With excitement for the new AKB48 single mounting in select communities, I have dusted off my first impressions of 'Heavy Rotation'. I hope the next single is just as fascinating.
I've just now watched the pv and I have to say that AKB48 never lets me down with the important and thoughtful way it presents and exposes the important issues of the day. This video finally uncovers what goes on at the slumber parties of Japanese teen girls. One would have thought there would have been a bit less synchronized dancing in military regalia and a bit more kissing in cat outfits, but now the world really knows.
It is a surprising and bold choice for AKB48 to go with such an austere, grim, realistic, and some might say gritty, look at what goes on behind closed doors in Japan. One would not have expected that management would have chosen using documentary footage of typical teens' slumber parties, but AKB48 does have a history of tackling important and controversial material in their previous work.
This rare glimpse into the lives of Japanese teen girls is quite astonishing. While there was surely less homosexual experimentation than most would have imagined, and more baths as opposed to the highly anticipated group showers, the most surprising element has to be overtly queer sensibility in the fetishistic dress teens put on in private. Still, it is good to learn that, at least in private, the youth of Japan feel healthy enough to experiment with dress, dance, sexuality, and eating sweets in homoerotic ways, that the youth of many other countries are too repressed or afraid to even contemplate.
We should all be thankful to AKB48 for opening up a door for the world to Japanese teen girl slumber parties that had previously only been known through hushed whispers and the fantastical conjectures of middle aged academics based upon scant evidence.
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