Bilibili Creator ilem: An Ordinary Otaku, an Extraordinary Name in the Anime World | 100 People With Ideas

He is adored on Bilibili, but he treats it all as an outlet for a private hobby, and seems oblivious to his own fame.

The creator ilem sits at the top of Bilibili's food chain.

In the scene known as VOCALOID, music fans write their own songs and then use voice-synthesis software made by Japan's Yamaha to give each song a virtual singer. Japan built the first of these voices, Hatsune Miku among them. After the technology reached China, characters like Luo Tianyi and Yanhe appeared. ilem is without question the most successful figure in Chinese-language VOCALOID. Of the 53 Chinese songs that have passed a million plays — "legendary songs," in the community's phrase — 14 are his alone.

Fans love making a god of him. Out of love for ilem they fill his videos with bullet comments reading "I've joined the faith." In time he acquired the nickname "the Cult Leader." At the end of 2015, Li Yuchun sang his Ordinary Disco (《普通 DISCO》) at Hunan TV's New Year's Eve gala. His followers were enormously proud and talked of little else. They believe the Cult Leader is one of the few people who has broken through the wall between the virtual world and the real one.

For all the worship, ilem keeps a very low profile. Unlike most young creators on Bilibili, he rarely shows fans any side of himself other than his music. Part of it is that he doesn't want to break the illusion. Part of it is that there is something genuinely closed off in his nature.

When ilem posted his first video on Bilibili in 2014, he was a sophomore studying precision instruments at Harbin Institute of Technology. In less than a year he put out more than a dozen videos, among them the ones that made his name — Zombie Dance (《僵尸舞》), Song of the Lunatic (《神经病之歌》), Ordinary Disco. On campus, almost no one could pick him out.

"He kept a low profile. We knew he was from HIT, but I never heard any campus gossip about him." That is about as much as his schoolmates can offer.

ilem's own account explains his thin presence there. "(I was) a shut-in. Basically, when I wasn't in class I didn't go out much." He was no athlete either: "I'm no good at any of it. I can't play basketball. Basketball can play me." That ruled out one of the standard activities of college men.

Most of the time ilem stayed in his dorm room, playing games, watching anime, watching variety shows. "For a while I liked carving wooden swords out of popsicle sticks." His description of himself sounds like a slightly odd otaku: "It's that feeling of being able to amuse yourself alone in a room — whatever's within reach, you can play with it."

Music was one of the things he could amuse himself with alone. He never trained formally — as a child he took electronic keyboard lessons, "the kind where I lasted a few days" — but he picked up the habit of writing the odd tune.

One day a neighbor suggested he find someone to sing them. "I can't really sing myself." That is what made him think of VOCALOID. He already knew Hatsune Miku from the PSP game Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA, and had come across the later characters, Luo Tianyi and Yanhe. As ilem put it: "I thought of the thing, and then I used it."

Making a VOCALOID track is not complicated. ilem started out writing scores in a piano notation program called Overture. Wanting guitar and drums, he switched to Fruity Loops Studio, which he found online — FL, as the industry calls it.

Once he had the rhythm, chords and arrangement down, he could put a song together in the software. He filmed the process and posted it on Bilibili. That tutorial was ilem's first video.

It was the summer after his sophomore year. Making VOCALOID tracks became a way to let feelings out. Like most people his age, what confused ilem most was his own life. He couldn't say whether he liked precision instruments, and hadn't decided whether to sit the graduate entrance exam or go straight to a job. The blur ahead of him kept him low.

That knot found its way into his first original song, The Same (《一样》): "But I can't lie to myself / the future is within reach / success doesn't always come from effort / the world isn't fair." In the video, stick figures moved along with the grey lyrics and tune, and the whole thing gave off dejection.

"Things weren't going well for me then. You can tell from the lyrics that I wasn't happy," ilem said.

On August 18, 2014, he uploaded The Same to Bilibili. In its first week it got two or three hundred plays, about what he had expected. Five days later he uploaded his second song, Didn't Take My Meds Today (《今天没吃药》). When that one, as unsettling as the first, drew more than 3,000 plays, ilem finally thought: "not bad, actually pretty impressive."

