I Guess Idol Can Die Twice: BiS’s One-man, New Single, Old Threat

/ Homicidol Maniac

It stands to reason that BiS, having come back from the dead to a warmish embrace and ultimately a more enthusiastic response after “SOCiALiSM,” would want to keep the momentum going, with a couple of new members and what felt to a lot of people like a good shot in the arm. So at today’s one-man:


Everybody wave hi to Andy!

They followed up a sick performance with this:

New single, August, yay. But more importantly (I think, at least) is their bringing back “IDOL is DEAD” as a token. It’s just the name of their next one-man (Akasaka BLITZ), but the old IDOL iS DEAD era was basically the “old BiS” that a lot of folks have pined for (and I’ll admit to preferring myself). I always took it less as a statement of fact than a promise — we’re coming for you, so watch out. Which, cool, if Pour Lui is feeling good about the music they’ve been working on after grinding through the available unlicensed work available to them for the first two albums back, great; full-throttle BiS is a lot more interesting than going-through-the-motions-BiS. And if I’m reading too much into it, that’s fine, too, because I’m not the creator and don’t get to tell other people what to do.

I could also be way wrong! I’ve alternatingly given Watanabe too much and not enough credit for being a maestro of fan manipulation, so I always want to catch myself when I think that he’s pulling a genuine master stroke as opposed to finding ways to milk as much money out of the mundane as possible. I just think, hey, you have this iconic thing that you did before, and you just released a thing that harkens back to that a little bit, and now you’re using the same title, you must have something similar planned.

And if it turns out to be a live recording of Saki doing a karaoke cover of Fiona Apple, that would play right into the whole thing, too.