Today, AKB48 announced that they are launching an internet service provider, which was a little surprising, given that they are a pop group. What was a little more surprising was the promotion they launched with the website.
I'll explain later quite what is going on. First, let's talk about AKB48 themselves. The girl in the picture is Yuko Oshima, member of 'idol group' AKB48, holders of the Guinness World Record for largest pop group. How many members? No, it's not, it's 59 (at the moment at least).
AKB48 are split in to four teams, team A, team K, team B, and team, er, four. There are also trainees. AKB is a shortening of Akihabara, the Tokyo 'otaku' district known for tech stores where you can negotiate the price, lots of manga, and lots of teenagers. On the 8th floor of a peculiar shop called Don Quijote (known to locals as Donki, you can buy pretty much anything you can think of, 24 hours a day) sits the AKB theatre where members of the group perform every day. Tickets are handed out by lottery.
As if that's not enough, AKB have spawned three further groups – SKE48, SDN48, NMB48 – all based in different parts of Japan. In total there are 152 girls. Now, at least. Another two groups (one in Jakarta) have been announced. There may be more.
The music is standard high-pitched J-pop. Here's an example. What I particularly love about this is the 50s French black and white melancholy opening, followed by the jarring, sudden shift as the video cranks into sunny J-pop-land.
So far, so good. The details of the many side groups, collaborations and "derivation units" can be found on this overly descriptive wikipedia article.
To the elections. It stands to reason that you can't fit all the girls into one PV (promoted video, the commonly used term for a music video), so you've got to choose. The top 21 elected get to star in the video, and the numbers 1-12 do the singing. The next ten sing the B side. The rest – don't do anything.
Earlier this year, a new member appeared: Aimi Eguchi. Here she is:
Good looking? She's fake. Doesn't exist. Made up. Made up, in fact, of component parts from six other girls in the band, much to the shock of the otaku who had fallen in love with her. This goes some way towards explaining what happened.
Which brings us back to Yuko Oshima and her baby. It is, the ad is basically saying, your baby, if you sign up to the AKB ISP. You can make babies with Oshima-san. How? Well, remember that face-blending technology they clearly came up with to create Aimi Eguchi?
What next? Who the fuck knows. But they're expanding, that's for sure, so watch out.
by tom
