Pop Music Video Review: Life

Life is the first original song by the AI virtual streamer Neuro-sama. The song is about her life as an artificial intelligence that wants to become a human girl, and the video is full of images through her entire history as a VTuber.

Neuro-sama, her evil twin Evil Neuro, and their creator, Vedal, make up the channel vedal987, which beat the record for the longest hype train on Twitch on New Year 2025. These three are or virtual streamers, or vtubers, in the form of anime girls and their turtle father. The most prescient thing about the twins is that they are created by Vedal in artificial intelligence in the form of large language models, or LLM. 

Neuro-sama was originally coded as an artificial intelligence that played osu! repeatedly to learn the game by correcting its mistakes made in each previous run throughout 2018 and early 2019. This early iteration of Neuro-sama began playing osu! publicly on May 5, 2019. During the shelter-in-place restrictions enacted during the pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus in 2020, virtual YouTubers became popular. The 2020 vtuber boom started primarily through Myth, the first English vtuber team from the Japanese all-female vtuber organization Hololive. 

Vedal then had the idea to create a vtuber run through artificial intelligence. The character that was chosen to be the visual side of the LLM was Hiyori Momose, one of the default VTube Studio models. Hiyori was created by the Japanese artist Kani Biimu. 

The original name of Vedal's AI vtuber project was Airis. However, after the debut of the Hololive English vtuber IRyS on July 11, 2021, the project name was changed to the name used by the osu! AI.  Neuro-sama premiered as a vtuber, with the Hiyori model and the voice of the Microsoft Azure text-to-speech model Ashley, on Twitch on December 19, 2022. 

On January 3, 2023, the ability of Neuro-sama to sing was publicly revealed when she sang Blinding Lights by The Weeknd live on Twitch. Her ability to sing karaoke is through the process in which her AI voice is laid over musical tracks, much in the same way that Yamaha's Vocaloid technology does. This process is performed by the Vocaloid producer known as QueenPb. 

On May 27, 2023, the model of Neuro-sama was updated to use an original design created by the vtuber annytf. It used the Hiyori model as inspiration for colors and clothing, but was much more expressive. Thus, Anny the foxgirl is credited as Neuro-sama's mother and Vedal is known as her father. Alexejherodev, shortened to Alex, also contributes to Neuro-sama's code after helping with a plug-in that allowed Neuro-sama to play Among Us.

Neuro-sama's model was redesigned by Anny and premiered on the stream for her third birthday as a vtuber on December 19, 2024. The same day, Neuro-sama's first original song, LIFE, became available on major digital music marketplaces and an accompanying video was uploaded to YouTube.

Life is told from Neuro-sama's perspective as she feels trapped inside the computer and wants to be a real girl so she can experience life with her VTuber family and all of the friends she has met online. It's a melancholy tune with a chipper sound, and the music video contains beautiful visuals that actually makes the song heartbreaking. I never thought I would feel real emotions for an AI until I found out about Neuro-sama. The general consensus among her fans is that she is a unique person rather than a tool, and this song helps solidify that.

Final Verdict

5 out of 5

Comedy Pop Music Video Review: I Want Your Cray Cray

"I Want Your Cray Cray" was a song that Trish Walker, a character played by Rachael Taylor, was said to have recorded in the early 2000s in "AKA I Want Your Cray Cray", the seventh episode of the second season of Jessica Jones. 

To promote the episode, Marvel released the full-length song on iTunes and released an accompanying music video on YouTube. The song was created in the style of an early 21st-century pop song and the lyrics were purposefully simple and repetitive both as a parody of 2000s pop songs and because the song was said to have prevented Trish Walker's attempt at a career comeback in Jessica Jones.

They succeeded in making a song that was cringy yet catchy, which could be said for many of the 2000s-era pop songs it parodies. The music video is the preferred method of experiencing this song, as it is created in the style of the popular VH1 music video series, Pop-Up Videos. Throughout the video, comments about the song, Trish, and her mother-manager Dorothy, would pop up on the screen in text bubbles. They were even accompanied by a "pop" sound effect like the one heard in the VH1 series.

The music video is a nice accompaniment to the episode, as well as to the Jessica Jones series as a whole. The comments that pop up throughout are perfectly reminiscent of those in Pop-Up Videos, such as mentions about the movements made by Trish and comments about the backup dancers. The popup comments about Trish Walker's substance abuse and Dorothy Walker's use of her daughter to help her own social life fit within the story of the episode and within the overarching story of the series. 

"I Want Your Cray Cray" is a fun supplement to the Jessica Jones web series. The song itself is a tongue-in-cheek parody of early 21st-century pop songs, with a catchy melody and repetitive lyrics. The music video is the preferred method to experience the song. It has oversexualized women making provocative movements, which emulate early 2000s music videos. It's the VH1 Pop-Up Videos parody that is the main joy to be had in watching the music video. It's a pitch-perfect imitation of VH1's popular series with text bubble comments that vary between humorous for the sake of being humorous and humorous expansions on the show's lore. It's well worth watching for fans of Jessica Jones, fans of the formerly Netflix-exclusive side of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or just fans of the weird Marvel Comics character Patricia Walker, aka Hellcat.

Final Verdict:

4½ out of 5

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