Babymetal and the ambivalence of cuteness

Cuteness

What is it to be cute? With its formal properties of roundness, softness and smallness, the affective experience of cuteness necessarily provokes a ‘range of minor negative effects: helplessness, pitifulness, and even despondency’ (Ngai, 2012: 65). ⁶ By visually and haptically foregrounding its own weakened affective state, the cute object invites a range of responses on the part of the subject (maternal desire, empathy, ownership, violence, ambivalence). Cuteness is also deeply tied to the child, as I will discuss in the following section on girlhood. Ngai argues that minor aesthetic categories like cuteness (or the zany or the interesting) speak to our experience of art and aesthetics in late capitalism in more precise ways than classic aesthetic concepts like the beautiful or the sublime, which are predicated upon exerting a certain theological power or sense of awe over the viewer. As she summarizes:

aesthetic categories explicitly about our increasingly complex relations to commodities, performance, and information – utterly ordinary yet in many ways highly peculiar ‘objects’ – the cute, the zany, and the interesting dominate not just mass culture but the most autonomous sectors of artistic production and are thus able to speak to changes in the concept of art and even the avant-garde in ways in which other ‘everyday’ aesthetic categories cannot. (2012: 22)

Indeed, it is the seeming inconsequentiality of cuteness and its ties to consumer capitalism – antithetical to the theological force of the sublime – that is central to its affective and economic power.

As a minor taste concept, cuteness generates feelings that are more ambivalent than major aesthetic concepts like the beautiful and sublime, which have a ‘hold over us’ (Ngai, 2005: 811). Conversely, the sheer availability and accessibility of mass-mediated cute objects provokes feelings of suspicion and derision from the consumer (Ngai, 2012: 18), a response that is often voiced by Babymetal’s critics. The band’s music and performance aesthetics have been described by some metal fans online as ‘soulless, gimmicky corporate shit’, ‘bubble-gum pop’ and ‘generally false’. ⁷ Such critiques occur alongside celebrations of their aesthetic novelty, interpreted as not only transforming metal but also the category of cuteness itself. While the band perform as highly mediated and accessible cute pop idols, which accounts for part of the ambivalence regarding their status as musicians, they also complicate this accessibility. In other words, they are not merely objectified commodities (as idol performers) but are also subjects themselves. Babymetal’s aesthetic is decidedly antithetical to the delicate and lighthearted style of most female idol groups who seek affective connections and intimacy with fans through constructing a sense of everydayness. This is most vividly evoked by the hugely popular idol supergroup AKB48 – promoted as ‘idols that you can meet’ – who connect with fans though live daily shows and ‘handshake event’ contests (Galbraith and Karlin, 2012: 20). By contrast, Babymetal’s members are fully committed to their roles and never break character during their live performances.

As many scholars have argued (Kinsella, 1995; Merish, 1996; Ngai, 2005, 2012; Yano, 2013), cuteness indexes a specific type of relationship between the consumer subject and the (weak) cute object predicated on feelings of care and empathy. The cute, in fact, ‘demands a maternal response and interpellates its viewers/consumers as “maternal”’ (Merish, 1996: 186). As Ngai notes, such feelings of care and dependency can become transformed into feelings of aggression and domination over the seemingly helpless cute object as a way of claiming ownership over the object. She explains that ‘in its exaggerated passivity and vulnerability, the cute object is as often intended to excite a consumer’s sadistic desires for mastery and control as much as his or her desire to cuddle’ (2005: 816–17). In other words, the feelings of empathy experienced by the subject can easily become transformed into the opposite: violence and aggression towards the cute object. It is not surprising, then, that cute objects are often portrayed when they are in states of injury, weakness or shame: ‘Winnie the Pooh with his snout stuck in the beehive, or Love-a-Lot Bear in The Care Bears Movie, who stares disconsolately out at us with a bucket of paint overturned on his head’ (Merish, 1996: 187). In their states of humiliation, these helplessly cute characters invoke a relation of dependence by calling attention to their own state of powerlessness and need for ‘adult care’ (Merish, 1996: 187). This emphasis on powerlessness and dependency (mother–child) speaks to cuteness’s grounding in a ‘peculiarly “feminine” proprietary desire … the desire to care for, cherish, and protect’ (Merish, 1996: 188). Indeed, cuteness is not only invoked as a feminine aesthetic, but is historically and aesthetically entangled with childhood.

