Flickr photos cc of Kurini Santosu, jetske, Bago Games, Trics4kidz

By Tyler Hersko

I’ve come to accept that I just don’t understand how seemingly random bands can just explode into international stardom.

As a diehard fan of heavy metal, whenever my music tastes were brought up in conversations last year, I was asked about Deafheaven’s “Sunbather.” The San Francisco-based band took black metal, a subgenre known for inspiring church burnings, murder and Satanism, and created a critically acclaimed album that was praised by publications ranging from Pitchfork to Rolling Stone.

The perceived quality of Deafheaven’s work aside, it appears that this year’s ironic metal trend is Babymetal. Hailing from Japan, Babymetal fuses Japanese pop music with heavy metal instrumentation. Or, as their record label defines it, “kawaii metal.” Right.

The band’s self-titled debut album released in February and enjoyed an unprecedented deal of commercial success, nearly topping the Japanese charts and even breaking into the Billboard 200. To say that Babymetal has gone viral would be an understatement. The group, whose eldest member is 16, is set to perform alongside legendary bands such as Metallica and Iron Maiden when they tour Europe next month.

It wouldn’t be surprising for the band to announce a string of North American tour dates sometime in the next few months, and given their continual rise in popularity, now seems like a good a time as any to discuss this phenomenon. The band’s rise to fame only begs the question: How good is their music? To put it bluntly, it’s certifiably horrific.

While being critical of the vocals of three adolescents may seem cruel — we will return to this point in a moment — the fact of the matter is that they are actively painful to listen to. It doesn’t help that most of their songs feature a sole, unimaginably generic, metal guitar riff that repeats itself ad nausea. Of course, Babymetal has neither a shortage of zealous defenders nor raging critics. The former is a harmless case of inevitability. If you’re a fan of three little girls in Lolita dresses dancing around a stage singing songs like “Gimme Chocolate!!” and “Headbangeeeeerrrrr!!!!!” then that’s fine. We all have our preferences. The latter case is a bit more complicated, but is a fine example of an increasingly worrying trend in music culture.

While some of the criticism is legitimate, there’s a veritable horde of detractors who demonize the group as the death of heavy metal music, shameless sellouts and otherwise the scourges of the music world. Now, these are all fairly ridiculous claims. Heavy metal has been through worse: The genre survived Metallica’s collaboration with Lou Reed and the dark period where scene kids started playing heavy metal.

It will survive this, too. As for the claim of Babymetal being sellouts or a corporate construct: Do these people even understand how the Japanese pop music industry works? Japanese child and teenage performers are managed by talent agencies that form idol groups and bands. It’s artificiality incarnate, but that’s how the music industry works. To be fair, the fact that it’s so blatantly fake — the trio has admitted to not even knowing about heavy metal prior to their band’s inception — isn’t wrong.

But really, is anyone going to listen to this kind of thing for its musical integrity? It’s supposed to be fun, harmless and simple. It isn’t like the rest of heavy metal, or any genre of music for that matter, isn’t commercialized anyway. The people screaming sellout?Possibly wearing Metallica patches or the definitely not commercialized St. Patrick’s Day-themed Slayer t-shirt. Yes, the latter actually exists.

Unfortunately, the widespread espousing of unfounded melodrama like this has led to a sort of stigma against any negative opinions concerning music. People seem to forget that there’s a fine line between unnecessary hatred and legitimate criticism. With regard to Babymetal, it seems like any of their more levelheaded detractors criticize the band’s biggest flaw — you know, their actual music, what this whole thing is actually about — they’re immediately shut down as haters or elitists.

People should be allowed to have opinions. Just because a band is a gimmick corporate construct doesn’t mean that they’re exempt. For better or worse, Babymetal is huge, and they’re only getting more popular. They say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but if you’re going to go down that route, at least try to maintain some semblance of fairness and reason.

Tyler Hersko can be reached at thersko@sagebrush.unr.edu.