In another installment of odd Japanese things, I ran across this music video of an idol girl group called AKB48 which has, incredibly, 48 members. Yeah, you read that right. Now I had heard of Morning Musume in the past and was pretty incredulous about them too but even they never went into double digit membership at any one time I don't think.
Now I'm sooo glad that for the most part, boy/girl bands aren't really "in" in the US music scene anymore but they're still going strong over in Asia and frankly I never understood the appeal. I mean having 4 or 5 guys/gals prancing around is already border-line annoying but why, why in the name of all that's good and holy would you create a group with 48 members? Even if they're broken down into 3 groups of 16 that's still 3 times as many members as there should be.
Comments (3)
I don't know why they even bother to post times for same-day ticket sales when none are set aside for the theatre box office; they're always sold out (to the same otaku) over the internet. Yeah, I tried to get tix several times... just because.
Oh, and when they perform as Himawari-gumi (which was quite often in early March), Teams A and K perform together with several members of AKB48 SEED (the farm team, sort of), bringing the total to about 34 onstage.
BTW, Momusu are arguably considered has-beens. The fact that they recently added 2 (non-zainichi) Chinese might be a sign of struggling to stay fresh.
Posted by kaige | March 22, 2008 7:17 AM
Posted on March 22, 2008 07:17
All I know is you'd have to be one hell of a dedicated fan to keep track of 48 people in an idol group.
Posted by Ben | March 23, 2008 1:58 AM
Posted on March 23, 2008 01:58
They're the Wu-Tang of j-pop!
Posted by felix | March 24, 2008 8:55 AM
Posted on March 24, 2008 08:55