I’ve been watching anime for what feels like a long ass time now. I didn’t seriously strap down and become a total weeb until 2016 when I started watching seasonal anime with Kinky. Before then I’d just watch whatever if other people said it was good or if I found it randomly and it sparked my interest. Even still, I managed to be deep enough into anime culture to know the kind of shit that was associated with it. And back in my day anime ruled over two domains in the music world: Vocaloid and Nightcore. The second one is a bit more confusing.
You see, it all began when this pair of Norwegian DJs started a dynamic duo called Nightcore. The original meaning was that their music was the “core” of the night so it kept the party going. Their main musical focus was on speeding up tracks to create energizing beats that got people pumped. The problem is that since their main musical process was making shit go a little faster, it didn’t take long before everyone on the Internet said “it’s so easy, even I can do it!”. This revelation occurred during 2010, and Nightcore began an upward popularity trend that lasted several years. But the much more pressing question, is why did anime become so closely intertwined with it?
The boys that started it all.
Most of the history of Nightcore is easy to discover after a quick Google search, but the connection to anime is a bit harder to find. Conducting searches that ask the question typically lead to Reddit posts, Quora posts, and Yahoo answers with users asking the same thing themselves. Explanations are of varying detail and quality. Some say that since Nightcore pretty much makes every vocalist sound like a high-pitched girl regardless of whether they were or not, anime girl pictures were used to match it. Some say that copyright detectors had a much harder time taking down sped up music, so it was a way to reflect the nature of how many people were skirting by Japanese copyright law by using Nightcore’s style (this doesn’t account for why American songs are almost always accompanied by an anime pic too though). Others suggested the eye-catching art was merely a way to garnish views on uploads or that nightcore in general sounded similar to Japanese pop music and thus the choice was to reflect that. I shifted through suggestions for a half an hour or so but didn’t find any concrete answer that had evidence to back it up.
Now this one takes me back. Maikel6311 was noted to be an early distributor of Nightcore music on YouTube.
Regardless of how it started, one thing is certain, this shit is dying out. I haven’t heard anyone say “Nightcore” out loud, or actually, even in text to me in a long, long time. I’m not sure if the copyright system got better at snuffing out uploads which slowed the genre, or if people simply got bored of listening to shit be sped up all the time. I’ll admit I partook in a dab of night here, a dash of core here in early high school. However, since then I almost forgot about the genre entirely. I went back to listen to some while preparing for this article, and well, uh, I can’t say I miss it too much. A couple songs were still banging but the vast majority were just garbage that completely obliterated the original tone, tempo, sound, well, everything actually of the song and didn’t offer much in return.
I'm no investor, but I'm not putting any stock in this one.
According to the graph, Nightcore’s popularity peaked around 2016 and has been slowly declining ever since. I think it’s safe to draw the conclusion then that my decision to start watching anime more seriously in 2016 single handedly destroyed an entire sub genre of music remixes. Sorry about that. For now though, Nightcore is on a steady decline and I don’t see it having a recovery unless something major happens. Gently into that good night, as it were. Did you listen to Nightcore? Why is Nightcore associated with anime? Will it ever see a revival? Turn up your WPM and leave a comment below!
