Things to never, ever tweet at me:

What's your take on this, @homicidols?

— 奧貝流行 (@auhby) July 10, 2018

Like, this is important, you guys. You ask for takes, you get takes, and you know that my takes are never short takes and often are in fact quite long takes that the more cynical among us could construe as attempts to pad out the post length and insert extra keywords and stuff. HOW DARE YOU.

But the point is, as the title suggests, that Corenament winners and all-around solid kids doing dangerous music Minna no Kodomo-chan are no longer simply going to be an idol duo, but an idol duo fronting a band:

みんなのこどもちゃんは２人組ユニットからバンド体制へ完全にシフトいたしました。現在いただいているオファー以外は今後全てのライブがバンドでの出演となります。

よろしくお願いします(*ﾟ▽ﾟ)ﾉ

— みんなのこどもちゃん👁 👁 (@kodomocafeid) July 10, 2018

First, good for them. Winning the Corenament was a choice that they made — when management promotes the competition, idols outperform their peers, and doing that means getting recognition. I love raising the profile of personally beloved chika units, especially if they in any way affiliate with TRASH-UP!!, so really everybody wins. And their album, yes, was great. I thought a while ago that the Children were looking to make some moves, and I think that things over the course of 2018 have backed that up, and among those moves is this, to add a band on a permanent basis.

Second, this is what any enterprising, rock-oriented unit needs to do. Idol is, at this point, basically a process of saturation bombing in a scene that was already stuffed to the gills in 2016. Last year’s weird, frayed dismemberment of so many units showed that things were at a point of unsustainability, from the chika scene on up; the increasing trend toward more artistic acts and less hit-’em-on-the-head whee-we-do-loud-tunes entities, last year as well as now, but especially now, is a recovery. There are just so dang many groups, and so many of them are basically knock-offs of each other.

So what do you do? Well, you can have a unique sound. You can have a unique look and an especially unique on-stage style. And you can take yourself seriously enough to keep moving forward and adding elements. For Minna no Kodomo-chan, that’s a check across all points.

But you know what else you can do? You can position yourself as a serious musical performance thing. Like it or not, idol (and idols) isn’t taken all that seriously in terms of excellence. It’s part of the model, seeing the girls develop their talents, and the root economics. If you want to rise out of that clamoring morass that is chika idol, you need to connect better with fans in the broader music scenes, and you do that by leaving core aspects of idol behind. For instance, you make a band!

It’s not just making it work in Japan, either; idol, except as a completely niche interest, is dead in the water in most societies without something to anchor it to those societies. Americans, for instance, are down with pop acts, but not teenagers who aren’t great singers and carry cultural stigmas, and especially not if it’s something that they already have. On the other hand, if the act happens to be toting a band and the whole shebang makes really cool, loud, interesting music, well, you have a there there.

This isn’t to suggest that I think that Minna no Kodomo-chan is trying to come to the States (though, please), just that this is such a solid move because of the credibility it can lend them and the (hopeful) longevity that will come with. Good idea, and may the execution go as well.

And that, friends, is why you don’t ask Maniac for takes.