Whenever I get tired of watching cats do silly things, YouTube is always good for watching kids pretend to be grownups. Here we have Cherri Bomb (formerly known as Red Shadow), an all-girl band from the Los Angeles area, tackling the Blue Öyster Cult classic, Godzilla. Being way below the drinking age, it looks like these young ladies have never faced the live band’s nemesis, Drunk Dude in Crowd. If you pay close attention to their facial expressions, you can tell Drunk Dude in Crowd is throwing them off their game. It’s called “paying your dues”, girls. Drunk Dude in Crowds’ contribution at the 2:06 mark is one of the great moments in Drunk Dude in Crowd History.
Cherri Bomb would do much better to take their show on the road and go to Japan, where the people are polite and they have almost fetishized young girls. Then again, they’ll face some heavy competition in the rockin’ prepubescent female department.
Take, for example, 11 year-old Haruka Kageyama, seen here playing the Michael Schenker Group’s “Captain Nemo”. Over at YouTube, there’s a lot of discussion about a) she’s not really playing, and; b) if she is really playing, she’s doing it by rote and not adding any feeling to her playing. That could be due to the fact that 11 year-olds aren’t really emotionally developed enough to “play with feeling”, or maybe it’s because she’s actually a robot built by Japanese scientists.
If Haruka Kageyama lacks a pop sensibility, check out 10 year-old Ruri Namiki and her band, featuring a 5 year-old drummer, 6 year-old bassist and 7 year-old second guitarist (Yuto Miyazawa, a star in his own right). Not only does Ruri-chan throw down a pretty decent lead (with some nice double lead work from Yuto), she wrote the song, too.
This is good and all, but it’s lacking that certain wtf-itude common to Japan. Fear not; Ruri Namiki has struck out on her own and her first single is “Gakuen Tengoku” (Heaven School), which must be something of a classic in Japan; it was originally recorded by the Finger 5 in the Seventies and has been covered by numerous artists. Ruri-chan’s take on the tune gives us that weirdness we’ve all come to expect from anything coming out of Japan: goblin schoolgirls in KISS makeup.
As a nation, we Americans are impressed when a 17 year-old girl can lip sync a song without having a nervous breakdown on stage. Meanwhile, Japan is churning out guitar prodigies at an alarming rate. We can take comfort in the fact that Japan is no longer interested in Imperialism.
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