Musical Mashups Among Japanese Female Youth Culture: BABYMETAL and Lisa X

The two videos by BABYMETAL, with their original song “Give me chocolate!” and Lisa X with her cover of Racer-X, “Scarified,” demonstrate the post-modern phenomenon of mash-up between Eastern and Western culture. Japanese culture post-WWII has become a melting pot of international influences, while retaining and imprinting a uniquely Japanese feeling on its many cultural appropriations. Female youth fashion trends such as Ganguro reflect an interest in the appropriation and intensification of Western modes of style (Kawamura). Music, visual arts, and other forms of media have incorporated foreign styles, loanwords, and tropes, cultivating a post-modern sensibility among Japanese youth. Japanese pop music, J-pop, has roots in both eastern and western musical genres. Ryūkōka, a musical genre which predated modern J-pop and was popular in Japan from 1920 to the 1960s, bore the influences of blues, early jazz, and Western instrumentation, including the guitar, but used melodies composed with the Eastern pentatonic scale (Yano). In the late 1950s, the popularity of foreign singers such as Elvis Presley lead to the development of Cover Pops (Kavā Poppusu). British and American rock bands of the 1960s and 1970s, most famously, the Beatles, inspired a new generation of Japanese musicians, who sought to break free from traditional genres (Yano). By the 1980s, rock was growing as an underground phenomenon in Japan and many American metal groups such as Racer X toured there and showed Japanese youth the intensity and ferocity of Metal, Punk, and Hardcore, which offered innovation in the stale American and European rock scene. While Blondie and Siouxsie and the Banshees rocked audiences around the world in the 1970s and ‘80s with a strong feminine presence, Japanese all girl rock bands like Princess Princess (Purinsesu, Purinsesu, or Puri-Puri) foreshadowed the modern pop rock scene which includes such acts as BABYMETAL. The newest generation of young Japanese has also taken an interest in the metal genre.

Lisa X, a budding 8-year-old Japanese female guitarist, pays tribute on YouTube to the 1980s band Racer-X, in both her name and choice of cover song, “Scarified.” Her methodical shredding of the metal song is impeccable and speaks to her talent and her ability for study and reproduction. The atypical pairing of cuteness and innocence with a subversive, violent theme can be found in other instances of Japanese media culture. For instance, famed international artist Takashi Murakami often contrasts “kawaii” motifs such as smiling sunflowers and bubbly eyes with darker elements like gaping mouths of razor-edged teeth. So-called kawaii motifs recall the innocence of youth and a miniscule untarnished perfection, and create contrast and difference when juxtaposed with fear, violence, and mortality, its binary opposites. Another prominent example of a contrast between young girls and super violence is the book and film Battle Royale (Pharr). Murakami’s paradigm of “superflat” is an effective lens through which to view the crossover between hardcore metal and female Japanese youth because of its flattening of cultural elements (Murakami). In the case of BABYMETAL, the tropes, stylistic, and fashion elements of hardcore metal are applied superficially, while the content of the lyrics, as in the chants of “chocoretto,” remains young, female, and Japanese. Issues of gender are at play here, as ultra-feminine singers beg in a cute vernacular for candy, meanwhile dissonant metal, a male domain, with crashing percussion and roaring guitars blares behind them.

The total effect of these videos is a bricolage of the cultural artifacts of ‘80s metal, kawaii girl culture, J-pop, and the technicality and measured intensity characteristic of traditional Japanese media and social displays. Western music and the style it entails has been flattened and painted onto a Japanese cultural substrate. The mashup between young female Japanese musicians and 1980s metal demonstrated by the artists BABYMETAL and Lisa X may seem surreal to outsiders, but the post-WWII incorporation of American culture and styles into Japanese markets and youth culture has fostered these unique permutations and mutations of culturally symbolic structures in the anthropology of music. Just as American youths might sing Karaoke of their favorite J-pop artists, young Japanese women may aspire to imitate, replicate, and elaborate upon their foreign media influences in their own unique ways.

Works Cited

Murakami, Takashi, Paul Schimmel, and Dick Hebdige. © Murakami. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007.

Yano, Christine Reiko. Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002.

Kawamura, Yuniya. "Japanese Teens as Producers of Street Fashion." Current Sociology 54.5 (2006): 784-801.

Pharr, Mary. Of Bread, Blood, and the Hunger Games: Critical Essays on the Suzanne Collins Trilogy. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., Publishers, 2012.