[Told by a Female Singer-Songwriter] The Difference Between Idols and Bands (Part 1)

Last updated:2024/8/6

[Told by a Female Singer-Songwriter] The Difference Between Idols and Bands (Part 1)

singer-songwritermisaki-tan
Singer-songwriter Misaki-tan, born from punk rock and raised on subculture. She was too headstrong to form a band, so starting in December 2015 she began pounding out her own songs with just an acoustic guitar to play punk rock. Originals like “Ugly Girl’s Selfies, Fat Girl’s Bare Legs” and “Theme of the F***ing Old Lady and F***ing Old Man” keep coming one after another, each distinctive and unique. With a freewheeling live show built on a crowd-engaging performance style and brutally straightforward MCs, she appears not only at acoustic singer-songwriter events but also at band and idol events. (If anything, she can even feel out of place at acoustic events.)

Singer-songwriterMisaki-tanIt is.

This time, I’m going to talk, quite selfishly, about what I usually feel regarding “idols.”

More like an “underground idol” than just an “idol,” I guess.

People often say that the underground and the surface aren’t connected, but personally, I think “idols” and “underground idols” are completely different professions.

An indie-band-loving subculture girl suddenly becomes an idol

https://twitter.com/misakitan22/status/848486332271706112/photo/1

As a subcultural girl who loved indie bands and spent my youth afflicted with something close to chuunibyo, I had absolutely no interest in the seemingly glittery world of idols.

However, for the rather simple and fangirl-ish reason that I was invited by Rino Oishi—the singer-songwriter/band member I was already a fan of—I ended up dipping one foot into the world of underground idols.

Culture shock in the idol scene

I grew up in a warm household where my lullabies from the day I was born were The Blue Hearts, and if you rummaged through the closet you’d find a Sex Pistols poster—surrounded by band sounds.

I’ve only ever been in environments where people aren’t into idols, so I really don’t know anything about them.

When I got involved with the idol scene, the culture shock was overwhelming.

For someone like me who has only ever been to band gigs, each and every thing—maybe obvious to everyone else—feels like a huge shock.

First of all, I couldn’t make sense of the timetable.

15 minutes of thinking time and 0 minutes of transition time???

How do you switch/convert in zero minutes?

What do you mean by 15 minutes?

So how many songs can you play???

There’s this mysterious “merch sales time (?)” that lasts a whole 60 minutes—what on earth are we supposed to do during that time??????

Like that.

To begin with, as someone used to band shows, I found it absurd to have a live setup where you just play a karaoke track made by someone else and sing over it.

I thought, “You’re all getting hyped over someone else’s song,” and to be honest, I was looking down on them at first.

I just think bands are definitely cooler.

For indie bands, it goes without saying they write the lyrics and compose the music, and it's also normal for them to handle everything themselves all the way through distribution and sales. Of course it's cooler when you do everything on your own.