4

Just Faking Their Goddamn Voices With Robots

Say your most beloved celebrity died tragically early, without singing all the words you wanted him to. And say you've run out of albums to release that consist of remixes of him ordering coffee and then yelling at the barista that he wanted soy milk, not coconut. What do you do next? Let the guy rest in peace? No, silly, you turn to Japan.

Ken Ishii/Getty Images News/Getty Images
Turn your head toward them in a dead-eyed stare. That's right.

Our Japanese friends, deciding that their blank-staring sex robots weren't creepy enough, have started using technology to metaphorically resurrect dead, no-longer-profitable-enough singers. It's all thanks to the speech synthesizing technology Vocaloid, developed commercially by Yamaha. Vocaloid can be programmed to mimic a particular human singing voice, dead or alive, like an extreme, necromancy-powered version of autotune. Early tests have already produced music from a folk singer who passed away in 2007, and last year, producers announced a new song by rock musician Hideto Matsumoto, who died in 1998 but is now being dragged out of his grave by singing robots. Take a look at the video of the song below, and remind yourself that apart from the backup vocals, no human is singing:

3

Post-Death Twitters

Did you know that Kurt Vonnegut is still alive on the Internet, still spewing out his deep philosophical thoughts to 177,000 followers?

Via Twitter
Then how the hell are people reading your Tweets, genius?

Seeing as how Vonnegut passed away in 2007, I'm reasonably sure that this is simply a devoted fan account, and I guess we should all be grateful that its anonymous author mostly sticks to actual quotes, rather than making every fifth tweet an advertisement for his Vonnegut quote t-shirt store. There's one problem with his devotion to realism, though: It has apparently led many fans to believe that the guy is still alive.

Via Twitter

I guess some of these Vonnegut-repliers could be doing it ironically or as part of an elaborate piece of performance art. But almost every one of those tweets has at least one reply complimenting the author, or even asking questions as if he's going to answer. And at least some of these tweeting fans must not be aware that their idol died years ago, and that the Internet is deceiving them as cruelly as that time it promised them millions from a foreign prince.

Vonnegut isn't alone in the strange Schrodinger world of social media death/undeath. Dead celebrity Twitter accounts are everywhere, and while many are used to harmlessly commemorate anniversaries or provide links to charities, others are largely devoted to selling us stuff. Celebrity Twitters can be insanely profitable, as shown by the case of @JamesDean, a fan account that in 2014 was sued by an agency that manages celebrity estates. The agency, whose case was eventually dismissed, demanded the fan hand over the handle linked to one of cinema's most enduring icons, presumably so they could use it to sell retro hair products or something.

James Woodson/Digital Vision/Getty Images
"We tried just misspelling his last name, but that didn't work out so well."

2

Publishing Everything They Touched

You've probably heard by now that a new book from Harper Lee has been announced, suspiciously soon after the reclusive author suffered a stroke that left her deaf and blind. And that a new Dr. Seuss book is coming out this year, even though the guy died over 20 years ago. Obviously, none of us have read these books yet, and for all we know, they're masterpieces that will add the final sprinkles to the chocolate sundae that is their creators' careers.

RCKeller/iStock/Getty Images
And maybe someone will finally kill that goddamn mockingbird.

But that's not always the case for dead or near-dead writers. Take Mervyn Peake, author of the Gormenghast trilogy. After Peake's health declined, publisher blundering meant that the final book in his trilogy, Titus Alone, was released with entire chapters omitted and "bewildering" editorial changes added throughout. A corrected version took over a decade to come out.

This "vomit out a profitable manuscript at any cost" craze is somehow even worse than the bad albums that are inflicted on poor deceased musicians. Sure, many of those musicians' unreleased material might have been less than stellar, but at least they recorded it in a studio, in front of others. That awful love song about mating dragonflies they thought up while drunk one Wednesday night and then mentally tossed away? It will remain unheard, at least until someone in Japan scans their brains and then makes robots sing it.

Via OurStarBlazers
It will probably look something like this.

1

Literal Ghostwriters

Sometimes, an author of a series of books dies before the series is wrapped up, and another author is drafted in to complete it. And that's fine: Brandon Sanderson finished the Wheel of Time series after original author Robert Jordan passed away, and very few fans screeched in terror. But other times, a ghostwriter takes over from a dead author and then just keeps going, shuffling through the dark, spooky halls of literature again and again like some sort of writing-related ... monster? Zombie? I can't think of a good metaphor here.

Thinkstock/Stockbyte/Getty Images
Non-corporeal part of a dead person that's not dead yet?

The best example of this phenomenon is VC Andrews, who, as the author of the 1979 young adult incest classic Flowers in the Attic, was creepy enough even while she was alive. Andrews had published six novels and was at the height of her career when she died of breast cancer in 1986, but her publishers had a solution to that. A ghostwriter was called in to finish the novel she'd been working on, and then to release more under the successful VC Andrews name. How many more books do you think he's put out since then? Two? Six? Try 70.

Milan Markovic/iStock/Getty Images
"And then ... the incest ... had been dead the whole time. Well, onto 71."

Andrews' ghostwriter, Andrew Neiderman, is a successful author in his own right. Among other things, he wrote the novel that the Keanu Reeves / Al Pacino movie The Devil's Advocate was based on. By all accounts, he's carried on VC Andrews' creepy torch successfully, and for all we know, Andrews is looking down from Author Heaven and smiling at him in between drinks with Kurt Vonnegut, but still. Most professional writers have produced at least something they're not particularly proud of, and Andrews was only 63 when she died. What if she was destined to change her mind about writing creepy incest, and spend her later years writing nice stories about magical horses? But now that a ghostwriter has taken over, her name is still being used to garnish the covers of lurid tales about incestuous rape and teenage prostitutes. For all we know, Andrews could be reacting to her ghostwriting afterlife like some sort of avenging ... specter? Revenant? Man, I'm no good at this.

C. Coville has a Twitter here and a funny book on sale here.

For more from C. Coville, check out 4 Reasons Being a Tall Woman Can Be Worse Than a Short Man and 6 Insanely Dark Online Games for Young Children.

Are you on reddit? Check it: We are too! Click on over to our best of Cracked subreddit.