Seven Lessons from Request Hour 2013

Since I'm not revealing what position this song came in, therefore I'm not spoiling anything.

Warning: spoiler alert. I'm assuming you've watched the entire four day concert series. If not, proceed at your own risk. Unless you've been spoiled already, of course. 

The epic four night long series (five, if you include Unit Matsuri) of annual concerts, known as Request Hour, has just concluded with a bang. This year, AKS decided to one-up their previous efforts and streamed every single night on YouTube. If you were a good boy, you would have watched all five nights by now, but in case you have not, the results are here.



Reviewing all four nights of Request Hour, I feel we can all take home something from it. Let me summarise them neatly:

Lesson 1: The era of single domination is over. 
As every night proceeded, there has been one clear trend throughout - nearly every single that has ranked previously has dropped in place this year, irrespective of whether from AKB48, SKE48 or NMB48. Significantly "Heavy Rotation", the past #1 stalwart of Request Hours gone by, has toppled dramatically to 4th. Some are quick to call an end to the "casual and public interest" era, while others simply note the dominance of wota mass voting power - more on that later - evident throughout the setlist. Out with the staid, "casual" AKB48 A-sides and in with traditional wota "battle cries", like Juuryoku Sympathy, Seishun no Laptime, Kitagawa Kenji and, most notably, the new Team 4 chart-stormer, Hashire! Penguin. What this all means in the long-run for AKB48 remains to be seen but for now, the wota are back. In full force.

Lesson 2: Comic relief does not necessarily make for good MCs.

Poor Ricchan. No, really. Even Aki-P thinks so.

If there's one thing that was generally, and universally, criticised about the entire Request Hour concert series, it was the hit-and-miss MC segments. Some were genuinely funny - SONE and "fake Acchan" Kintaro in particular - but others left you wondering "whoever thought the audience would find this funny and interesting should be hung and left out to dry". Indeed, even the big boss himself Aki-P, on Google+, did not think too highly of Day One's entire sports & batsu game segment, and the infamous "let's throw acrophobic Miorin/Lemon onto a giant Tower of Terror-esque theme park ride for no particular reason".

I would not be blaming the members for some of the MC performances; actually, the best MC performances across the four nights were those conducted entirely by the girls themselves (who could forget, for better or worse, the monomanes). And yes, the girls do need that lengthy of an MC so they can change costumes and prepare themselves for the subsequent performances. But ultimately, you really do not need "comic relief" to make an MC a crowd winner. NMB48's Day Four acappella performance proves this. And more.

Lesson 3: The writing is on the wall: Paruru is Acchan's replacement. 
So Atsuko Maeda's gone. What to do with the dozens of unit songs and singles that have her traditionally front-and-center? One method, which I'll elaborate further on, is to "bring her back from the dead". The other? The tried and trusted "find a replacement member". The next question, of course, is then: who to pick? This is the coveted center position, one cannot just simply enter Mordor pick anyone from the entire 48 group.

Simple answer: pick Aki-P's hot favourite running to become the next center of AKB48. Haruka Shimazaki ("Paruru"). Day One, the "singles" night this year, was full of it. Nearly every single A-side featured a Paruru center in lieu of Acchan. Of course, the anti-Paruru netizen crowd were out in full force. But is this something really to complain about? One need not look back too far to realise Paruru's ascension to the upper echelons of AKB48 was the next logical step (some of the SSA/Tokyo Dome performances come to mind - I'm looking at you, Nagisa no Cherry). An expected reality, rather than an invitation for rage. And whether you like this trend or not, this is the future of AKB48, Paruru basking in the glory of senbatsu.

Actually, Paruru sums it up quite nicely:

Lesson 4: The "sister groups in AKB48" argument is dead. Since a long time ago.
Some say that Day Two can equally be referred to as "Day SKE48". Or "Day Team KII (3rd)", judging by how many KII (3rd Stage) songs got ranked there. Or if you so prefer, Day One and Three had liberal sprinklings of NMB48 throughout. In fact, even HKT48 got a run in with their namesake song at 38th place. Of course, being "AKB48" Request Hour, this was an open invitation for the "purist" murmurers to come out of the woodwork.

Yet they conveniently forget one simple thing: (SKE48's, never mind the AKB48 Team K connection) Jurina Matsui's been in AKB48 singles since Oogoe Diamond. If there ever was a time for this issue, it was then. Five years ago. Nowadays, given the fluid nature of member (and now managerial) cross-appearances, transfers and the like within the entire 48 group, such arguments appear tired and stale. The AKB48 of now is, by defacto, a mass idol group entity that directly comprises also of all its sister groups. So why not celebrate the sister groups' songs being ranked alongside AKB48's own? They are equally as part of the family as anyone else.

