The chocolate crisis

'Gimme Chocolate' is the song that BABYMETAL tends to be most associated with. Most people who first encounter the band from this song are immediately hit with cognitive dissonance and are unable to process what they are watching for a while. Sometimes longer.

It opens with a monstrous growl demanding chocolate followed by a wall of metal noise as drums and guitar smash into your face. Three little girls wearing striking red and black frilly skirts take centrestage in a frenzy of perfectly coordinated dance. Within seconds the mind has to cope with so much dichotomy of sight and sound, and then the girls bring in a vocal tone that runs freely and lightly against the backing music, so heavy and dark.

This band is all about dualities of things that obviously do not fit, yet these incongruous threads are woven together into a surprisingly wonderful never-experienced-before tapestry full of music, energy and fun.

Going by the translated lyrics, the song depicts this duality in the dilemma of craving chocolate, yet worrying about gaining weight. We see this dilemma also played out in their dance. MOA and YUI are the devil and angel attending to each side of SU. Their words are gibberish: One says 'dokyun' and the other, 'zokyun', so there's no way to tell which is 'good' and which is 'evil', but both are unhelpfully egging SU on to choose between them. Do it, or don't do it.

Their dance moves between checking themselves out for signs of weight gain -- pats to the waist and face, the one tiny butt wiggle, and the back lean, like they are imagining what a rotund belly might look and feel like; alternating with miming a chocolate box in their hand, so near, and yet so far. They constantly revisit the move where they alternately point to their own heads with opposite fingers, suggesting the constant struggle to choose between temptation and consequence.

The song's conclusion is so BABYMETAL: consequence be damned, they gleefully bite into the chocolate bonbon they have been denying themselves this whole time, no regrets. It's like realising that not every choice needs to be the crisis it's made out to be. Have a bit of chocolate, be happy, work hard. Life doesn't need to be more complicated than that.