Girlhood, childishness and performing cuteness

Aesthetic markers of cuteness have been described as ‘roundness of form and thickness of limbs; roundness and flatness of face; largeness of eyes; and especially by largeness of head in proportion to the body – all attributes of the human infant’ (Merish, 1996: 187). As Merish explains, because of this linkage between cuteness and the child, cuteness necessarily ‘aestheticizes powerlessness’ (1996: 187). Much of the public outcry from within the global metal community revolves around Babymetal’s liminal status as cute teenage girls performing a musical genre that is putatively not available to them. This apparent contrast both marks the band as musically suspect and marks the consumer-listener as having been tricked or deceived by corporate staging. These critiques are intertwined with anxieties for some male metal fans who view Babymetal’s girlish vision of cute metal as undermining metal itself. As I argue, Babymetal call attention to their deformation of normative markers of girlhood and cuteness through their performance aesthetics (including song lyrics and themes that speak to girls and young women), fashion and staging. The band’s music and performances play on the tension between cuteness as inherently ‘powerless’ within a genre – heavy metal – that celebrates potency and transgression.

Minor aesthetic concepts like the zany, cute and interesting dramatize ‘their own weakness, or relative lack of aesthetic impact in a way that is significantly not the case for other vernacular aesthetic categories’ (Ngai, 2012: 19). In contrast to the experience of the sublime or the beautiful which make claims ‘for their extra-aesthetic power (moral, religious, epistemological, political)’, Ngai argues that the cute’s foregrounding of its own aesthetic inadequacies provide a more ‘direct reflection on the relation between art and society’ (Ngai, 2012: 22). Babymetal’s members openly admit to their beginner status as a heavy metal band with no prior background in the genre as fans. It is notable, for example, that Yuimetal and Moametal often perform air guitar movements during live performances while Su-metal sings and the backing band performs. As a mediated live performance style that has deep ties to amateur forms such as karaoke, air guitar can be embarrassing for the viewer for ‘not only is the performing body almost entirely severed from the musical sound, but the physical performance gestures to their [the performer’s] own theatricality’ (Miller, 2009: 419). Of course, this childish mode of performance also playfully gestures to their background as idol performers (and not instrumentalists) for which they are often critiqued.

At times their status as children who might be susceptible to the creepy sonic and visual themes of their music leaks into their public persona. They reportedly viewed heavy metal as ‘scary’ before they joined Babymetal and learned more about it. In one interview with Su-metal, she revealed that Yuimetal would get scared by the introduction to one of their songs, which involves a ‘spooky’ chant-like sound. She would scream at the band to stop playing during rehearsals and would often start crying. Su-metal explained laughingly that they would sometimes deliberately play it because they knew it would scare her. Their status as metal novices is further established by such childish affects and responses in their interviews. In this context, performance mistakes are a sign of impish childishness contained under the aesthetic of cute metal. In interviews with foreign media about their musical tastes, the band members express cheerful wonder at the appeal of foundational death metal bands like Cannibal Corpse. ⁸ Fans revel in the jarring strangeness of seeing diminutive girls profess gleeful, yet innocent, fandom for a band whose music is grounded in explicit themes of graphic violence and gore.

