was arguably the last time music actually sounded like the future. Of course it’s easy for me to say that “the music that came out when I personally was sixteen years old was the last time music sounded like the future” and you would be rightly suspicious of me. But at least it’s true that the sort of rave-era electronic music that Kanno was drawing from was a remarkably forward-looking period in music: one consciously engaging with the future and trying to push forward into it as fast as it could go.
This is a double edged sword in Sharon Apple’s music. Arguably the most dated sounding parts of this imaginary album I pieced together come in places like the J-Pop/Europop techno of Information High, where even the music of the era swiftly outran what Kanno’s magpie ear was picking up. But the sheer, ecstatic rush, that feeling of pure momentum barreling forward into the future, that she channels from that era nonetheless feels present and authentic in the music: we feel the future not in the music itself so much as in its vector and velocity.
Nonetheless, I’d argue that this sense of the future is more of an aura that helps make Sharon Apple feel plausible in a science fictional context rather than the core of what makes her relevant to where music in our world actually went. Yoko Kanno is a postmodern composer and very much a creature of the networked, post-history cultural ethos of remixing existing sounds. She’s a contemporary of the Shibuya-kei scene, albeit with an idiosyncratic and fascinatingly alien imagination of her own that’s quite separate. Born from a crate-digging otaku-like musical sensibility, Shibuya-kei was by nature an eclectic and difficult to define scene, but key artists like Cornelius, Takako Minekawa and Fantastic Plastic Machine shared an approach stitching together electronics, samples and pop esoterica in unexpected ways that confused traditional genre boundaries. The Hosono-esque pop of Idol Talk (Shibuya-kei had Hosono priors with him having produced early Pizzicato 5) and the hyperactive channel-flipping sound collage in the middle of Santi-U are from a playbook the Sharon Apple project shared with the Shibuya-kei generation.
Kanno’s own off-kilter sensibility, together with the future-facing aura she channels from rave culture helps makes Sharon Apple work as a soundtrack to a fictional time and place that feels distinctly otherworldly. Meanwhile, her Shibuya-kei-like musical magpieism points the way towards a pop of tomorrow that’s closer to where we ended up than most (if any) other similar attempts to imagine the future.
This is something that goes further than just the genre-hopping, cut-and-paste musical ethos and into the in-universe nature of a pop star like Sharon Apple. Sharon may have had precursors, but earlier cartoon bands like The Archies, Josie and the Pussycats or or Jem and The Holograms were at least presented as real in-universe, while Megazone 23’s Eve sounded like any mid-80s kayōkyoku singer and didn’t wear her artificiality on her sleeve the way Sharon Apple does. The first actual virtual idol in our universe, Kyoko Date, appeared a year after Macross Plus, and failed partly because the Horipro agency production team behind her didn’t engage with her artificiality in any real way, and tried to simply recreate a regular pop singer in an uncanny valley CGI shell.
In that sense, what Macross Plus’ story has to say about the question of Sharon Apple’s sentience versus the “soul” provided to her music by producer Myung Fang Lone is less relevant to what makes her such an interesting predictor of future pop music trends than the explicit artificiality of her in-universe presentation. In her concert scenes, Sharon changes hair color, length and style in a flicker, depending on the mood the song demands; her skin is pasty android-white; she wears impossible costumes that seem to clothe her in the night; she is a visibly transparent hologram to those watching live; she splits herself into dozens of duplicates that float around the stadium. This mirrors the frequent costume and style changes of stadium-grade pop stars, which themselves are part of how a pop idol leans into their own artificiality and tells the audience “I can be whatever the moment needs me to be”, and it amplifies them. Sharon Apple is a self-reproducing version of Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych but with no Marilyn: endless Boudrillardian copies with no single original.
The music Kanno produced follows these lines structurally too, with multiple vocalists, including Kanno herself under a couple of pseudonyms, expressing different facets of Sharon Apple’s music in a variety of sometimes fictional languages and with no real consideration for whether they could plausibly be taken for the same singer. Even the vocaloid idol Hatsune Miku, far more successful than predecessors like Kyoko Date in both her fame and in how she engages with her own artificiality, is characterized by a single fixed vocal style synthesized from singer and voice actress Saki Fujita. Sharon Apple doesn’t care: she embraces the full range of voices her artificial nature gives her access to and even harmonizes with herself (herselves?) in choral pieces.
