Rhymeberry

Miri, Hime, and Hikaru of Rhymeberry don’t rap about the usual things. Love, friendship, orange juice—that’s their lane, not money or street cred or any of the stuff that supposedly matters in hip-hop. Which should be completely stupid. It’s not.

After AKB48 took pop, Babymetal took rock, and Charisma.com claimed electronic music, there weren’t many genres left for cute Japanese schoolgirls to work through. Hip-hop was just sitting there undefended. When Tokyo Girls’ Update interviewed them about the gap between their image and their music, their answer was simple: we’re actually good at this. And they meant it.

Their videos have this cheerful, unguarded quality that’s rare in hip-hop. You see them cruising the city, throwing parties, rapping about what’s on their minds. No posturing, no armor, no performance. It’s the opposite of the usual theater where everyone’s supposed to sound desperate or wounded or dangerous. They just sound like people who wanted to make music together.

That directness gets to me. They’re aware they’re cute, and they don’t care if that makes their music illegitimate in anyone’s eyes. No angle, no strategy, just three people doing something because it seemed fun. Maybe that’s rarer than it should be.