This gets into what I posted over in another topic so I’ll just copy and paste it here.
I think in general we should just throw out the term “Nagoya-kei” because we use it to refer to dark, angsty music when the name literally translates to “Nagoya-style” and implies that all bands that come out of Nagoya sound the same. They don’t.
Even @sume7 says in his post that not all bands that come out of Nagoya play Nagoya-kei. Which just makes it even more confusing, because I have never seen a band refer to themselves as such. The vast amount of confusion that I have is personally why I shy away from using these terms.
I think @CAT5 said it best in the Discord, but I’ll start by saying a lot of these terms stemmed from the visual kei boom. Bands were popping up left and right and there were so many distinct styles and sounds under the visual-kei umbrella that it was only natural for people to try categorizing them. Categorizing is human nature. It gives context to and helps to explain what we see in the world. To some extent, these labels such as oshare-kei and nagoya-kei are useful because they paint a broad picture. But the problem with our categorizations are that they are not consistent or well-defined. They seem retrofitted to me.
Let’s take for example the fact that there are so many styles of visual kei from the 80’s that just get lumped under “proto visual kei” or all of the 90’s that get lumped into “kote-kei”, and even a lot of bands from the early 2000s get thrown under sofubi, but it’s not until the visual-kei boom where a lot of these definitions seem to “start” and to also be concentrated around. Can you find me an oshare-kei band older than 2003? When did Nagoya-kei start? When did kote-kei end? What about the start of angura-kei? Who was the first angura-kei band? What about bands that don’t cleanly fit into any of these categories, what are they? Why is it that we seemed to stop making new terms after 2010, even though the style and scene keeps progressing? Some of these questions I legit don’t have answers to.
And then to get back to the consistency thing, a lot of these terms are built different. Some define sounds. Some looks. Nagoya-kei is alone in describing a location. Then there are the terms that are like overly specific, like Tanbi-kei or Iryou-kei, which are useful in describing a type of fashion but are rarely used. Then there’s the whole debacle of “neo visual-kei”, which I can’t describe a sound or look for you because it seems to be used to describe everything after 2010. I mean at some point you can take a verb or adjective, affix -kei to it, and you’d be able to describe some aspect of the scene (ex. cyber-kei, brutal-kei, loud-kei, etc.).
Because that’s what we are doing. Trying to describe aspects of a scene. It’s why I described it as a fractal earlier, because that’s what it really is. It’s a pit where the deeper you go the less things make sense. It’s like trying to recall the details of a dream where the harder you try the more it slips away.
We have such a hard time trying to define what visual-kei is that it makes no sense to go even deeper and try to suss out the limits of an area where we haven’t even defined clean boundaries. And that is partially why I don’t like using these terms.