Well, it’s been a long time since I posted here.
I’ve pretty much lost most if not all interest in AKB, and NMB is barely holding on.
I did manage to secure concert tickets to the 3rd Anniversary Concert in Osaka, and I feel like that concert will make or break what’s left of my interest in idols. Right now I have very low hopes. The reason for that is that concerts have to do a lot to impress me. I’ve never been a big fan of live music. I’ve only been to a handful of concerts and except for one (Utada’s concert at the House of Blues), I can’t say I’ve really been wowed.
Knowing that NMB lipsyncs at concerts, I don’t imagine it’ll be any better. But there’s hope, I guess.
In the meantime I watched this Documentary thingy. I don’t know why they called it a documentary. There was really just random variety clips inserted in there.
The footage was actually used in an earlier broadcast somewhere so it’s nothing new really.
One thing that always gets me is how tiny they are in real life. On camera they look, uh, life-sized? But when I see them in real life they all look like kids, even if they’re not. I think the HA! outfits makes them look way taller than they really are for some reason that I don’t really know.
The first variety is when 3 of the girls tour SKE’s home base.
Whenever I’ve visited Japan I’ve always debated going to the AKB Cafe. However, lazyedt told me he ate there and when I asked for his opinion, he said “I can’t believe they charge people so much for this.” That pretty much says it all.
See, they go to some other place in Nagoya to eat.
Hitsumabushi seems to be a type of eel-on-rice dish that you eat in multiple ways. It looks absolutely delicious. I may have to try this on my trip.
(It was also nice to see Milky going nuts with the wordplay… “Himatsubushi” means “killing time” and she made a lot of wordplay puns with it. Ah, the good ol’ days.)
Back to the concert…
Those ZKS outfits are way too revealing. They should really update them. It’s not even the classy “revealing”, it’s just… I dunno. I’ll get to that in a minute.
There were also these random “Team M ‘adult talks'” where they talked about things like “How do you feel about Team M, Nana” and “What kind of marriage proposal would you like?”
That kind of stuff to me either feels very generic, or very Cosmo. And I dislike Cosmo.
I’m kinda tired of them asking these questions based on romance when there is clearly no hope for it. It doesn’t make any sense to me anymore. I guess it gets to you when they ask an adult “What’s your ideal date?” when they should have theoretically went on like, a ton of dates already.
And back to the concert we go!
I’m not sure how I feel about this. I finally got around to looking at the lyrics and it’s all very good and respectful, but was that really true for all of them? It felt really weird. If they really wanted to tug at the heartstrings, I think choosing just a few to who she really had an impact to would’ve done a much better job.
Or it could’ve been something crazy.
Like a Jou solo.
This song, Dazai Osamu wo Yondaka hurts a lot because Yui was so good in NMB, and because this song is a fantastic song. I really can’t wait to hear/see the acoustic version. The vocal power is good, the harmonization is good, there are only 3 of them so it’s not too confusing, the outfits are cute, it has everything going for it.
And then Yui returned to AKB.
Sad times.
And then, lastly, I saw some of the concert footage and I came to a realization.
They’re all dancing in their skimpy outfits with their tight T-shirts and short shorts, and I realized that mentally… I’m out of it. There clearly has to be some sort of sex appeal that they’re shooting for, and I just can’t go along with it, and it’s wearing me down. It’s not a moral thing where I’m thinking “Oh yeah, well, I’m old, and they’re young and that is wrong!” but like… they are just too young-looking for me. And yet I’m constantly bombarded with this kind of stuff and it’s just mentally wearing me down. It’s like if there’s a cereal you don’t like, but your friends say the cereal is delicious and you get bombarded with cereal ads and you start to question whether or not your impressions of the cereal are correct. And they really are, you don’t like the cereal, but you feel like you should eat the cereal because it’s supposed to be good.
And the weird thing about that analogy… is that I don’t like cereal anymore. Ugh. This is confusing.