Hi everyone! This isn’t the special entry I promised a while ago, but it’s still AKB48 news, so I really felt like posting it.

The SEED adding crazyness continues, with Kitahara Rie added to Team A (damn! If they add one more SEED to that Team I’ll be a n00b all over again, I can’t recognize this girl for dear life)

Moving on, we have another SEED, this time joining Team B, Sashihara Rino. Let’s hope that she’s a good singer, after listening to Team B’s Senaka Kara Dakishimete, they are in desperate need for good singers. Yukirin, Haachan, Naruppe, Nakayan and Matsuyuki can’t make everything sound lovely, more help is needed.

Ok, after all that talk about SEEDs, let’s have more talk about SEEDs! Yay! No, I kid. former AKB48 SEED Deguchi Aki has officially joined SKE 48, which is amazing, because she’s an incredible performer and I didn’t want her talent to go to waste! The other semi-familiar face is Takada Shiori, who apparently is the sister of really neglected obscure former Team K member, Takada Ayana. Poor Ayana, I never even heard of anyone being her fan or at least liking her to some extent. That’s pretty sad considering how she was in team K for 3 Stages…

Poor Ayana didn’t even get a different profile pic in all the years she spent in AKB! Just the old and ugly Aitakatta pic… Sad fact.

Well, apparently, Team K members feel the same way that most people do about poor Ayana, seeing how Ohori Megumi (aka. Pervy Queen) posted an entry in her blog saying how she hoped that Shiori would fulfill her sister’s dreams. Ouch. I mean, Takada was in Team K for 3 freaking stages!!!! YOu would think that’s enough but apparently no…

So here’s the pic of SKE48, yes, I am aware that some of the girls look seriously hideous, but this is a common thing in AKB48, at the beggining they kind of look like little trolls, and then a little make over and voila! perfectly cute idols.

So, other than that, the other pretty big happening in AKB48 was the release of the 3 DVD set, the Shibuya AX concert held in January with a countdown of the top 100 songs of AKB48. Funnily enough, this was released almost simultaneously with Morning Musume’s Single Daizenshuu DVD, which I found to be an interesting coincidence, to say the least.

Of course, comparing an AKB48 concert with a MM concert is probably not a very wise thing to do, because regardless of what most people believe, the 2 groups are radically different from each other. MM concerts tend to be all over the top, flashy lights and effects, huge venues, a short tracklist of singles and album songs and hideous costumes of course While AKB48 stick to their “homely” feel even in big concerts. It’s all about the girls, not the show. So the feeling is really different.

However, I couldn’t help but thinking about this a bit further. What if MM would actually perform 100 songs? I’ll tell you what, it would be boring as hell. And no, I don’t mean it out of hate, but simply because while MM’s singles are probably stronger than most of AKB’s stuff (you know, production wise and stuff), their B-sides and album songs tend to be pretty blah, if not downright boring and/or impossible to listen to. Does MM even have 100 great songs to perform? Of course, not all of the songs AKB performed are great songs, hell, one of them wasn’t even a song! (the overture) But the music style of the group allows for songs to be kept in the same line of quality, generally speaking, so nothing falls out of place, and this consistency in the composition of the songs makes up for great concert material, even when songs are taken out of their original Stage Performance context. MM doesn’t necessary have that consistency, because they don’t actually need it. They put out a single, they need the A-side (which will get promoted) to be really good, the B-side to be passable and when all of that needs to be put in an album, then we get the really supbar album songs. This isn’t a bad thing, I insist, it’s just meant to fit into the needs of the group.

Going even further along with this commentary, I must say that some key members were missing during parts of the AKB concert, like Acchan, Maimai, Miichan, Tomochin and so on. The absence of said members didn’t really affect the overall quality of the concert, but it sure hurt some unit songs, where a stand in needed to be placed. Besides, what’s an AKB48 concert without Acchan’s face shoved in your eyes every 2 seconds? It felt kind of weird, and going back to the comparison thing, in MM this kind of stuff just doesn’t happen. See, in AKB the most popular girls get signed with various agencies, which manage their career outside of the group (like acting, modeling, TV hosting, gravure, and so on). So if the girl has to, say, go to a photoshoot on the day of a concert, she misses the concert. So we could safely say that AKB is a side project for the most popular girls (like Oshima Mai, who hasn’t even been seen at the theater much in the A4 revival). MM is radically different, all of the girls are signed to the same agency, and their idol career is their main thing. They never do anything that isn’t sponsored by their agency, and of course, their work schedules for things other than MM never conflict with an important concert.

Well, taking all of this into consideration, I’d like to have a word about the quality of both concerts. I was sincerely blown away when I watched MM’s concert. I used to be a huge fan, then Koharu’s screeches, Reina’s spastic winking and poor Aichan getting shoved in my face all the time drove me away in order to keep my sanity. I still download MM’s concerts, and watch them merely out of tradition. Sure, there are girls I love to watch, like Risa, Eri, Sayu or Aika and Aichan is amazing to see live, but the magic was gone. The excitement I used to feel whenever something new was released just wasn’t there anymore. Last concert I watched I skipped like half of it. I don’t even know the new songs (nor do I want to) so I get bored. And in that same train of thought, when I saw this one up in the H!O tracker I thought “Hmm… let’s see Koharu butcher all of the MM songs I love” and then I sat down and watched it and I was blown away. This concert moved me, it made me remember how much I love this girls and why I stuck with them for so long. This is hands down the best MM concert I’ve seen in quite a long time, and I’m glad I watched it, because every second of it was entertaining and nostalgic all at the same time (and Koharu’s horrible singing didn’t appear in most of the songs, thank God)

And what about AKB’s concert? WOW. That’s all I can say. I can only feel even more proud of being a fan after watching it, knowing how hard on the girls it must’ve been to rehearse 100 freaking songs while having to perform twice a day a completely different thing from what they were going to sing. They all are in full spirits, energetic, dancing their hearts out and 0wning this thing from beginning to end. I thought that a concert like this would bore me to death, but I didn’t even skip one song. Not even the ones I don’t like, because the new performances were incredible. These were 4 different concerts, I believe, which might be the reason why they always seem to be so pumped while MM kind of half asses some of their dances (especially in the first part) in order to have energy for the rest of songs.

I can’t draw a conclusion from this, other than saying that both concerts are great, definitely worth watching. And that all of you people starting in the AKB fandom, this concert is a great way to know all of their popular songs, and realize how AMAZING they are on stage, all of the three teams!

Thanks for reading!