Sabotage, in Better Outfits

The idea of a Japanese girl group covering Beastie Boys should not work. The Beastie Boys were three Jewish kids from New York who turned hip-hop aggression into something art-world respectable over thirty years, and a J-pop act reinterpreting that catalog should register as novelty—affectionate parody at best. But Japanese pop performance culture has this habit of taking foreign material and executing it with a focused commitment the original artists never quite managed. Not covering a song so much as becoming it, at least for the duration of the performance. The precision is the entire point. That’s not pastiche. That’s something else entirely.