He still preferred working alone, quietly making videos. His output at school had no fixed rhythm — slower when exams closed in, faster when he had time.

Shooting the music video for Dalabengba (《达拉崩吧》), ilem wanted somewhere with few people, so he found a study room in his dorm building. For material for this tale of a hero and a dragon, he looked around his room. He dug a deck of playing cards out of a drawer and made them into people. An upturned food-delivery box became a mountain. Sticky notes and A4 paper carried the lyrics. As for the dragon: "I looked for something that resembled a dragon, saw the trash can, and thought, you'll do."

The friends he made through his videos stayed mostly inside VOCALOID. In QQ hobby groups people talked about anime series and traded notes on their own work. ilem's first version of Zombie Dance was cheerful, with the feel of a crowd dancing in a club. People in the group heard it and suggested he darken it, which produced the faintly cultish version that ended up onscreen — the one that had plenty of fans commenting "stay safe at home."

As he became better known, more attention came.

On one side, he was glad to be recognized. "When you're at university, without a job, before you've realized your own worth, everyone thinks about it — where is my value, how am I needed by other people. It's an important question. You come to recognize yourself through other people recognizing you."

The recognition on Bilibili gave meaning to a life that had felt directionless. "When you know that what you're doing means something, that people like what you make, and that they're really, seriously looking forward to more of it — that's a huge encouragement to me. My whole attitude to life got a lot more positive."

ilem calls himself a praise-driven personality. "Say today I go and wash a bowl in the kitchen. I get the bowl very clean, but I don't rinse out the rag, I just toss it in the sink. If you say, 'The bowl looks great, and it'd be even better if you wrung the rag out too,' I can probably take that, because you're praising me for the bowl. And next time I'll be more inclined to wash the bowl, because I know it makes you happy. But if you come at me and say, 'You washed the bowl but didn't wring out the rag, and leaving it in the sink like that breeds bacteria' — this is a conversation that has actually happened — 'leaving it in the sink like that breeds bacteria, don't do it again' — then maybe next time I won't wash the bowl at all."

On the other side, for a while ilem minded the tidy verdicts that came with labels: "maddeningly catchy," "brainwashing." He gave an example. A reviewer, writing about his work, said his songs ran mainly on internet memes. The review appeared before Song of the Great Wine (《大氿歌》), from the album 2:3, came out. After it did, the same reviewer added that the song carried on the meme-driven style — only that the earlier memes were comic ones, while Song of the Great Wine's were historical allusions.

In fact he had deliberately tried different styles from the start. Fondest Memories of Jiangnan (《最忆江南》) went for ink-wash realism; Song of the Lone Bachelor (《孤高光棍歌》) and Flamenco Star (《弗兰门戈之星》) worked in rap and flamenco; Lanxiang Kuaishu (《蓝翔快书》) and The Great Artist (《大艺术家》) were not even sung — one is kuaiban, rhythmic clapper-talk, the other xiangsheng, crosstalk …

ilem also put his view of labelling on Zhihu. Under the lyric "singing the praises of this greatest of eras," he argued, his song The Great Era (《大时代》) was really about a wave of anti-intellectualism. "But it seems nobody has brought that up, so I'll sulkily add it here myself."

He thought it a shame that commenters saw none of this range: "What you do and how other people see you — the gap between the two is just enormous."

"At first I wasn't used to it, I couldn't handle that kind of thing." In 2016 a thread appeared on Zhihu asking whether ilem had any embarrassing history. He answered it himself, coming back several times to add more, and in his last addition wrote: "If a year from now you still haven't done anything, and you're still happily trashing this person and slagging off that one, then I hope you enjoy yourself. But we're going to have to take back our respect for you, you pitiful little keyboard warrior."

Slowly he adjusted. Today he says he has made his peace with how people online treat him, and thinks it best to let things take their course. No single event caused the shift; it came gradually.

