Before the young women in the Japanese trio Babymetal were inducted into the weirdest and most terrifyingly adorable hard-rock band in the world, they hardly knew what heavy metal was.
“When we first started out, we had no idea what metal music was all about,” says lead singer Suzuka Nakamoto, who goes by Su-Metal, in a translated email interview. “But now we listen to everything from cute songs to all sorts of metal music. I am sure there are some people who say that we are not metal, but we want to create a new genre that will appeal to people of all ages, both boys and girls.”
A click-bait combination of theater, thunder-bringing hard rock and (sometimes uncomfortable) pubescent bubble gum kitsch, Babymetal, with songs mostly in Japanese, is one of the world’s leading ambassadors of idol pop, a personality-driven, prepackaged offshoot of Japanese pop that prizes cuteness and youth. Its best-selling, self-titled debut will be reissued for American audiences in June by Sony Entertainment, to which Babymetal is now signed. The group has opened for Lady Gaga, played some of the world’s biggest hard-rock festivals and sold out shows in London, Los Angeles and New York (Babymetal plays House of Blues here Thursday).
The Babymetal live shows are becoming legendary: The girls, who range in age from 15 to 17 (and are styled to look even younger, in pigtails and tutus), sing, scream and dance while older, costume-clad male musicians play instruments behind them. Traditional Western notions of authenticity don’t apply to idol pop, says Patrick St. Michel, a Tokyo-based pop culture journalist who has written extensively about the genre.
“The music is secondary with a lot of idol pop. It’s all about the experience, the story that they sell you,” St. Michel says. “You’re sort of in this together with the group, like, ‘We’re going to rise together. We need your help to do this.’ They’ll sell a single for the equivalent of $10, and fans are supposed to buy multiple copies to get tickets to go to handshake events and to get ballots to vote in idol elections.”
Metal idol groups were not something that historically existed until Babymetal producer Key Kobayashi, aka Kobametal, sensed an opening. “In the past, the metal scene has a lot of different bands, and it was rich with all sorts of different types of metal,” he says (like the girls, he was interviewed by email). “But I noticed that lately there are a lot of bands that are very alike musically, that it feels almost like the scene is in a rut. The name Babymetal means the birth of a new type of metal which is a fusion of metal sounds with J-pop sounds which are unique to Japan. Babymetal is doing something that other metal bands are not, and is striving to be the only one.”
Idol artists are meant to be polarizing — factionalism encourages high-dollar loyalty — but Babymetal needed to win over both idol music fans, many of whom are middle-aged men, and skeptical metalheads, who tend to be younger.
After some early pushback from purists, and some well-timed praise from Slash and Metallica’s Kirk Hammett, worldwide resistance has crumbled.
It helps that Kobametal appears to have exhaustively studied metal and can defang its symbols and creation myths for Babymetal’s audiences. The girls use fox horns instead of devil horns, though this wasn’t to dilute the gesture’s potentially off-putting Satanic implications; they merely got confused.
“When we were first figuring out some dance moves for our song, our choreographer showed us a pictures of the devil horns sign,” says Yui Mizuno, also known as Yuimetal. “But as we were not so familiar with metal back then, we thought it looked like a fox sign. When our choreographer saw us holding up the fox sign instead, she decided to just include the fox sign into our performance.”
Being an idol pop star of any kind has its hazards:
Last year, members of the pioneering group AKB48 were attacked during a meet-and-greet by a man wielding a saw. Some idol groups replace members as they age out, but fans are likely too attached to the young women of Babymetal to tolerate replacements.
The bigger dangers for the schoolgirls in Babymetal: the passage of time, and the erosion of the novelty factor. Idol pop in general “has an expiration date, and eventually it will stop,” St. Michel says. “J-pop music doesn’t get any attention abroad, so Babymetal has managed something impressive. It all plays into this image of, ‘Oh, Japan’s so crazy. Look at this.’ There’s always that element lurking beneath it.”
When: 6:30 P.M. Thursday
Where: House of Blues,
329 N. Dearborn St.
Tickets: Sold out; 312-923-2000 or livenation.com
Stewart is a freelance writer.
Twitter @chitribent
