Rock Is A Lady’s Modesty Perfectly Captures Music As An Act Of Rebellion

By Elijah Gonzalez | August 7, 2025 | 1:00pm

Anime Features Rock Is A Lady's Modesty

Rock Is A Lady’s Modesty Perfectly Captures Music As An Act Of Rebellion

At this point, we’re well into anime’s girl band revolution. After Kyoto Animation helped kickstart this trend of series about girl only musical acts back in 2009 with the ever-popular K-On, we’ve seen lots of different takes on this material: there’s Bocchi The Rock and its comedy meets creative animation, Girls Band Cry with its raw emotions, and the entire Bang Dream series, which has gradually gone from resembling the “Cute Girls Doing Cute Things” (CGDQT) trend set by KyoAni’s seminal series before spiraling into Hot Mess territory with the brilliant It’s My Go and its even more gonzo follow-up Ave Mujica.

But despite all of this competition, much of which has already deviated from this format’s starting point, Rock Is A Lady’s Modesty manages to find its own niche, bawdily trampling on any notion of decency as it proves its thorough understanding of rock music’s historical role as counterculture. Its central girls can be loud, crass, sweaty, and angry, and that’s very much the point.

The story follows Lilisa Suzunomiya (Lily), a student at the elite private school Oshin Girls Academy. To her peers, she’s the very picture of a high society lady, at once corteous, charming, and elegant. However, she harbors a secret: she’s completely winging it. As someone who only recently entered this world after her mother remarried, she is putting on an elaborate, exhausting façade. Her end goal is to win the title of Noble Maiden, an honor given to the student who most embodies their academy’s values. It’s all to live up to her mom’s expectations, who has an unhealthy obsession with blending in now that they’re part of the prestigious Suzunomiya family. And to do this, Lily has given up her greatest passion because it’s one deemed unbefitting of a lady: her guitar. When she was younger, her birth father instilled a love of rock music that she’s carried with her all this time and that her mom wants her to forget.

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Rock Is A Lady's Modesty

And while Lily tries to put on a brave face, we can see how much this constant performance eats away at her. At school and at home, she’s expected to embody a specific form of idealized femininity, one that readily conforms to gender roles as she behaves politely and obediently, never causing a scene and always doing what she’s told. Intersecting with this are certain norms when it comes to class: appropriate topics of discussion, appropriate things to eat, appropriate hobbies, and appropriate kinds of music.

In short, there is an overwhelming pressure to follow the unwritten rules, both from her school, whose headmistress mercilessly hammers home the social code these girls are expected to follow, and her mother, who has her give up guitar for a more aristocratic instrument in the violin. While many around Lily have been raised to accept this incredibly limiting spectrum of expression, as someone who previously had a life outside this world, she finds these circumstances even more stifling. This all comes across in both her internal monologues and in the first episode’s imagery, where the window muntins of her school are likened to the bars of a bird cage.

Despite her suppressed longing for rock Lily dutifully accepts these burdens for the sake of her mom, attempting to become the Noble Maiden to solidify her parent’s place in high society. Of course, she can only keep this lie going for so long, and everything changes when she meets her soulmate, Otoha Kurogane.

At first glance, Otoha is the exact kind of lady that Lily is attempting to be, effortlessly regal and adored by the student body, someone who also keeps her cool. But while she seems outwardly “perfect’ in the way that Oshin Girls Academy instills in its students, she has a secret hobby: she’s an absolute killer on the drums. And after Lily stumbles into one of her solo jam sessions, she comes out the other end so transformed she can’t return to her cage ever again.

When Otoha taunts Lily into finally dropping her pretenses and admitting that she plays the guitar, the two engage in a musical duel to the death, both trying to make the other submit with the sheer weight of their music. It’s sweaty, intense, full of BDSM imagery, and has several layers of incredibly unsubtle sexual innuendo.

The animation is brought to life through motion capture of real-life musicians, the members of Band-Maid, instilling an intensity that gives the scene weight, as they trade ear-shredding solos. Here, the camera is in near-constant motion, something made possible thanks to the use of 3D models, giving this and future performances a dynamism that perfectly matches these girls’ tidal waves of instrumental sound.

