It’s that time? It’s that time! I’m gonna ruffle a few feathers with this one, but if this upsets you, then it is meant for you.
There is more to Japanese music than visual kei and idol bands.
There is more to Japanese music than visual kei and idol bands.
Once again, there is more to Japanese music than visual kei and idol bands, and there is much less of a difference than you would expect.
I’m not saying that you have to listen to other styles of Japanese music, or that you have to stop listening to visual kei wholesale, so don’t misinterpret my prompt and check out now. What I’m saying is that there are several layers of cognitive dissonance that come with the territory of being a visual kei fan, and we’re gonna run through a few of them real quick to prove my point.
- “There are no other bands that sound like visual kei bands”
There is nothing about dressing Super Saiyan that unlocks special rights to exclusive scales and modes. Not to mention that as a scene, visual kei has survived this long by shedding old trends and adopting new ones. The topology of the scene has changed immensely since it started in the late 80’s. It’s entirely possible for a non-visual band to nail the visual kei sound, because “the sound” itself is a pastiche of three to four different genres. This is why you have bands like 9GOATS, THE PIASS, DEXCORE, DazzlingBAD, Gertena, D’espairsRay, Dir en grey, Laputa, Pashya, and Sugar under the same label even though there are no sonic commonalities.
Here’s a song from a non-visual band that you would think is visual if you didn’t know.
The reference to lynch.'s “an illusion”/“all this I give you” in SILENT DIFFERENCE’s song is intentional and purposeful. This is a love letter from the doujin scene to the visual scene, except it had the wrong address so almost none of us got it. Let’s fix that, please.
But wait, there’s more!
I maintain that Imperial Circus Dead Decadence is the most visual sounding non-visual kei band there is on the scene right now! Except, if you don’t listen to both visual kei and follow this band, those connections would just never be made.
So I hope I made point one clear: we all like the way visual kei bands construct their music, and that’s 100% valid, but there are other bands that do the same thing and get passed over simply because they don’t self-identify as visual kei, not even that they aren’t visual! And that’s kinda sad, because that means there’s the potential to miss out on cool stuff.
- “You are listening with your eyes”
After so long in the scene, it’s the only answer I can come up with as to why so many visual kei fans jump ship to K-Pop instead of exploring the backyard. If we’re talking on a purely musical level, it’s a lot more challenging to change languages (the cadence of Korean when sung is not the same as Japanese and is it’s own kind of pleasant), change genres (half these people during the boom were talking shit about American pop music and ended up banging MIROTIC on loop not even six months later…), and change scenes (talk about starting from step one, disregarding all connections and knowledge you’ve built up) than it is to go from visual music to non-visual music. For crying out loud, people were more willing to give YOHIO and Seremedy a chance than your average Japanese band and they aren’t even from Japan!
If the mass exodus of '09-'10 has shown anything, it’s that we are all capable of listening to and even enjoying music from different cultures simultaneously. So what’s up with the mental barrier between visual kei and everything else from Japan? Where did it come from? And to piggyback off my #1 point, if the band sounds visual and you can’t tell right away, does it even matter? Does it negatively impact your perception of the band to the point where you can no longer enjoy the band because “they say they aren’t visual”? It’s all Japanese music!
Then you are listening with your eyes, not your ears.
To reinforce this dichotomy between visual and not-visual is to force all bands new to you through an increasingly more intricate and elaborate definition of what it means to both look and sound visual at the same time, which ends up detracting from the aesthetic fusion that the fantasy of visual kei promises. There are so many bands I consider “visual-adjacent”, that legitimately sound great and have strong visuals, and would be at the top of the scene if they considered themselves visual kei, but don’t, so a lot of people read that and decide they already don’t like them. There are so many bands from yesteryear that fit the definition of visual kei then but don’t now, and get passed over without a second thought.
I’m coming through with proof, starting with Yousei Teikoku:
My old-new favorite, Onmyo-Za:
8-eit:
el -Ethnic Legist-
Tokyo Jihen
Wagakki-Band:
Imperial Circus Dead Decadence:
QUEEN BEE:
Ancient Myth:
Unlucky Morpheus:
For the twelve of us that still listen to el -Ethnic Legist-, you’ll see I was sneaky and slid them in amongst the others. Because that demonstrates my point: you can be visual and appreciate aesthetics without having to be visual kei, and if you enjoy visual kei because of the aesthetics then there are other bands with fiery looks and driving sounds to catch your attention too! If you can’t tell the difference right away between visual bands and visual adjacent bands, then the distinction ceases to matter.
