Not Creating Much: Dragon Voice Vol. 1

I am a big fan of the manga Gravitation. A while back, I wondered if I was a fan of Gravitation because it was about the music industry, or because it had good-looking guys having buttsex. After thinking about it I've concluded it's a mixture of both, but I still checked out some other manga about pop music. One of them is Full Moon wo Sagashite, which is sitting unread on myself until a later date. The other is a series called Dragon Voice.

Dragon Voice is a shounen manga about boy bands, and where Gravitation's boys are more Pet Shop, Dragon Voice's are Backstreet.* In this manga, harmonizing and perfecting dance routines are taken as seriously as life and death. It's unintentionally hilarious in that way, even though it's a comedy to begin with. The main character, Rin, has a presumably bad low voice, yet somehow manages to join a boy band, the Beatmen, in a dance-off with member Shino. He asks Rin, "Do you have some sort of dream? What will you create?" (pgs 26-27). This seems to be a recurring theme. Never mind that the Beatmen were put together by a talent agency, their first single is a cover of the song "State of Shock" by the Jackson 5 and Mick Jagger (but with the words changed poorly), and their creative control is limited at best and nonexistant at worst: they really say that "create" line a lot.

The Beatmen themselves are a bunch of stock boy band characters. Most of the Beatmen bear similarities to members from other boy bands. Rin, however, has a deep gruff voice which the other characters liken to a bullfrog or an old man. Although his voice really has no place in a boy band, they let him in because he may be the legendary titular "Dragon Voice." Throughout the first volume, the Beatmen keep reminding Rin that his voice is weak (and do so by harmonizing a whole lot). They're that type of group who would reject the label "boy band" and demand to be called a "male vocal group" instead. At the very end of the volume a rival group, Privee, is introduced. They look...really feminine for a shounen, and they have really bad hair (but pretty much everyone does in this manga). It's an interesting story, but it's somehow lacking something.

It's impossible for me to analyze Dragon Voice without comparing it to Gravitation, and although they're in different genres and have different plots, they're both have main characters in pop bands striving for success. The characters in Gravitation are musicians, so their struggles to create are valid. The characters of Dragon Voice, on the other hand, say they are creating something but are just vessels for others' creations. Not that credibility really matters to me, because I listen to enough pop music for it not to, but if the Beatmen just wanted to be a packaged bunch of cute boys whose only goal was to sell millions of CDs and capture millions of girls' hearts, I would prefer it over the false "what will you create" mentality. So in conclusion, I hope that in future volumes they quit with the "create" B.S. and really get into the fun and fake face of pop.

*=If preferred, replace with Erasure and NSYNC, respectively.