I feel increasingly like SPARK SPEAKER is becoming this undeniable force. Chika, yes, for all that entails, and hard-working street performers on top of that, but please take a look at this live video and tell me that you aren’t immensely jealous of the people who got to experience it in-the-flesh live:

This is best idol.

I keep referring to this because I mean it, the 969-is-closest-to-what-Maniac-would-do-with-idols-in-America thing, and also because it’s relevant when you see this kind of power and swagger on stage. It obviates a normal expectation of how an idol performance can go; it takes itself seriously from an oblique angle that says that it’s the performers themselves and the image that they project, rather than the package that they perform, that’s important. Hell, the choreography is more of a suggested set of complimentary movements to block out the stage action while the members, especially Shizuka, basically strut — and vocal-strut — their way around, freely commanding that everybody within eyesight and earshot pay attention to them right now.

These are performers who own their game, and they know it and act like it. They’re loving this, and the people clogging that floor are rapt, desperate to eat out of the idols’ hands in metaphorical and no doubt highly literal ways. That’s power, the kind of power that an Americanized idol project would no doubt have to wield with diabolical glee if it were to get beyond fringe fests and the like. But it’s also the kind of power that, in a just world, would have SPARK SPEAKER rising far and fast. Chika idol is replete with merry mayhem and people doing it for love; few are crushing it to this level right now.