On the other hand, critics view these childish affective responses that emphasize their aesthetic inadequacies as indicative of the band’s lack of musical authenticity and as an effect of corporate manipulation and control. For example, Babymetal’s trademark hand gesture (which mimics the head of a fox) supposedly emerged from the members’ mistaken attempt to mimic devil horns, the classic performative gesture of metal fans. Fans participate in this narrative by donning fox masks, making the fox hand gesture at live performances, or painting their faces to resemble the fox mask. Babymetal foreground their aesthetic weaknesses and gaffes – which become framed as innocent childlike mistakes in imitating a basic expression of heavy metal fandom – and transform the gesture into a cute, yet mysterious and gothic foundational narrative in which they are guided and possessed by the fox god. ⁹

Anti-cuteness

Despite cuteness’s linkages with helplessness, vulnerability and the figure of the child, in recent years the concept has become an ‘aesthetic under siege’. This is partly a reaction to the overly utopian and sentimental images of cute children (Harris, 2001: 18). As Harris writes, ‘cuteness thus coexists in a dynamic relation with the perverse’ (Harris, 2001: 17). He refers to such deformations as ‘travesties of cuteness’ that are evoked through popular filmic representations, all of which are centered upon perversions of the domestic. Chuckie, the possessed doll who violently torments and kills family babysitters; the young blonde girl in Poltergeist through whom demented spirits flow via the home television; the main character’s children in Cronenberg’s The Brood, who resemble ‘a pack of dwarfish gnomes, gestate in moldy embryonic sacks hanging outside of her belly’ and are transformed post-birth into rage-filled terrors who ultimately beat their mother to death (Harris, 2001: 18).

In recent years Japan has begun to witness similar ‘deformations of the cute’ (Ivy, 2010: 15), where cute (referred to as kawaii in Japanese) aesthetics are being fused with grotesque and scary elements. The effect of this synthesis is to foreground the inherent link between cuteness and violence. ¹⁰ Indeed, cute aesthetics have been taken up by contemporary Japanese artists in ways that acknowledge the inherent violence and aggressiveness of cuteness itself – Murakami Takashi’s eerily cute DOB character, and Nara Yoshitomo’s drawings of aggressively cute children brandishing knives are a few notable examples. Writing about Nara’s famous paintings of ‘evil children’, Marilyn Ivy notes that ‘the modal requirements of the kawaii have been pushed past the limits of vulnerable malleability, disclosing the aggressive dimension always implicit in the cutified aesthetic relationship’ (2010: 15). His paintings of ‘evil’ children reveal an uncanniness that is perhaps contained within the notion of cuteness itself (Ivy, 2010: 15). Ivy describes Nara’s images as eerily cute; the viewer’s inability to determine whether the image is cute or creepy is itself, as Ivy points out, uncanny. In regards to the ugly and aggressive feelings that cuteness can provoke, Ngai explains that the cute object must possess ‘some sort of imposed-upon aspect or mien – that is, that it bears the look of an object not only formed but all too easily de-formed under the pressure of the subject’s feeling or attitude toward it’ (2005: 816). Babymetal members express – yet simultaneously overturn – this ambivalence of cuteness by headbanging, dancing in a manner that evokes temper tantrums, and ripping their own costumes in states of possession. In sum, they act in ways that both affirm and deform the cute.

Indeed, Babymetal distort cuteness by employing ‘cute’ objects, aesthetics or affective states (flouncy tulle skirts, curly ponytails, hair scrunchies, pink lip gloss, bodily injuries from headbanging) in radical and unexpected ways. In stark contrast to standard J-pop idol staging, where each individual group member smiles happily and enticingly for the camera, Babymetal members look either demurely menacing or coy. They often gaze directly and unflinchingly at the camera with their arms defiantly crossed. The group photo on the biography section of their official website ironically draws on the appeal of cute objects or people (or animals) when they are in states of being wounded or maimed. Each member of the group is photographed individually lying sprawled on the ground, face down, with their hair covering their faces. We can see they are all wearing their usual black and red outfits, complete with red plaid skirts resembling school uniforms, black Mary Jane shoes with rounded toes, and black nail polish. We might be shocked to see young girls (idols, no less) presented with their faces covered while lying face down, if the parodic staging were not so overt. The lead singer, Su-metal, clutches an object in her left hand, but it is unclear what she holds. All the members look either exhausted from their intense performances or in the throes of musical or spiritual ecstasy. Moametal, one of the two backing dancers and ‘screamers’ (to use the band’s promotional language) lies face down, her hands raised with palms upward, as if to suggest the heightened emotion of their performances. The deformation of the cute, as we see here with Babymetal’s visual staging and packaging of themselves as anti-idols, becomes entangled with their status as young girls who foreground their vulnerable position in society through song themes and emphasizing their novice status in the heavy metal genre.

