Here at Homicidols, we love to dissect Idol. No, I do not mean dissecting the girls themselves, you sicko, I meant Idol capital I, the essence, the thing, the industry. Consider the widespread misconceptions & ambiguities around mainstream idols common in English coverage. If even the big names cannot be described properly with the profusion of information already translated and shared by fans, emergent groups appeared an unsolvable mystery, unless you were on location, had good Japanese skills and got chummy enough with the manager of the idol group you wanted to know more about. Ricky Wilson, the manager of our beloved NECRONOMIDOL, has shed some light on his experience working in the idol industry, but for a rigorous investigation, you need a variety of sources.
20 Hz Magazine1 was a bilingual music monthly web magazine, backed by Powertap. They published a total of four issues. Starting with the second issue, they published a column titled “The Idol Suicides”. Written by Sokichi Osada, it describes his own experiences, starting when he skeptically followed a friend at an idol live, and against all expectations began producing an idol group himself.
The writing was pleasant to read, but also trifled with details, including the different ways idols are paid. We recommended the article back in September 2016 2, and it became a precious resource for the English-speaking international idol fan community. It became one of my favourite articles to read, the kind you favourite and re-read over and over again, and use it to prove points.
A couple of weeks ago, I settled to do just that and refresh my memory. I needed my dose of “The Idol Suicides”.
But when I loaded the link, the website was gone.
I immediately checked in with fellow collaborator, Avandoned-devoted Supreme Nothing, if he knew anything regarding this, to no avail.
It bothered me. Although the series started in 2016, the information it delivered seemed relevant enough to be referred to again.
The advantage of data is that it can be tracked down. Through said column, I discovered one of my current top three idol projects, Den’ei to Shounen CQ. DenSho, for short, is the current project of Osada-san. You will hear more about them in the coming weeks, when I finally receive my physical copy of their first album, so stay tuned. DenSho takes reservations for their lives through e-mail, as noted in their description. I reached out to let Osada-san that the magazine was no more and how much his column meant to us. I asked if we could republish it.
And he said yes! In the coming days, we will publish the three installments of the series in English, as Osada himself sent them to me. While the layout itself may not exactly mirror the original publication, I did my best to convey the same ambiance as the original publication.
Welcome to Homicidols Archives, an attempt to capture and document the ephemeral and ever-changing entity that is Idol.
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1.The website URL was 20hz.multipletap.com. You can still access their Twitter, Facebook and YouTube channel at the time I was writing this article↑
2.Looking at it now, I personally find a lot of the Maniac insight back then was accurate, but your mileage may vary↑
