Why Didn’t Anybody Say It Was February? Happy Birthday to Us!

Well … okay, so it’s mid-February, actually. But yeah, February 1, 2016, was the day I chose to flick the lights on for this ol’ website. I’d been “building it” for several months at that point, collecting assets and planning out a content strategy and the like, and then started writing a backlog of posts in October 2015. I hadn’t quite sussed out how Idol Twitter worked, nor had I found more than a handful of other Westerners to try to connect to, but I had a mission and a fairly decent idea of how to accomplish it.

On that first day, I think I had something like 5 total page views, and they were frankly probably all bots and/or people googling “Kuromiya Rei”. Because I have a background in analytics, I’d hover over the numbers in the early going, checking in at least once per day, trying to measure what did and didn’t work, what people did and didn’t seem to respond to. Not so much because I was trying to have a Popular Idol Blog or anything, but because dammit, I’m actually kind of a professional, and if I was going to do this thing I was going to do it right. There was an objective, after all: LEVERAGE WESTERNERS’ GROWING FASCINATION WITH BABYMETAL TO GET THEM TO LIKE BIS AND STUFF TOO.

I have no idea if that was ever actually successful. Yeah, there are anecdotes from people who are like “I saw a thing on YouTube and liked it and Googled it and I found your website and now I have a Zenkimi tattoo,” but how many are there really. My personal measure of success was always going to be whether a handful of certain acts came to the Americas and/or Europe/West Asian/Africa to perform, and while we’ve been so graced to welcome NECRONOMIDOL and Yukueshirezutsurezure and Oyasumi Hologram and 2& and Yanakoto Sotto Mute and even Chiaki, bless her, to Western shores*, I am shamed to say that not a one of the groups that I originally tagged for U.S. appearances has actually done so yet despite some of them being fairly significant acts not just in Japan but elsewhere in Asia.

So has the project failed? In that regard, it really has! But with five full years under our belts, and really just an absolute ton of development in idol and the fandom and even how casuals connect to it, I think that’s worth talking about a little, no? Continue reading

Pour Lui turns Thirty – Here’s 30 ways to celebrate!

Let church bells ring, let children sing, let wota shout “hooray!” Such revelry because Pour Lui is thirty years today!

Yes, today marks three decades since the birth of idol legend Pour Lui, a woman who, arguably, would herself give birth to the entire Alt-Idol™ genre, only out of her mouth instead of her, er, tummy.  How shall you rejoice?  Don’t worry chums, your wise and friendly Homicidols.com has 30 suggestions to relate of ways to feast and jubilate.  And here they are.

Continue reading

Three Years Later, How Is This Still a Thing?

Well, happy birthday to Homicidols Dot Com, I guess! That was yesterday, if you’re keeping score at home, but I wasn’t in the mood to finish this thing that’s been in the works for a few weeks, so let’s do it a day late and pretend it’s because the cake needed to be replaced or something.  Continue reading

BiS Says Happy Birthday! Next Free Track

I hope it’s somebody’s birthday, because New BiS has a message for you!

Kidding! Kind of! Following up from “Human after all,” here’s another song that’s bringing influence in from all over the place — old-school heavy metal, disco, pop punk, #IDOL — to put together something way more fun than any one constituent element. Continue reading