Learning to headbang

Babymetal’s preoccupation with headbanging illustrates the tension between the aggressiveness of the metal genre and the cute and childish aesthetic the band embodies. As newcomers to metal, the band members openly speak of headbanging, a ‘core activity of heavy metal fandom’ (Waksman, 2009: 278), in pedagogical terms. In a YouTube video for the Japanese website ‘Kawaii girl Japan’, the band discuss the liberating power of being able to headbang, something they were not permitted to do in their previous pop idol group. Moametal explains the bodily effect of such activities: ‘Sometimes I headbang so hard that I walk like a robot the next day because of the pain.’ ¹¹ The band smile and nod eagerly in agreement. As an action that channels the ‘aggression and impact of the music into the sphere of bodily response’ (Waksman, 2009: 279), headbanging is reconfigured by Babymetal into a learned bodily technique to be honed and refined through practice and the accumulation of somatic experience. As Su-metal elaborates, ‘Our headbanging has gotten so much better. At first, we couldn’t stop shaking. We went into different directions while shaking.’ This lack of musical experience is viewed either as a source of aesthetic innovation for their fans or a sign of corporate manufacturedness for their detractors. For metalhead critics of Babymetal, the bodily response of headbanging (wild and forceful, but also restrained and precise), which must be affectively felt and expressed, has become transformed and objectified into a synchronized, superficial dance routine. In Babymetal, the act is no longer steeped in an organically transmitted corpus of intellectual and bodily knowledge of metal, of how to listen to and perform metal music. Instead, as one online commenter has put it, Babymetal members are ‘permutable’ and ‘replaceable stage gymnasts’. ¹²

The band also emphasizes their outsider status in the metal scene through the music itself. This theme of Babymetal as novice (girl) metal performers is at the heart of the band’s 2012 song ‘Headbanger’. The song is about a 15-year-old girl who goes to her first metal show and headbangs for the first time. The song foregrounds themes of teenage girl fandom as the suffix ‘banger’ (bangya, in Japanese, short for ‘band girl’) references the Japanese slang term for fangirls of the underground Japanese gothic-rock form, Visual Style (Visual-kei). The music video opens with Su-metal in her bedroom wearing a navy blue schoolgirl sailor uniform, her hair in two long ponytails. It is significant that the video begins from the scene of the girl’s bedroom, evoking a sense of nonthreatening domesticity. As Simon Frith wrote in 1978, ‘Girl culture starts and finishes in the bedroom’ (cited in Kearney, 2007: 126). Scholarly research has long linked notions of girlhood and girls’ culture with the bedroom as a space of domesticity, leisure and cultural production. ¹³

In the video, Su-metal’s room is adorned with what appear to be standard visual markers of girlhood and domesticity, such as stuffed animals and walls painted soft pink. Yet there is a twist. Su-metal sits down on a floor pillow in front of her dresser with her legs folded underneath her. The top shelf of the dresser evokes the feeling of a shrine with candles, flowers, and a cluster of framed photos on her dresser that portray an eerie faceless person wearing a white robe, head down with long straight black hair completely covering the face, appearing to be in various states of headbanging. The unidentified individual’s hands are in the iconic metalhead devil horn pose. As Su-metal sits down and brings her hands together as if to pray, rumbling is heard overhead. She looks up to the ceiling and raises her arms to receive a wooden crate that has just descended down into the room. The box opens as if on its own, and Su-metal looks down to see a white neckbrace nestled inside the box. She picks it up and stares at it mystified. In a flash, the metal guitar riff and drums kick in, she throws the neck brace on and immediately begins headbanging deeply and aggressively, precisely in tune with the driving rhythm. Her headbanging is intercut with quick flashes of ‘girlish’ objects from her room – a rabbit soft toy and candles.

