The fiercest and most fearsome monsters have always stood for something bigger than themselves. Latinate etymology and pop culture would agree. [Pulls down projector.] The word “monster” derives from the Latin monstrum, meaning “divine omen, sign, warning.” Taken literally, the monster acts as a messenger for greater evils at play. For example: Godzilla. Created in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla (or Gojira in Japanese) gave shape to the post–World War II fear of nuclear warfare, transmutating national trauma into cinematic spectacle. Or consider the cheonyeo-gwisin of Korean folklore. [Next slide.] On the opposite end of the monster-gender spectrum, this “virgin ghost” represents the moral horror of a woman dying unmarried, unloved. With her womanhood unconsummated, the cheonyeo-gwisin haunts the site of her premarital demise as she seeks some sort of resolution, i.e., terrorizing mortals with seething, virginal charm. [Projector snaps shut.] To be a monster is to display misfortune; to encounter a monster is to receive a warning. 

I was given several warnings in the moments leading up to Mister Cobra, the one-night, one-girl, music-theater performance by Lucy Liyou, staged in New York this past April to debut Liyou’s album of the near-same name, MR COBRA. First, an usher gave a content warning outside the theater doors (consider this yours as well): nudity, strobing lights, depictions of sexual assault, gender/general violence, death. Once inside the theater, I grabbed two seats in the center-front row. Then a different usher walked up and issued another warning: “Just so you know, this [gesturing] is the splash zone.” Oh? I thought I was in the Keith Haring Theatre at Performance Space, not SeaWorld. I told her that I didn’t mind a little spray of water, to which she replied, “No, not water. Blood.” Right. I relayed this to my boyfriend when he joined me. “Fake blood,” I assured him. He wanted to move, but I insisted we stay put—I didn’t want to miss a single drop of Red 40.

Liyou has described the album as “a revisionist retelling of a time back in high school” when she “fell in love with a predator.” Fleshed-out over twelve tracks, the record traces the (un)becoming of Babygirl—Liyou’s freshly postpubescent, pre–gender transition persona. Within the first forty-seven seconds of the show, which is to say, the duration of the opening number, “Yoohoo (An Overture),” I knew Liyou was about to rip us a new one. Officially in character as Babygirl, she leaped onto the keys to throw a fit of free jazz over a gunky backing track replete with squelches and skittering percussion—just to give you a sense of what the next fifty minutes of chaos, catharsis, and eventually chainsaws had in store. Basically, imagine Minnie Mouse trapped in one of Jigsaw’s torture contraptions. What sounds would emerge from this diegesis? I wager something like what we heard as Liyou lured us into her subterranean world. 

The first apparent monster of MR COBRA is its titular figure: a pedophilic, middle-aged, white guy with an Asian fetish and—pardon me—a literal monster cock, which Babygirl likens to Godzilla after Mr. Cobra unzips, in track four, “Gojira Dearest,” at her behest. Darkly voiced by fellow experimental musician Jake Muir, Mr. Cobra appears mostly in sudden and silent interstices between and within tracks, imbuing even the most jubilant moments of the record with the dread of his expected arrival, made all the more ominous by his lack of a cohesive countenance. One moment, in the performance, he was depicted on the screen as a clip-art snake with a clip-art bow tie—the next, he stood onstage as a male mannequin with detachable limbs. He was omnipresent, but remained ungraspable—neither for the audience, as we tried to parse monstre from monsieur, nor for Babygirl, as she tried to win his favor with her pageantry. 

But really, the fiercest, most fearsome monster of them all is not Mr. Cobra—it’s the beast that emerges from Babygirl’s coquetry. The track “Babygirl,” which introduces us to Liyou’s persona, arranges harsh, frenetic textures to supply something of a demented playground for Babygirl, her “teehees” and “ta-tas” (g/j)iggling about the score’s oblique corners. She’s showing off, strutting her stuff—charming the snake. He’s not impressed. “You’re nothing but a boy,” Mr. Cobra finally hisses, after being urged to speak. The track ends with a sample of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby giving voice to Babygirl’s mom, who screams at the sight of her demon-baby-but-actually-just-trans-daughter: “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HIM?!” Being simultaneously the show’s composer and protagonist, Liyou could have chosen to portray Babygirl in a more flattering light, but no. She shaped her image in response to her immediate company, ingesting and spitting up other people’s disgust.

Betwixt these monstrous moments, however, Liyou insists that there is still a baby girl inside Babygirl. Whether we’re expected to find her adorable or deplorable remains a compelling ambiguity sustained throughout. In “Romeopathy,” Babygirl offers a luscious cover of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” to soliloquize her desire for Mr. Cobra. In the next track, aptly titled “911, A Kidnapping,” he’s taking her to his basement, an experience she likens to “being invited to a god’s drinking hole.” As their affair progresses, we feel a mix of concern, embarrassment, and compassion for Babygirl—after all, who is more vulnerable than a child on the brink of transition? 

