AKB48

AKB48 has 64 members, broken down into various teams. If I recall correctly, the Beatles had just 4 members and 1 team, but popular music has changed over time.



I have no idea what that is a video for. The YouTube site for the group is mostly in Japanese. There's links there to their website, also mostly in Japanese. There is something that strikes me as innately bizarre about Japanese pop music, and its closely related Korean cousin. They've taken their direction from Western performers whose music is secondary to their performances and virtually eliminated the music altogether. I can't imagine even if I understood what they were singing that I would want to listen to it on the radio, much like with Madonna, where although I do understand what she is singing, I still don't want to listen to it on the radio. It's not music, it's production. But put these people on stage, a couple of dozen cute girls all dancing in unison, or one Madonna doing her best to pretend she's not old enough to be Lady Gaga's grandmother, and you've got spectacle, and a lot of popular music today stands or falls on its spectacularness, or lack thereof. Give 'em the old razzle dazzle...

I spent a fruitless fifteen minutes bouncing around on AKB48 sites trying to figure them out, after reading an article explaining how they're not allowed to date. Now I've passed them along and you can do likewise.