And yes, speaking of managerial fluidity, such a shame to see the majority of no-confidence votes imparted by the wota populace. In Australian parlance, we like to use the phrase "give 'em a fair go". I think it applies appropriately here. They have a lot of learn, yes, and there are expectations of performance. But everyone is human: starting their jobs off with a seal of "no confidence" will not help matters. Just ask the SKE48 girls how they feel about the entire drama. (Side note: Of course, it's a little bit more complex than that. Now whether the YouTube "approval by netizen voting" method was entirely needed is another story, but frankly, it is disappointing to see the wota band up so negatively.)

Lesson 5: VTR is in, member replacement is out. 

Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice..

This will not apply if you were one of the lucky couple of thousand who watched the concerts live, in person, at Tokyo Dome City Hall. But for everyone else watching the concert staring madly at their screens, 3.5" to 60"+, you may have likely been fooled quite a few times during these concerts. Or you would have, but for yourself being too emotionally into the moment with your fellow fan peers to not notice the little (actually, some were quite obvious in hindsight) intricacies that gave it all away.

No, Nacchi, Acchan and Yuttan did not come back to attend and perform. But they did... albeit in a 2D video form. When everyone started to get excited about the prospect of Acchan returning to perform Omoide Hotondo, they finally got what they wanted - Acchan perfoming. Except it was footage from 5 months ago (Tokyo Dome), with Takamina in the present standing alone on the stage and singing wholeheartedly to the figure on the big screen in front of her. Same with the "tribute" performance aka. Yume no Kawa, members still left singing and looking up to the screen as if she was no longer in this world. Or something. But hey, better a VTR with the real member performing rather than finding a replacement that will inevitably be criticised even more heavily for "not living up to the original". Or Paruru. (I kid, I kid). A case of the "lesser of two evils", then.

Lesson 6: Be happy that you got a stream. It was, and is, not always going to happen.
Fans sometimes act like little children. "I want Blu-ray releases" (yes, I admit, I was, and still partly am, in that crowd...). "I want 3D". "I want live streaming of every live event and concert that they hold". "I want them to do a world tour". "I want NYC/LON/SYD/SIN48". Maybe AKS was nice enough to give us fans free live streaming of all, and every, night of Request Hour concerts, including the preceding Unit Matsuri. Or perhaps they were fed up and just did it to shut the children up.

In hindsight though, Tokyo Dome appreciably had no live streaming. Not even YouTube's 720p could do the concert justice, quality wise. And certainly not with 200k+ people also streaming it at once. Only a full-blown box-set DVD/Blu-ray release like they did would be appropriate for AKB48's flagship concert series. Thus they did. No way the annual Request Hour, however fun it may be for fans, can live up to it. Of course, I am not saying all the "lesser importance" concerts and live events will get live streaming - otherwise, AKB48's Kouhaku event last year would have been streamed too (it never did). None of us know what events would be chosen for streaming and why, but I am pretty sure management have their reasons - commercial, technical or otherwise. So consider ourselves lucky.

Lesson 7: When the wota want to happen, they will get it. 
If you never understood any of the above lessons, that is fine. However, if you do not understand this particular one, you need to be sent back to finishing school. If you never believed in the power of the wota fanbase, you better start believing in it, because it was out on full display throughout these nights.

Request Hour is never really about how good the song is in order for it to be ranked. It sometimes is, in the case of the aforementioned "classic wota power-up" songs (Kimi no Koto ga Sukidakara or Kodoku na Runner for e.g.). Rather, and more importantly, Request Hour is a demonstration of the wota fanbase's pride, commitment, (buying) power and influence. If you were a Team KII, Kumi Yagami (and/or most of the other recent SKE48 graduands), Miyuki Watanabe, Rena Matsui, Sayaka Akimoto, Haruka Katayama or Sae Miyazawa fan (to name a few of the notables), you had every reason to be happy with the results. Or at least be associated with a fanbase with a lot of purchasing power and influence, economic recession be damned. If you loved Acchan and wanted to see her back, you may have been partly happy at her songs "in passing" being highly ranked. If you wanted to see SDN48 performing once again, live, you got it. 'Course, let's not forget all the (for lack of a better word) "rabid" and "voracious" Team 4 fans being ecstatic at their pride and joy's anthem displacing the once-mighty Heavy Rotation for outright ranking honours; an almost politically charged, "up yours" statement to Aki-P's disbandment of the team during Tokyo Dome last year.

The concept of mass voting in 48 group events such as Request Hour is nothing new: indeed, SKE48's own Request Hour last year showed the combined power of fan's love and send-off for the then graduand, Rikako Hirata, by power voting up one of her key songs, Hazumisaki, all the way to 1st. These past few four nights have only been a reminder, and confirmation, of the fact: never underestimate the power of a group of wota banding up with a goal in mind. Because there is a very high chance they will get close to, or exactly, what they set out to achieve.