It’ll take guts, pizzazz, and a penchant for seduction to get through this mess. The record’s midpoint, “Constrictor (Haha),” encapsulates all of the above with Babygirl moonlighting as a disco diva, complete with shimmery harmonies and a thumping baseline—all that’s missing is a boa! The song dishes out her boldest display of grandeur and sex appeal yet, only to be abruptly interrupted by an embarrassed Mr. Cobra. “Relax, please, relax,” he scowls midway through the song. Then a crowd of boos comes in and rises to an ear-bleeding crescendo, smothering us in acerbic static. But for Babygirl, it’s only a brief intermission; she picks up the beat right where she left it, as if dusting off her puff-sleeved shoulders after being hit by a truck. [Cue the Foley car crash.] Such is the turbulent nature of Babygirl’s story: the girly gives way to the grisly as her delusions of love—acknowledgement! acceptance! completion!—go southward, leaving her to contend with her ripening identity as it reflects back to her rottenly in the eyes of her voracious trade. As Liyou writes in the album’s liner notes, “Why did being called ‘my girl’ by this freakish man in his 40s make me realize that I truly was and could be a girl? Why do I still look for that realization in others? When will this search end?” 

This willingness to tackle the manifold discomforts of identity formation is characteristic of Liyou. Across her oeuvre, she approaches identity as a site of interrogation and expansiveness without veering into the didactic. “My job isn’t to babysit people and help them understand my relation to ‘the Korean American experience,’” Liyou said, in a 2023 interview with The Creative Independent. Certainly not, but if you also identify as an Asian American of the gender-expansive experience and were forced to take piano lessons in childhood, Liyou’s music will resonate with you as much as it will eviscerate. At turns ambient then abrasive, melodic then entirely glitch-fucked, her compositions express the conflicting urges of the racialized, sexed person to appear both serene and obscene before the flattening judgement of others. In her 2020 record, Welfare, she reimagined the traditional Korean folk opera form of pansori to present a sonic biopsy of familial trauma and self-healing. Mister Cobra, as both album and live performance, pushes the envelope even further, erecting something of an autofictional Gesamtkunstwerk (for the dolls with trauma). By combining dramaturgy, film, production design, and choreography, Liyou took her audio material and embodied it to its fullest extent, making a gruesome, engulfing display of the music—that is, she made a monster of it. 

Of course the question remains: What “greater evils” do the monsters of Mister Cobra represent? In an online exchange I had with Liyou, she mentioned liking the image of cobras specifically for their hoods—how they resemble open arms, ready to envelop their victim. But unlike the predator, who operates only in service of his appetite, Liyou imbues Babygirl with a multitude of several influential evils, such as: (1) The transphobia of our current political and media landscape; (2) The lust of her daddy, be it the devil or a john from Grindr; (3) Her own wretched impulses as a teenage girl. I mean, surely she’s no angel. She’s a temptress, “a scarlet letter,” even a cannibal! (During a staged scene for the penultimate track, “Self-Mutilating Missus,” Babygirl gave the Mr. Cobra mannequin a blowjob that finished with blood dripping from her mouth.) Ultimately, she’s a creature both produced from and representative of great contempt. She’s daddy’s little monster. 

Liyou also reveals, in the album’s notes, that the project was, from its conception, “a record about shame.” Shame provides an effective strategy for monster-making: it is simultaneously externally informed and internally adopted—a funhouse mirror that tricks the subject into believing her misshapen reflection, however silly it looks. Shame, as experienced in adolescence, can feed off of self-seriousness and a lack of greater perspective, inspiring the macabre as a coping mechanism. Babygirl indulges in these dichotomous properties of shame—horror and hilarity—with equal weight. “I just wanna fake die,” read the screen toward the end of the show as Babygirl writhed in her trash heap. When will this search end? Like this: an existential hissy fit culminating in exquisite, histrionic, and simulated suicide, a bucket of the forewarned fake blood inverted over her head. After fake-dying, Babygirl donned a tiara and a sash that read “TRANNY OF THE YEAR,” putting a grim spin on what it means to “transition to the other side.” This finale could be understood as a claim that the search for self-realization, for anyone but especially for trans youth, is ceaseless and brutal, the only terminus being death itself. Though I favor a more empowered interpretation of Babygirl’s ending. By expurgating herself from the disgust and disdain projected onto her, and by embracing the monstrousness of her ever-mutating image, Babygirl shows us exactly who she is: a goddamn ferocious trouper. 

Some weeks after the show when I started drafting this piece, my mind kept returning to the cheonyeo-gwisin, who is typically envisioned as a young woman in a flowing, white dress with long black hair cascading over her face—not dissimilar from how Liyou dressed onstage. While, unlike Godzilla, this monster does not make a cameo in Mister Cobra, I think she is a relevant figure for understanding Babygirl. Cast aside by society as unfuckable and thus unproductive, unwedded and thus unfulfilled, the cheonyeo-gwisin represents a hollow of identity, a waste of potential, a hanbok full of un’s. But that is not to say she is weak or powerless—the opposite, in fact. An unverified post from the blog K-Occult describes her danger level as “HARMFUL (Restless Spirit / Han-Driven Haunting).” Because at the root of this vengeful power is the Korean concept of han, which can be superficially understood as “sorrowful grief.” More accurately, han encompasses the complex feelings produced under an individual or nation’s long-standing subjugation by a superior force. Resentment, discontent, shame: the emotional residue of evil first endured by the girl, then unleashed by the monster made of her.  

This piece is part of the Summer 2026 issue.