SMTown NYC Day 3: Tell Me Your Wish

If you want to talk about an inhuman time to get up, how about the loons who camped out around midtown Manhattan all night after the SMTown concert so that they could get their signed Girls’ Generation CDs in the morning. I mean, when people tell you “show up at the Good Morning America studio around 7 am and early arrivals can win one of 50 signed CDs,” that CLEARLY means you should start lining up at 2 am.

So being the NORMAL person that I am, I slept back in my hotel and returned to Times Square the next morning around 7:30 am to the following sight:

Who are all these people and why are they wearing pink shirts?!

In traditional Good Morning America fashion, every 15 or minutes or so the crowd would go wild as the camera focused on the teeming masses. This meant that NORMAL Americans watching this on TV suddenly saw signs such as “Girls’ Generation” and “TaeNy pairing ONLY!” and wondered if there was a new Occupy going on.

The winning sign, clearly.

I also brought my reversible AKB48 troll sign once again:

SMTown NYC Day 2: Bring the Boys and the Girls out

WELL I have about ten bajillion fancam videos to upload from the concert, and I have to wake up in another 4 hours for the Good Morning America fan-spammage where psychotic Soshi nuts are going to crash American network television with signs saying “SMTOWN IN INDONESIA INDONESIA INDONESIA INDONESIA” how much they love SNSD.

So instead I will pad this out into a thousand-word post by including a picture:

Hi girls!

A more thorough write-up to come once I have calmed the hell down.
(And uploaded the videos.)

SMTown NYC Day 1: Into the New World

ARE. YOU. READY?!! AY ... KAY ... BEE ...... oh wait

It should have been no surprise that Koreaboos on the East Coast are pretty much like Koreaboos on the West Coast, except with a better public transit system. With enough transfers and rail tickets, I could pretty much take the trains and subways from Newark, NJ (cheap place to stay) all the way to JFK International Airport just to greet GIRLS’ GENERATION.

This also meant making an appropriate fan sign:

BAAAHAHAHA JUST KIDDING

That’s more like it.

The End of the End and the Beginning of the Beginning

An anonymous stupid ass wota once said that Morning Musume went down the hole in popularity because the lineup became stagnant sometime around 2007. That is a hilarious LIE. If anything, the group’s decline—not just in sales but also in pop-culture relevance—began much earlier than that. As early as 2003 you would see manga or TV show punchlines along the lines of “I can’t remember who’s in Morning Musume anymore because all the members changed.” In other words, the general public’s problem was not the lineup always being the same, but the lineup changing too much. It was a dynamic, unusual way to run a idol group—but it also confused the hell out of people. (It also led to condescending, English-speaking J-entertainment writers making unfortunate comparisons to Menudo.)

IN REALITY, if I were to list the causes of Momusu’s current trajectory in the Japanese pop culture landscape, it would go something like this:

1) the natural showbiz cycle
2) everyone’s original favorites left
3) Tsunku ran out of great song hooks and the producers ran out of good arrangements
4) Poor marketing management
5) AKB48

HAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!11 about that last one, btw.

The hardest goodbye

It is almost too daunting to answer the question, “What does The Great Ai Takahashi Graduation of 2011 mean to Morning Musume?” You have to go back to basic principles and answer things like, “What is Morning Musume about? Who are they? WHAT are they?”