Little Japanese Girls Are Now Dominating Heavy Metal Music

Stop what you're doing and pay attention – Li-sa-x is in the building.

No, she’s not Malcolm X's lost Japanese grandchild. She's a regular 9-year-old who happens to enter beast mode whenever she picks up an electric guitar. Exhibit A is this video from December 2013, which showcases her viral cover of Racer X's "Scarified" metal solo:

Her Facebook fan page is the cutest shit ever. She describes herself as "I <3 Guitar!!" and "Japanese 9 year old girl," and her influences are guitarists Guthrie Govan and Paul Gilbert. That’s about it.

Little else is known about this mysterious genius, except that she bugs out when she sees herself on TV:

Image Credit: Facebook

And she's getting tons of love from the Internet lately. The Huffington Post is celebrating her as an example of subverted "gender stereotypes" — as presumably one wouldn't normally place "little girl" and "face-melting guitar solo" in the same sentence. But really, Japan has seen an influx of young women putting their unique spin on heavy metal recently.

Earlier this year, music videos posted by pop-metal fusion outfit Babymetal took the Internet by storm with their unexpected marriage of head-banging guitar runs and cutesy J-Pop stylings. Here's their video for "Gimme Chocolate" (yes, you read that correctly):

And here's one for "Head Bangya!!" where a band member ceremoniously dons a neck brace so she can head bang without causing vertebral damage. I think:

The three-member group — which formed in 2011 — consists of 16-year-old Su-Metal and 14-year-old Maometal and Yuimetal. Drew Millard at Noisey writes: "By all human logic, this shouldn't work in the least, but it does, completely and unequivocally, through both the machinations of the J-Pop machine as well as the sheer force of their own weird."

Babymetal is not alone. In 2012, Tofugu listed four other "all-female hardcore metal bands" to watch out for: Dazzle Vision, Exist+trace, Cyntia and Aldious. In other words: yes, yes, yes and hell yes.

So if she decides to stick with it, Li-sa-x seems poised to deliver epic things to the metal-crazed masses for years moving forward, just like her predecessors. For her growing legion of fans, her attitude toward the whole affair is definitely encouraging:

"Wow!" she writes. "I was surprised that the 'Scarified' Video which I posted in Dec of the last year is played so much suddenly. Now, I practice the next music." (Insert smiley-face emoji.)

The world is yours, Li-sa-x. The rest of us just live here.