As she sits on the floor with her legs folded under her, we see her preparing to perform and headbang with the band. There is a close-up of her putting on pink lip gloss, curling her eyelashes, putting on mascara, and putting on a black jacket. Much of the video of the band performing is shot in black and white with occasional jolts of red from hair ribbons or flouncy skirts, evoking a moody atmospheric quality. We see that Su-metal’s microphone stand is adorned with black and red sparkly rhinestones. She is positioned in between imposing stacks of Marshall amplifiers, and we see a white cross being projected on the black wall directly behind her. The performance is undercut with flashes of the mysterious headbanger with the blurred face from the photos, who is wearing a white robe with the classic metal ‘bullet belt’. Yuimetal and Moametal dance energetically on either side of Su-metal, at times hopping up and down to the aggressive rhythm in a way that ties cuteness to the dark, horror-esque aesthetics of the video. It is significant that Su-metal’s performance with the band is cut back and forth with brief clips of her singing privately in her bedroom while jumping on her bed, a classic domestic performance trope that is often linked to children or young girls. ¹⁴ The viewer is unsure which performance is the fantastical imagined performance and which one is actually occurring.

The Japanese limited edition CD for ‘Headbanger’ came with a neck corset for ‘headbanging training’, and fans were instructed to wear it to the live concert. This commercial tie-up, while dramatizing the song’s themes, positions the act of headbanging as a pedagogical tool and material object for female fans, who might have no prior experience with headbanging, to collectively participate in Babymetal’s live concerts by performing their status as injured or maimed listeners. Indeed, designating the neck brace as a ‘corset’ invokes a feminized sartorial object for female fans. Further, the use of the neckbrace itself – an object that is used in cases of head or neck injury or bodily strain – evokes the connection between cuteness and the state of woundedness. In this case, however, Babymetal and their female fans do not seek care or empathy. This gesture foregrounds the fragility and weakness of the band members as young performers who might be susceptible to injury through performing heavy metal, thus highlighting the state in which cute objects hold the greatest appeal for the consumer: namely, when they appear injured or otherwise pitiable and in need of care (Harris, 2000: 6). Importantly, Babymetal twist the conventional view of cuteness’s aesthetics of pity and weakness as inviting ‘consumer empathy’ or protection (Merish, 1996: 187). Instead, the neck corset serves as a powerful consumer object that signifies the reveling in youthful, childish behavior that contains the (exciting) possibility of violence or bodily injury. By calling out to young, possibly inexperienced or naïve, female fans, Babymetal acknowledge the inherently feminine dimension of cuteness itself, through which women and girls have historically been hailed as consumer subjects (Merish, 1996: 188).

They explore social pressures for young girls in other songs. For example, in their 2013 song, ‘Gimme Chocolate!!’ Babymetal perform a rigorously choreographed and fast-paced metal-pop song that expresses frustration with body image pressure for teenage girls. As the lead vocals plead, ‘I can have a bit of chocolate, can’t I?’ the backing vocals (Moa and Yui) respond back to her and reject her pleas using the childish form of the word for ‘never’ to evoke this. The feminist potential of the song becomes overwritten by ambivalent listener responses that dwell on the supposed incommensurability of the song’s lyrical themes with the genre of heavy metal itself. An online commenter on Metal Injection.net writes, ‘I like metal for what it is, not cute. I don’t want my metal to be cute and full of cute dancing and talking about candy and chocolate.’ ¹⁵

