The other day it was brought to my attention that BiS has put out a new PV, STUPiG.

Yeah, just take a second for that to sink in.

My feelings on BiS have been complicated. On the one hand, I want idol music to expand as a genre, and I don’t want my personal tastes to interfere with that, but on the other hand BiS really doesn’t appeal to my tastes. I don’t like their music and I don’t find their style appealing. I can’t see BiS appearing on any of my top lists, and I have little interest in them. Yet, I can’t help but admire them, in a way.

After a bit of thinking, I realized that the way I feel about BiS is the way I react to Avant Garde art, specifically experimental, Avant-Garde film. I got my degree in film/media studies, but my interests have always been with popular culture, mass media, narrative cinema. Other people get passionate about art films, and I do like a lot of good, independent arthouse films, but I never really got some of the avant garde stuff. I mean, I watched it in class, talked about meaning and symbolism, but it often seemed purposefully obtuse. Analyzing meaning within a narrative structure is relatively simple; avant garde film breaks down that structure entirely.

This film, Meshes of the Afternoon, was one I watched in class, and I was never really that wowed by it. However, one of the interesting things it does is break a lot of rules about how things are shot, for continuity editing, that most films NEVER break. The way the key falls down the stairs is a way you’d never see something shot in a mass produced film. In fact, while there are many ways to make a film, there are many things taken for granted or always done.

I’m not saying that BiS is on the level of Meshes of the Afternoon or some of the more famous avant-garde films. But I do think that’s what they’re accomplishing. In making a film, there are a number of rules that most people tend to abide by, and the whole point of avant-garde film is that they bend and/or break these rules. They try to test the boundaries of the medium itself.

Think of idols. Not any specific idol, but just what your image of idols are in your head. I imagine that most of you will be thinking of cute Japanese girls in some cute outfit singing something cute. While idol music doesn’t necessarily have to fall into any particular genre, it often falls into that type of cute pop music. There’s nothing wrong with this; I adore typical idol pop. But there is a very typical way that idols are generally presented.

BiS completely goes against this. They are often scary looking, often choosing to eschew being cute for being scary. Their music doesn’t sound like much else in the idol world. Their outfits are strange and they have chosen in the past to essentially go nude (in the infamous My IXXX PV). They are often gruesome. Yet, they are still idols.

That’s why I’d consider them to be one of the few avant-garde idol groups out there. They are specifically going out and breaking through the boundaries of being an idol. They’re releasing noise albums (as the collaborative group BiS Kaidan) when their normal music is hardly normal music. There’s a reason they were the scary villains of the Dempagumi.inc W.W.D II PV; they are the least idol-y idols out there.

Even though I don’t know if I’ll ever be a full fan of BiS, I respect them because they are avant-garde. While many groups that perform other genres as idols have been around before BiS (Babymetal was formed in 2010 when BiS was formed in 2011), there have been a lot of metal, non-conventional idols popping up. Pure Idol Heart has been doing a lot of write-ups on some of these non-conventional idols. And while Babymetal should take a lot of the credit for the metal idol renaissance of sorts going on right now, BiS is still being strange and breaking the boundaries open for groups that want to take it. Alice Juban, for example, has a lot of very conventional music, but they pose with hockey masks, chainsaws, and headbang a lot. And I imagine that, as BiS gains more recognition, more idol groups are going to step up and take risks.

I’m not trying to say that BiS is going to completely change the course of idols. That’s not happening any time soon. Yet, I do see their trajectory a lot like Avant-Garde film; there’s room for both BiS and the AKBs of the world, and groups like BiS do a lot to open up the world of idols for more and more opportunities, which I whole-heartedly approve of.

So while just about nothing about BiS appeals to me as an idol fan, as someone interested in idols in general and as someone who wants for the idol world to keep growing, I can’t help but be more than a bit grateful for the avant-garde idol groups like BiS.