And then, when it’s over, and both performers have sweat through their pristine school uniforms, Otoha starts a tradition in cussing out Lily in a profanity-laced tirade that contains genuinely wild phrases like “And your phrasing’s as dull as dishwater, c**t shlicking guitarist!”

Out of context, it might have come across as so over-the-top as to completely take you out of the action, a tone switch trying to cash in on the unexpectedness of these high-society ladies engaging in foul-mouthed courtship. However, it works thanks to the series’ central thesis: through rock music, these ladies express utter disdain for their restrictive surroundings, breaking their chains with each ear-splitting lick.

And beyond their “unladylike” activity with an unacceptable hobby that includes equally inappropriate language, behavior, and appearances, the very act of them making music together is framed as intensely sexual, another taboo for these young women who are supposed to be chaste. And you can layer on another “taboo” in Japan and elsewhere: it is very gay.

Beyond serving as a reaction to traditional CGDCT shows, Rock Is A Lady’s Modesty is also in conversation with Class S fiction, a sub-genre dating back to early 20th-century Japan that focuses on relationships between students at all-girls schools. Almost initially seeming queer from a modern perspective, Class S tends to range from depicting these girls as anything between “very close friends” to near-lovers. Regardless, the result is always the same, with these characters “growing out” of same-sex attraction so they can pursue hetero romance.

While Rock Is A Lady’s Modesty very directly copies Class S visual hallmarks, like flowing white school uniforms and passionate “relationships” between young ladies (virtually everyone at the school seems to be in love with either Otoha or Lily), it takes a wrecking ball to maidenly decorum as the visual representations of its central duo’s music goes full Venus in Furs-mode. It honestly feels misleading to describe Otoha’s flirting as innuendo, because she never stops talking about Lily as her soulmate and the one she loves getting “hot and heavy” with.

Beyond this, whether it’s the main character’s name, Lily, which is literally the English translation of a Japanese term for girls’ love stories (yuri), or the fact that the protagonist calls Otoha her “lifelong partner” as she narrates their first meeting, the series’ depiction of queerness dovetails neatly with its general stance of music as a vehicle to blast through backward social stigmas.

Perhaps the best confluence of these ideas comes in Episode 11, when Lily meets a previous Noble Maiden winner, Yayoi Takayanagi, who at first seems to have a lot in common with our protagonist. Even though Yayoi didn’t perfectly abide by the rules, had a passion for her instrument, the harp, and followed what she enjoyed, she still took home her school’s most sought-after award. Excited that she may be able to replicate this success, Lily asks her how she did it, hoping to learn how she can come out on top while still pursuing her love of rock.

Unfortunately, the truth is Lilly’s worst nightmare. We learn that Yayoi only got away with skirting expectations because her parents are filthy rich and paid for an addition to the school. As for Yayoi’s instrument, the harp? She gave it up after her father deemed it “unnecessary.” She then points out how Lily has to keep her guitar a secret because it doesn’t befit ladies.

In Yayoi, we see what our protagonist may have become if she had never met Otoha, forced to toss aside what she cares about to obey. Yayoi’s encouragement for Lily to essentially “outgrow” what she loves also perfectly mirrors the underlying message of many Class S stories, implying that her adoration of both music and Otoha is something she’ll be expected to discard one day. Of course, our heroine flips the bird instead, eventually cursing out Yayoi while she and the rest of Rock Lady kick in the teeth of some dirtbag pretty boys during this season’s climactic concert.

From the beginning, rock has pushed against the boundaries of social expression, whether challenging gender norms with men decked out with makeup and hard rock ladies, or when it comes to sexuality, with many queer icons like Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, Elton John, and more. And more broadly, the genre has had a role in counterculture since its inception, whether we’re talking about its birth in the American South led by African American musicians, the moral panic caused by Elvis, the “British Invasion” intertwining with the anti-establishment ‘60s, punk music, the Satanic Panic of the ‘80s, and so on.

As for the women of Rock is a Lady’s Modesty, the genre is a means for Lily, Otoha, and the rest of their burgeoning band to break through layers of parental expectations, gender essentialist nonsense, and heteronormativity. Rock has always been a language of dissent, and these girls shred the status quo with each killer solo.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.