Babymetal

January 29, 2019

Whoohoo, 4 days without new content, talk about how lame content-maker I am!

OK, today will be another Japanese day. Japan truly is a generator of weird. Maybe they live so good, they don’t know how to entertain themselves more and have to resort to weird.

I consider the following story a story about a successful musical group manager. Because this is wonderful. Beware, a lot of videos; wanted to illustrate my point better.

Several years ago in Japan one of their numerous pop idol groups retired because they became… too old to do that anymore. Around 14 years old if I understand correctly. However, their manager obviously did not want stop milking that cow and started thinking of ways to continue using the singers he has.

And the solution he came up with was “let’s pick literally the best metal band we can find in the country and combine them with the singers we have now; call the resulting group Babymetal”.

I present you Babymetal - “Karate”, probably the second best song of theirs:

The guitar, bass and drums are so skillful they call them “the kami band”, kami means “godlike” in this context. Yes, the instruments players got from fans a separate name than the band itself. ;)

Here’s Megitsune, probably the best song / music clip of theirs:

The tale of this amazing manager doesn’t stop at this. In 2014 he managed to put his group on a world tour, including such true metal scenes like Sonisphere. And at Sonisphere they blew the crowd up. Here’s the live from their final song at Sonisphere 2014:

See the totally entranced crowd? How they managed to do that with UK metal fans using totally unknown Japan teen girl band? Simple: lyrics of the first song consist of a single word “Death”, repeated for three minutes. :D

After that he managed to make them sing with Lady Gaga and later with Bob Halford from Judas Priest.

In 2019 that’s not the teen girls anymore, and one of them left in pursue of the solo career, so it’s not that crazy as it was in 2014. Hard metal band with a woman lead singer is not something special, after all, even if the lyrics are downright crazy.

But the scar left in the history of metal will still linger.