I Have
My Own Reasons
To Not Talk About
This AI-Generated Song
2025.7.9
My hobby is to research about modern visual culture, and by that I mean anime and (by extension) the parts of Japanese culture and Japanese public psyche which gives birth to and remains as the supporting pillars of anime. Naturally, to actually carry out that task, you will need to understand Japanese memes at some point - not every one, but just the major, longstanding ones; and among those ones there's this one I have suffered through the unfortunate fate of becoming one of those that are "in the know", the one that I have been consciously avoiding for as long as I can remember... knowing that, you can imagine my surprise when Pitchfork out of all people published an article on an AI-generated song that is nothing but that particular meme I've been avoiding.
Let's talk about that song.
The fvck is the song about?
The song is titled YAJU&U
, and if you look it up on YouTube you'd see it's got (by the time of writing) about 38 million views, which is actually quite insane for an AI-generated song. There's not that much musicality to speak of - you can generate 10 different songs of the same quality every single day by using the free tier subscription offered by SUNO AI. The Pitchfork article said it's like a cheesy showtune for a Disneyland cafe that serves misshapen chicken nuggets, this couldn't be more accurate; but then again, almost every AI-generated music sounds like a cheesy showtune at a misshapen-chicken-nugget-serving cafe. So naturally, one would look for the lyrics to understand why this somehow blew up; and what is unbeknownst to them is that they will not understand a single thing, because the lyrics is almost entirely made up of that exact in-joke they don't know about that makes the song into what it is.
That in-joke, is called 淫夢 [Inmu (or INM)], short for 真夏の夜の淫夢 (A Midsummer Night's Lewd Dream).
It would probably require three full-length university lectures, a whole 12-pack of the strongest cider available in your local off-license store and 3 whole bottles of wine to explain INM lore in its entirety, but in short, some companies ("companies", because there's more than one) made some gay porn movies with plots (as you naturally do), the plots sucked ass (pun not intended), the acting bad and bizarre, and for this reason, whoever's in the movies became subjects of ridicule and mockery, which somehow has never stopped for the last 20 years, because people keep associating other (often mockable) materials to it (including a singer from a music group that has made some very good music (long story), a Touhou fan animation project, and - God, save us - someone's scat fetish log entries on 2chan), and people keep deconstructing (in postmodernism lingo) other things with it. If you have never heard of it before, good, keep it that way; it's not something worthy of your time, no matter how trashy and deserving you might be.
This is the real reason why I don't want to talk about it: it's essentially cyberbullying, it's borderline homophobic (which, according to sources, Gota Nishidera was justifiably angry about), it involves things that shouldn't get involved (like seriously, what does an innocent Touhou fan project has anything to do with you?), and honestly, a good part of it (if not all of it) is seriously disgusting, and it's not something you can just forget once you've been in the know
.
Despite being arguably one of the most seen face among the terminally online in East Asia, somehow no one ever knows who The Man Himself actually is, which is especially impressive when you take how good Japanese are at digging into things into consideration. Rumours have been around, saying that he may have went through plastic surgery or may have died by commit suicide after INM became a thing. Well, either way, whoever and wherever he might be or might've been, I hope he can find true inner peace, because after what he's done, he sure as hell need a hell load of it.