Babymetal’s 2013 hit single ‘No More Bullying’ (‘Ijime, dame, zettai’) is a commentary on Japan’s long-standing culture of bullying, especially towards young people. A sonically heavy song that draws more directly on speed metal conventions than the group’s earlier singles did, ‘No More Bullying’ evokes a more complex form of cuteness to reframe metal in terms of cheerful positivity and messages of social awareness. In their videos they play on classic heavy metal tropes, but also comment ironically on such conventions. The video for ‘No More Bullying’ opens in a setting that is dark, moody and atmospheric, amid castle-like structures and graveyards, thus evoking classic imagery of extreme metal in which band publicity photos are often ‘taken outdoors, often at night, often in a forest, graveyard, or “medieval” setting’ (Hagen, 2011: 189). The video begins with a flaming Gibson Flying V guitar (a classic metal guitar brand) stuck neck down in a desolate landscape. When we first see Babymetal, the girls wear black hooded robes that at first glance seem reminiscent of the infamous and comical Stonehenge live performance scene in Spinal Tap. Yet as the song develops, the lyrical content (despite the intensely cheerful singing) makes it clear to the listener that they are serious about anti-bullying. As they enter the gothic setting with their hoods up, they stand in what appears to be a guitar graveyard – the ground is filled with Flying V guitars emerging from the earth like headstones. The camera pans on each of the band members’ faces, each of them looking somber with their eyes closed. They open their eyes and look up obliquely while only Su-metal meets the gaze of the camera. All appear to be wearing pale pink glossy lipstick, with Su-metal’s the most overt. We see their backing band dressed in their standard black and white skeleton suits, with their faces completely covered, evoking the look of cartoon characters. As Babymetal enter the graveyard scene with their heads down, they lower their hoods and defiantly fling their robes off with a synchronized flourish.

Babymetal’s vision of cute metal confounds the standard narrative of cuteness as marked by qualities of innocence, softness and femininity through their performance of cuteness in terms of power, energy and intensity. In the video for ‘No More Bullying’, cuteness is deformed by being tied directly to darkness and demonic forces through the bleak and desolate graveyard-like setting and the girl’s dark, hooded robes. The band has described the act of headbanging and dancing during their performance in terms of positivity and as a mode of stress relief. In ‘No More Bullying’, Babymetal transform dark, horror and gothic aesthetics into an unabashed, yet cheerfully cute, anti-bullying anthem. As Su-metal sings, Yuimetal and Moametal flank her on each side and provide chirpy background vocals while dancing in a style that is described in an NME (New Musical Express) concert review as ‘synchronized tantrums’. ¹⁶ They close their eyes and shake their heads aggressively and angrily from side to side while shaking their clenched fists in anger or frustration, their ponytails frenetically swishing all around their faces. This performance of angry childishness would suggest that they themselves, as children, could be subject to bullying.

Babymetal also perform this sense of childishness in other ways. Drawing on the predilection for puns and wordplay in Japanese, band members will often use Japanese in ways that linguistically intertwine cuteness with classic metal aesthetics such as darkness and intensity. The Japanese pronunciation for Babymetal sounds similar to the Japanese pronunciation for heavy metal, a fact that is often circulated by band members and producers. When introducing themselves, band members will sometimes pronounce the copula in Japanese (desu) with a childish lisp, thus softening and infantilizing their speech such that it sounds like ‘death.’ This is taken further with their anthem ‘Babymetal Death’ which is a cheeky (and perhaps ‘childish’) translation of the original Japanese for ‘We are Babymetal’ (‘Babymetal desu’). In print interviews with Japanese metal magazines, Babymetal will frequently conclude their statements with ‘DEATH!’

