Uma Musume is often called an “idol thing”, and while the presence of Live Shows are an easy thing to point to as the reason for this, I always say that if it was “an idol thing” then Smart Falcon’s main character trait wouldn’t be explicitly being an idol.
Live Shows can feel like some sort of weird… vestigial appendage sort of situation. Like some weird leftover from The Idol Days that I’ll explain down the line.
The game has made peace with this though. Akihiro Honda, Cygames’ composer, once commented that to him the live shows in Uma Musume felt more similar to Joshi Puroresu (Female Pro Wrestling), particularly from the Showa era, when Live Shows were a common ocurrence after the matches.
This is Kakemeguru Seishun, performed by the wrestling duo Beauty Pair. And if the name sounds familiar, it’s because They WERE the inspiration for the anime/light novel Dirty Pair in a roundabout way. As the story goes, author A. Bertram Chandler was in Japan and in his itinerary he stopped by Studio Nue, where he was to meet with Haruka Takachiho, and by suggestion of staffers Yuri Tanaka and Keiko Otoguro they went to an All Japan’s Women Pro-Wrestling show where Beauty Pair was on the card. Then something happened in the middle of the show that made Chandler comment that “they might be the Beauty Pair but these girls with you are the Dirty Pair”.
This isn’t the post where I go off about wrestling (lie), but it’s to illustrate the key idea: A Live Performance after matches was often customary at the time. And even nowadays Joshi Puroresu carries a lot of idol elements with it (but that’s a story for another day also).
This is the approach that Uma Musume takes to its live shows, as a sort of post-match victory lap. The main element where you can tell this is the fact that all the songs are agnostic to any girl. Next Frontier (my personal favorite) isn’t any girl’s song but the Live Show that happens after Tenno Sho or Arima Kinen, Blow My Gale is just the Live Show for winning the Twinkle Star Climax at the end of Make A New Track, which itself replaces Umapyoi Densetsu.
Umapyoi Densetsu, by the way, is the oldest song implemented so far, being the background song of that one first godawful trailer back in 2016. It’s also the inspiration for the name of this blog, so hey.
Even when in the Main Story every girl gets their own personal song to perform at the end of their chapter (Transforming being my personal favorite amongst them), it’s just to close off their arc rather than something that happens as the climax of the story.
And this is the key difference with an idol property. While Uma Musume shares some structural elements with it, like how all the emotional development precedes a confrontation, there’s two things to note about this: The first is that rather than being directly a carryover from idol IPs, that structure is a carryover from sports IPs that idol properties have adapted (I remember a friend once described Love Live as “similar to a cheerleading competition” and it’s not too far off, actually); and second is the fact that unlike in idol properties, the “confrontation” isn’t the Live Show, but the race.
In any idol-adjacent thing from Love Live to Bandori, the Live Show is the “battlefield”, the place where all the emotional growth and skill is either shown or tested, many times the songs performed will be given some emotional or personal connection to sell it further.
This can often result on the musical part of said song being… really subpar in the hopes that the emotional connection sold through the drama will offset the faults. But that’s not the topic for today or for this blog.
The point is that while ささやかな祈り (Sasayaka na Inori/Modest Prayer) is very much Rice Shower’s song (a melancholic ballad about chasing happiness), singing it is not Rice Shower’s story climax, it is instead a meditation or a victory lap on what her story entailed.
One detail I really like about the songs in Uma Musume’s repertoire is their use of running and the goal line as a metaphor. Idol songs often use imagery of love and romance as a shorthand that can also be read as many other elements. For example in another one of my favorites, Soldier Game from Love Live, the lyrics can be read as both a girl telling their object of affection that they’re not just small girl anymore but a soldier in love’s game, but it can also be seen as an allegory to growing up and not wanting the world to underestimate you anymore framed through the concept of being in love.
And because love is not allowed in Uma Musume, In Sasayaka na Inori the lyrics talk about reaching up some stairs and trying to grasp happiness, Next Frontier talks about being set on a path and not stopping for anyone until you reach the top. The way they use that language of being in a race, running, or reaching a goal, is very reminiscent of using Love and Growing Up in other IPs’ songs.
So hopefully this answers a bit why a game about running and racing puts so much emphasis in singing and performing. As a homage to a different sport where that was done and to the narrative value it had on it.
The problem is that this only answers things on a meta standpoint, on the external, production and consumer angle. But I’ve talked often about how in Uma Musume everyone feels like they have a life and a place in the world, where things feel like they’re there on purpose instead of “just because”. So do people in this world just accept Live Shows without thinking?
No! And there’s a whole scenario that precisely asks to itself why are things the way they are.
But that’s a story for later and we’re still in that Basics mood.