So I decided to watch some of the 3rd Anniversary Love Live Concert just to truly understand the idol experience.
I've seen the two K-On concerts, and I think they work because they're meant to be a band and half the event is anime fanservice instead of pure music (the fact that they learned to play their character's respective instruments is a nice bonus), but I don't think I got anything watching this concert.
Insert joke about 2d vs 3d here.
Nico pulling a Gene Simmons.
I think the problem is that idol singers aren't all that interesting. There's so many of them that you have to service everyone by giving each singer one song and the sub-units their own song, meaning you don't really care about any of them in particular. The fact that all they do is just dance around and sing isn't all that compelling to watch either, unless you like seeing 20something women dress up in school girl uniforms/costumes while prancing around a stage and making weird gestures. Of course, I missed the whole K-Pop thing, so I'm sure there's some Asian music thing that I just completely missed.
But perhaps the most disappointing part to me is that I discovered that the music is much less complicated than I thought it was. How do you have a 3 or 9 part vocal group and NOT HAVE HARMONIES? I know shitty pop songs are shitty pop songs, but even Green Day has harmonies in their songs.
That said, I suppose the real point of going is to hear them talk to "you" for 30 minutes at the end of the concert. Half of it is shilling to you about various products coming out (Vita game!!!) and half is crying about how grateful they are to have "you" as a fan... I'd like to believe they're being genuine about that, but I'm also so cynical that I can imagine some evil producer telling the girls to cry on cue in order to sell Love Live branded tissues after the concert.
But hey, at least Love Live isn't as stupid as AKB48 with elections and weird shit. lol