Love, Friendship, and Orange Juice

By 2014, Japanese idol groups had colonized nearly every genre available to them. AKB48 had strip-mined pop. BABYMETAL had taken metal somewhere strange and oddly necessary. Charisma.com had done something genuinely weird with electronic music. That left Rhymeberry—Miri, Hime, and Hikaru—to figure out hip-hop, and figure it out they did.

Their subject matter wasn’t expensive cars, sketchy neighborhoods, or absentee fathers. It was love, friendship, and orange juice. In a 2014 interview with Tokyo Girls’ Update, they made a point of it: they knew they were cute, but cuteness wasn’t the whole story. We have skills too, was essentially the message. Watching their videos, you believed it. They had genuine energy—a restlessness that didn’t feel manufactured. Three friends cruising through the city, throwing parties in their favorite restaurant, rapping about problems light enough to dissolve in an afternoon.

There’s a version of this that sounds patronizing—isn’t it sweet, idol girls rapping about wholesome things—but that reading misses what was actually happening. The joy in Rhymeberry’s music was real and specific and theirs. They weren’t performing happiness at the camera. Three people who clearly liked each other, liked what they were doing, and were completely comfortable being exactly who they were. In a genre that had spent decades cosplaying toughness, that was quietly radical.

Hip-hop has always had room for the playful, the communal, the genuinely lighthearted—even when it doesn’t make space at the table. Rhymeberry didn’t ask for a seat. They dragged their own chair over.