While many global metal fans find this deformation of cuteness with darkness and scary imagery appealing, there are also some who see this fusion as a threat to ‘real’ metal musicians who are deeply invested in the genealogy of metal and, more importantly, play their own instruments and (presumably) compose their own songs. The ambivalent response by some in the global metal community reflects the inevitable ‘secondary’ feeling of manipulation or exploitation that overpower the initial experience of cuteness as the ‘affective response to weakness or powerlessness’ (Ngai, 2012: 24). In other words, the experience of cuteness is predicated on feelings of suspicion as the ‘rapidity and promiscuity of the cute response makes the impulse suspect, readily overridden by the angry sense that one is being exploited or deceived’ (Angier, cited in Ngai, 2012: 24). The spectacle of a feminized form of pop music, specifically J-pop, contaminating a putatively more brutal, complex and underground form of music provokes feelings of mistrust and derision for some metal fans. As an online critic wrote, ‘Next, there will be an army of these little stage gymnasts who will be permutable and replaceable and performing simultaneously at different concerts.’ ¹⁷ Here, the manufactured nature of the idol industry (and mainstream popular music more generally) is seen as inherently at odds with metal’s roots in the (masculine) Romantic myth of individual virtuosity and heroic artistry based on classical music aesthetics. ¹⁸

Cogan and Cogan examine how female-fronted J-pop idol group Puffy is critiqued for their highly commodified and feminized musical aesthetic. The authors argue that Puffy’s pop musical contributions and subtle gender subversion and critique are overlooked, as listeners are ‘not trained to see J-pop as authentic’ (2006: 71). Similarly, the critique of Babymetal as illegitimate heavy metal performers is tied to their roots in the idol industry, which positions them as mass-mediated and feminized performers under the control of their management company. In this way, their subversion of heavy metal genre conventions becomes devalued under the larger critique of feminized cuteness.

Conclusion

According to Ngai (2012), cuteness is a commodity aesthetic and significant affective experience in late capitalism heavily mediated by gender and sexuality. But it is also an aesthetic experience that is highly ambivalent and contradictory. In contrast to the rarefied and singular experience of the sublime, our ordinary encounters with the cute – in its banality and everydayness – would seem to be more fitting for the present moment and our popular encounters with art and aesthetics (Ngai, 2012). She explains the logic of vernacular aesthetic categories like the cute for understanding aesthetic experience in ‘today’s totally aestheticized present, in which it can no longer be taken for granted … that “lofty art is the source and innovator of aesthetic norms”’ (2012: 19). Unlike the singular and emphatic feeling of disinterested pleasure as evoked by the sublime, aesthetic categories like the cute, interesting and zany are predicated upon ‘complicated intersections of ordinary affects’ and not with ‘rare or conceptually unmediated experience’, as in the case of the beautiful or the sublime. It is the ordinary mass-mediated (and feminized) status of cuteness under which Babymetal are rejected as unruly and inauthentic metal performers.

Babymetal’s subversion of cuteness reveals the complexities and contradictions of the category itself. Their musical and visual aesthetic invokes normative understandings of cuteness as weak, vulnerable and tied to childhood, yet their performances and self-presentation deform the very notion of cuteness in radical ways. Band members draw on but also subvert notions of cute childishness, especially ‘girlishness’ in Japan, by performing such behavior – covering their mouths while giggling, dancing spastically and playfully as if having a tantrum – in conjunction with dark and demonic horror-based imagery and lyrical themes of positivity and empowerment for young girls. Significantly, Babymetal express emotions and perform affective states that are typically not registered or available under the logic of the cute. The cute should not talk back to us or express anger or critique (Merish, 1996:189). This subversion ultimately provokes ambivalent reactions from listeners – fans see their playfulness and radicality as innovating metal aesthetics itself, while their detractors are troubled by the aesthetic immediacy and availability through which metal is transformed into something cute and popular (and feminine), thus stripping it of its transgressive, and perhaps masculine, qualities. This ambivalence leads to suspicions of being tricked, which is at the heart of so many critiques of Babymetal. The band’s deformation of the cute into a powerful and subversive aesthetic form (and the ensuing critiques) reveals a new perspective on cuteness in relation to subject–object relations, gender and violence.