And I don’t wanna hear “they don’t sound visual” because visual kei is whatever the fuck you want it to be. NOCTURNAL BLOODLUST actually turned visual kei and proved to us all that it’s a matter of following certain compositional tropes to incorporate “the sound” into their music, and all they did was coordinate outfits and people fell head over heels for them, but I legit was pushing their first single before Ivy and no one wanted it at that time. Dir en grey got a lot of shit after Kisou for switching their style up, to the point where “western Metal” became a weak insult for a band that didn’t meet sonic expectations right away. DEVILOOF? JILUKA? DEXCORE? Even ten years ago those bands would have been discarded outta hand for being “too American”. Expectations change and the scene changes too.
I don’t understand how one can profess love visual kei for the variety and the looks and then throw out 99% of the music that comes from Japan because…insert arbitrary reason here? Some of the roots of visual kei can be found in noh theater from the 14th century, and those roots branch right back out into almost every single Japanese band there is. Half of y’all ain’t even look and that’s the honest truth.
So to circle back to my #1 point, “There are no other bands that sound like visual kei bands” should be corrected to “There are no other bands that sound like Japanese bands”. You won’t find another band that mixes rock with traditional Japanese instruments, sings about Buudhist mythology, or combines showa-era kayokyoku with jazz-pop. I refuse to believe that Wagakki-Band is too dense of a material to digest for people who jock the neo-folk unit Kagrra, every time they reach in the back of the cupboard for that spice. Kagrra, is even more unapproachable IMO, but that’s a topic for another time.
If you can dig deep and find all sorts of different styles within visual kei, you can scratch the surface of the rest of the scene and find all that and more. There’s very little that’s unique to visual kei that you won’t find in the rest of Japanese music, and it’s arguable if those elements are even good things. But for as much as we leave back handed comments about the uncertain future of the scene, and how often the scene is “dead” or “dying”, we don’t do enough to address the mental barrier of “visual kei versus everything else” under the Land of the Rising Sun.
And the best way to do that is to actually LISTEN to the bands that your bands are listening to. Plus Ultra that shit. And that leads me to my third and final point:
- Most of these bands play embarrassingly easy music
It’s a cold day in Sendai when I find a new visual kei band that knows what sus2 chords are. Most visual kei music can be described as banging on power chords with a smattering of breakdowns and hammer-ons/pull-offs for the solos. Satisfying when I’m in the mood for it, but after a while you can see where the band runs up against the limits of their musical knowledge and doesn’t have the vocabulary to define what they need to move forward.
An easy example of this would be the album VIGOUR by BORN. It’s not a bad album, but it’s not memorable either, and it’s because they rely almost exclusively on power-chords to get through the 45 minutes and I’m just begging for some kind of flavor or seasoning, but I roll around to the mid-tempo ballad FACE by track five and it’s just more power chords but with less distortion and it’s a slog to get through one after the other. Combine that with the fact that most visual bands play drop tunings in order to get that sound and to make it easier to play these chords fast, and I came to the conclusion that most visual kei music is rather basic and easy to play.
That doesn’t make it bad, it just means there’s room for improvement. Give me some sus2/sus4 chords, some 6ths, 7ths, and 9ths, a scale other than the minor pentatonic (say Phrygian), and you get something resembling Ethnic Legist from earlier. You don’t really understand what I’m talking about? That’s okay, neither do most new band members on the scene. But learning how to play the guitar has allowed me to peer behind the veil so to speak, and I came back a little more enlightened. Unless you’re dropping a very specific band and example, I’m more likely to believe the music from some upstart visual band is more of the same than something unique that can’t be found anywhere else, not even within Japan. And that’s completely fine, but I’m no longer operating under the assumption that visual kei is more special than it is.
So yeah, end the musical apartheid. Tear down that mental barrier. It’s all music, there’s a lot of good stuff to enjoy, and I guarantee you’ll end up liking visual kei differently if you leave and come back. Most of us old heads that are still around left and came back, and personally speaking my time in other waters redefined my taste in music so that I learned to like additional elements in visual kei that would have taken me longer to appreciate.
Don’t be afraid, the music won’t bite back.