BiSH Gets It
BiSH shouldn’t work the way they do, but they’re smarter about it than anyone else doing this. They’re an idol group from Japan that owns being an idol group—owns the construction, the artifice, the whole manufactured thing—and that honesty makes them feel more genuine than the groups pretending to be natural. Aina The End, Cent Chihiro Chittiii, Momoko Gumi Company, Lingling, Hashiyasume Atsuko, Ayuni D—seven members, sharp energy, songs like PAiNT it BLACK
and SMACK baby SMACK
that stick with you.
Japanese idol culture is massive. AKB48, Nogizaka46, Passpo—inescapable. Billboards in every city, the radio, TV, local knockoffs in smaller towns. Perfect smiles, manufactured everything, the same formula repeating infinitely.
BiSH is an idol group too, and they’re not against the formula. They sit somewhere between Scandal and Stereopony and Morning Musume, but weirder, harder. They took that sweet, artificial thing and made it aggressive. Being fake becomes the honest choice. You’ve got this sound that’s tender and mean at once—it shouldn’t work, and yet.
They’re huge in Japan right now, songs everywhere, people talking about them on the street. It deserves to be that way. They figured out what no one else will: how to be completely constructed and actually mean something.