Kanno’s contemporaries in other scenes were picking up on similar conceptual threads and would explore them in their own ways over subsequent years. In the 2000s, the Japanese post-Shibuya-kei group Plus-Tech Squeeze Box constructed themselves on their first album around the concept of an android vocalist (played by the actual human singer Junko Kamada) and by the second album they had ditched Kamada and transformed themselves into a cartoon band that incorporated multiple vocalists under one channel-surfing sonic umbrella. At around the same time, on the other side of the world, Blur vocalist Damon Albarn and comic book artist Jamie Hewlett’s cartoon concept band Gorillaz were emerging with a similar conceit of multiple contributors gathered behind an artificial band.
More recently, actual AI-generated music has become a topic of controversy — not because an AI-generated fake Drake MP3 has hacked into global defense networks and launched a nuclear strike on Kendrick Lamar at the Superbowl, but for more banal but nonetheless significant issues over intellectual property and copyright. The debate over AI touches on more abstract questions too, though.
Part of the current discourse around AI, at least as Large Language Models and related software are branded, centers around a debate over whether they really are a forerunner to some version of AI consciousness or whether they are simple plagiarism machines. There’s a related debate over whether AI’s model of reading, rewriting and presenting back the past work of human creators is really any different from the way humans learn by imitation and create by reconstituting existing work. In musical terms some loose parallels might be a musician who learns by playing cover versions, begins to write through pastiche, and explores their creativity by combining and recontextualizing these ideas — a magpie like Yoko Kanno, for example. There is also some debate over whether the process behind AI-generated art being authentic or not really need matter to the human imagination that perceives and interprets it as its audience.
With AI as it currently stands, we might be able to draw some fairly confident answers to these questions1 but I’d argue that these aren’t really questions about AI at heart, but rather about human creativity: the fumbling imitations of machines turning our thoughts anxiously inward towards what makes us human. Macross Plus also isn’t really about AI as a technology and doesn’t have anything very interesting to say about it as such. What makes Sharon Apple interesting is as a reflection of the human imagination channeled through the tools of mass reproduction and information networks — Sharon doesn’t ask “What if machines could be conscious?” (a magical black box in the series just does it for her) but more like “Are we really our full, authentic, human selves when plugged into the information high of the network, or are we losing it in the noise?”
In the series, Sharon Apple IS Myung Fang Lone. Her music is Myung’s, even her love for Isamu is Myung’s. The conflict the two of them represent is really one person’s internal conflict and plays out a traditional rock biopic narrative of the star who gains fame, loses something of themselves in the process, goes crazy and then remembers why they started making music in the first place. Myung’s own music is presented via the song Voices, appearing in an acoustic piano version and in a slightly more pop arrangement, but both presented as a more traditional singer-songwriter contrast to Sharon Apple’s extravagant artificiality. It’s an interesting song in its own right, the sweet if sentimental folk melody traveling off on a Broadway-like diversion halfway through, before rediscovering its central motif. But while Voices is coded within the series as more authentic, Macross Plus devotes far more of its attention (and, let’s face it, its enthusiasm) to the “fake” pop of Sharon Apple.
The fight between authenticity and pop facade may have been a significant issue in pop culture in the 1990s, but it’s a war the poptimists generally seem to have won by now. The artistic creator as a pre-1965 Bob Dylan type, changing the world with an acoustic guitar and songs written alone in his room is one that a handful of major artists pay lip service to, but it’s not the norm in the machinery of pop production and the writing has been on the wall since Bowie. Nowadays, a Taylor Swift or a Beyonce is not an artist in that old fashioned sense: they are a creative director of their own image — manufactured pop stars who manufacture themselves. Their music isn’t tied to a particular style or genre, their image is fluid, and where they do write their own music, they do so more as a director creates a movie, pulling in and managing various talents. They are Sharon Apples, escaped from their programming and become something far larger than a single human singer-songwriter could ever be. I’d argue that this makes Sharon Apple herself a more prescient piece of science fiction than the 90s iteration of the Macross soap opera that serves as her stage.
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