To add on to this (because I didn’t really finish), I feel like a lot of what I find inconsistent about the -kei system is that it treats visual-kei as a genre of music and not as a scene. I firmly believe it’s a scene because bands play fusions of rock, pop, and metal and also because it sits at the intersection of sound and aesthetics. But now’s not the time for that conversation.
Visual-kei to me is like a color gradient where each color represents a combination of music genre and aesthetics.
You can identify different hues of colors very easily within this picture, but if you start trying to draw boundaries to separate colors it gets hard. At some point the result is arbitrarily drawn lines. That’s what the -kei system feels like to me.
I don’t think I would have so much of a problem with it if bands could be more than one -kei at a time. And there’s nothing saying that a band can’t be, but I’ve never seen anyone do it that way. Rather, I saw people come up with new terms to describe new developments in the scene that old terms don’t cover (ex. koteosa to describe the fusion of kote and oshare). And then at some point we just stopped.
The -kei system is useful and it’s trying to fill a hole in our vocabularies that we need to describe visual kei bands to one another quickly. I’m not trying to convince anyone to abandon it, but rather to revive and improve it. I think that trying to assign terms like subgenres doesn’t scale well and I haven’t heard any new terms since “neo visual-kei” in 2010, which I think is so broad it’s not that useful. I think we need terms that describe what we see and hear, but aren’t exclusionary so that you can stack them.
I remember we ridiculed them when people first started using them, but when I think on it terms like brutal-kei and loud-kei are a step in that direction already. Maybe instead of using Nagoya-kei as a term to describe alternative metal bands with a melancholic, gloomy atmosphere we come up with several terms that actually describe the looks and the sounds? Like the forum tag system we have in place even.