"Thanks to HIT," he said, half joking. "The way of thinking it taught me helped a lot." Working with data and experiments taught him this: other people's feelings and judgments belong to feeling, which cannot be controlled, but the logic behind those feelings and behaviors can be analyzed. People sometimes just get used to filing what they see into a fixed system of judgment, and are unwilling to overturn it — like that reviewer of Song of the Great Wine, who was really working to fit his verdict on ilem "into a single line, or a single plane." So he gradually stopped taking labels to heart.

"In mathematical terms: you know this thing can't be worked out, it has no solution, and you insist on calculating one anyway — don't do that," ilem said. Ask him now how he feels about his music, and the answer is: "I'm pretty satisfied with all of it."

The satisfaction may come from knowing himself. For all the halo of "Cult Leader," ilem is more interested in his own limits. In the interview, the thing he came back to again and again was that, without formal training, his knowledge of music is still short.

He often asks friends with music degrees for help. He has come to see that for someone untrained like him, work is driven by inspiration, and he often cannot handle composing to order. People with professional training have the rules in hand and manage that easily; they need inspiration only when they are reaching for something higher.

Song of the Lunatic, the song that brought ilem wide attention, was a classic product of inspiration. He remembers coming out of the bathhouse — or maybe the cafeteria — when the laughter of two boys nearby caught his ear. "If you got a lot of people to sing the same thing, all they could do is laugh," he thought at the time.

In Song of the Lunatic he used two Chinese voice banks and two Japanese ones. The Japanese banks can't sing Chinese, but that didn't get in the way of the laughing. When he finished, he wrote in his fan group that the new one was "seriously hilarious."

"To have a style, you need a fairly high level of skill. Back then I thought I was working toward different styles; looking back, maybe that's too big a word for it. Never mind — I'll keep trying to make things different from what came before."

In 2018 ilem was invited to make an album, 2:3, with Zhang Yadong. Zhang is one of China's top music producers and has worked with Faye Wong for years. ilem treated it as a lesson from the start. His own part was finished once he had written the words and music alone, but he still flew from Dalian to Beijing to watch the recording. Each time Zhang gave a singer a note, ilem would ask him why.

"Zhang Yadong and his team are a ceiling for us — the very top," ilem said. Using a phrase like "top of the food chain" for Zhang, he did not seem to notice that in Bilibili's world he stands at the top of the food chain himself.

This was not ilem's first work with the traditional music business. In January 2016, Dashi Copyright, a label under Taihe Music Group, announced it had signed him. What it wanted was less his songwriting than his value as a symbol in anime-and-games culture. Signing ilem amounted to locking in the users active on Bilibili — and only by winning young users could a steadily declining music industry hope to save itself.

ilem understood none of this. About his own success he still seems almost indifferent. As of April 3, 2019, he had 1.013 million followers on Bilibili and had picked up the title of "Bilibili 10th Anniversary Achievement Award creator," and he still thinks of it all as a small VOCALOID matter. "It's hard to say I've made it. Feels like it doesn't reach that level."

What he has accepted are the rules of the traditional music world. "For me, a lot of people in these groups are star students from music conservatories. There's no way you take what you've got and go up against them on technical knowledge, so you end up asking them for help. Luckily a lot of them are very kind."

After graduating in 2016, ilem found a job with no clocking in that mostly let him set his own hours, so he could keep his habit of not starting work until after midnight.

"Once you've kept a hobby up for a long time, you're bound to start wondering whether you could do it better." Compared with the early days, when music was only a way to work off frustration, his attitude toward it has shifted slightly.

For now, though, ilem makes progress mostly by doing and by talking with others; he has no near-term wish to go back to school for formal training so that he can live off music.

He has thought about what would happen if music became a profession, something that tied him down: he might not be able to keep his creativity. "If the thing gets turned around into a goal, then I'm doing it in order to be better, rather than wanting to be better because I love it. If I ever end up in that frame of mind, it becomes something I have to force myself to stick with, and I don't know how long I could keep that up."

Cover image source: amiami-san, and the official Weibo of @HatsuneMikuCryptonFutureMedia