As discussed elsewhere on the site, Homicidols.com was created to give me opportunities to bloviate about idols be a portal by which Western (or at least English-language) music fans could connect with the hard side of idol, the punk and metal and 10 kinds of -core performed by the Japanese cultural phenomenon, the idol.

It can be done. Just through some casual digging, I stumbled upon a bootleg rip from Zenbu Kimi no Sei Da’s album that a kind person had put on YouTube because Kiminosei lacked the good sense to give us a video with the release. It was good, so I posted about it, then was able to add another after an exchange with the, uh, publisher. This was the result:

@homicidols Holy fuck! I’m loving this. Where the hell do I buy this? \m/

— 安論 (@metalheadxXx) February 24, 2016

This is what this site exists to accomplish, and now that there’s been some time to breathe, maybe it’s time to try a little project.

Listen to this:

Pretty good, right? Like you’d like to see that performed, and have vocals and be an actual by-definition song.

I had seen that somehow or another in the past, but Idol 2.0 shared it out today, and I was glad to run back into the weird art and, frankly, ass-kicking track.

As it turns out, this for-now-solo piece of music belongs to yet-to-debut PoroPoro Baroque, or Poro2Baro, whose first appearance is slated for next Thursday, March 3.

You can see that they currently consist of a Twitter account, a single track on Soundcloud and what looks like a number of members. What are they about? Where are they from? Who knows?

So this is an adopt-an-idol situation. I’m going to keep up with their official Twitter and try to establish communications with their management, see if I can get additional information.

This will be at the very least a trial run for just how well this West-meets-East experiment can work. I’ll update on the site as much as possible and probably very regularly retweet from their account. Even if you’re not crazy about the music, humor me a little and a) follow them on Twitter, if you use it and b) find ways to share the posts about Poro2baro with other people, with Facebook and the like.

This will officially kick off on March 3 at the same time as the group, and we’ll round back on this with a report on April 4 (I’d say the 1st, but do you really think anything else is going to happen on Fox Day?). I’ll track their gains in Twitter followers, Soundcloud plays, YouTube views (if they post anything) — basically anything that’s publicly available and measurable, I’ll measure.

The goal, though, is less about whether stuff that originates from this site or runs out through the Homicidols social channels goes places (though that’s like Benchmark 1); the goal is to create fans of Poro2baro, to build their presence.

Why Poro2baro? Because they’re so new and so little exposed that small changes in the metrics will be more significant; if posting about Necronomidol’s crowdfunding helped them get the money they needed, it may have been significant, and if posting all that stuff about Babymetal helped turn a person into a fan, it honestly doesn’t make a difference. But every ripple in a puddle is like a tsunami, and that’s way easier to measure.

If there’s no effect, or we just kind of fail, no big deal. People learn by trying and failing, after all. But if we do make an impact bigger than some Twitter followers, not only can we keep the project going in this case, we can explore how the model can be applied in other cases, and how our personal favorites can be elevated, even just a little bit, in the public consciousness outside of Japan.

That’s what this site is about, and I hope that you’ll give it a try with me.

See you Thursday?