Not sure if i going to write it here or random thoughts thread, but the Disbandment of DIMLIM means that we’ll never got a Spiritbox-kei band like them anymore.
(maybe it’s just the riffing style+background effects)
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I’m back like your monthly check-in with your visual-kei therapist that says mean things and makes you think. I’ve also been thinking about this for a while, and it’s a sensitive topic so I need to choose the right words, but it’s important that I use my soapbox for saying things with good intentions. Also, I’m calling out a mentality, not any person in particular. You may have read this somewhere else but it’s important enough to repeat.
Trading gotta go.
Find an equivalent to JRO that isn’t visual-kei based, then come back here because it doesn’t exist. The fans of that scene of the 00’s and the 10’s had a very different culture than the visual kei scene at that time. I can only speak as a secondary source who hovered on the outskirts because that scene was so impenetrable. You had to know someone who could introduce you to the bands others would listen to and who could feed you files for free before you could get accepted into the fold, and even then there were layers. Private servers where certain things were shared, bluffing like you had more than you did so you could get clout and inner connections, listening to things you don’t even like so that you appear informed about everything, it was easily ten times more work to get into that scene than this one. Without a connection, your introduction to the scene began and ended at bands who did anime themes. This may not be true now, but it was true then, and it matters. It’s why I think there was a mass migration from VK to K-Pop, and why for a long time there was a mental barrier between VK and the rest of Japanese music. That barrier came from somewhere, and now I’ve just given an explanation of what I see.
The layers and servers relied on lots of trading from what I could infer, but they could never conquer the infamous Catch-22 of “in order to acquire some rare release A you need an equally rare or rarer release B. But if B is rarer than A, than whomever has B will likely want C, which is rarer than A”. The chain continues for quite some time as the odds of these stars aligning are very slim. These releases are by definition rare, and therefore hard to acquire! But the bar for where “rare” was for this scene was set so low Satan was playing limbo with it in hell. To me, it felt like everyone wanted something for nothing; getting into new non-visual Japanese bands was so hard because they weren’t on Bandcamp, YouTube wasn’t as mature, there was no Spotify, and few were promoting. That scene imploded on itself. There was no new blood coming in, the old guard aged out, and the people that remain are reading this because there’s nowhere else to go.
This is in stark contrast to visual-kei, and I don’t want that to happen to us. We did a damn good job of promoting, preserving and pushing the music wherever and whenever we could for the last 25~30 years? That was/is our culture. Vk.gy is a mammoth database and that’s forever awesome that fans were motivated enough to do that. Our music cameos in the weirdest YouTube react videos. It’s not the cultural export that K-Pop is, but I don’t think I want it that way. But this whole thing only worked (and continues to work) because we were so willing to freely share and talk about it, despite how alienating and difficult it could be in person, and that flies in the face of trading. If the future of the scene feels grim, then raising the bar to entry for new people to discover these bands past and present is the opposite of what we want to do.
Remember that behind every person who hoards their files was someone willing to promote them freely. I firmly believe it’s your money and that you are free to share or not, but in my 20+ years in the scene I have never seen a visual-kei band that wasn’t promoted do well. Never. I can think of an easy 3-5 songs that I know I will never hear because no one is trading or selling it. That hurts everyone. The “perceived value” of how rare something is eventually falls off. Eventually rarez become obscure, and then the amount of people that would care about the band depletes rapidly. So if you really want to flex, people have to know (and care) about the band and then you have to “cash in” before the release loses its luster. I’ve learned goodwill is the kind of currency you earn in small portions and burn all at once, and I’ve rarely met a trader with a surplus of goodwill. Also, if you buy all your rarez secondhand then the scalper gets all your money, so the band was not supported in that transaction, so the amount of money spent on acquiring rarez means nothing to me most of the time.
I think the impact of our consumption is a double-edged sword but more good than bad comes of it. This community is undeniable proof of that. So yeah, trading gotta go, and I’m talking from the perspective of someone who doesn’t consume as much as I used to. I’ve always seen trading as annoying, but now it’s in direct opposition to what I see as best for the community, so I gotta say something.
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I am sorry to frustrate you Zeus
Their music channels:
And we got this one too
You notice how the music channels are missing VK
Edit: J-Zone has a crossover with Kpop… Soo yeah
The part we have that works better with us than with discord server is a overview of threads.
Even after discord added the forum options, personally i didn’t completely get used to it.
Also both server include JPop fans and not merely JRock or VK fans.
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I don’t count Discords because they aren’t indexed by Google and don’t pop up unless you dig a bit deeper. Discord servers count as private servers in my mind, an evolution of Mumble and Teamspeak. I should have clarified that I was thinking of forums. But it’s good that there are discord servers to go to!
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True, you got a legit point there. I actually had to so some digging to find those server, because they don’t even pop up disboard and the subreddit one, i didn’t see that one anywhere on any of of the Japanese subreddits.
Also to your point on the new Discord functions, they are so weird. I put them on my private server as you know and it doesn’t hold a candle to Discourse. It feels like those features are a response to the organization that you mentioned previously rather than an attempt to actually embed forums into Discord. Discord is short-form and medium-form conversation to me and Discourse is long-form conversation, which is why JRO can have a Discord and a forum and neither steps on each others toes.
vkei is dead
Before your server i did get to see that function on Nik Nocturnals server and they are so absolutely ignorable, it’s amazing.
And on one side for a huge server it keeps unnecessary stuff away from the general chat, but it also get perfectly ignored by tons of people, because you need to actively open the channel where the threads are inside.
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lmaooo
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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.
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There’s a LOT of truth here, and the core message of ‘go and try and enjoy some other stuff outside of your sphere’ is timeless
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golden bomber is the best band ever and they were sent by the universe as little eggs to revolutionize the industry
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Lynch’s The Buried is just as pointless as Sinners (2018) since the original version of the tracks is better in every single way (especially the Vocals. just discover greedy dead souls recently, and holy god does Hazuki sounds better here than in the subsequent albums. Wish he just stayed that way.) i know that the point of The Buried was to give Yusuke more involvement. similar to how Sinners (2018) was meant to give Akinori more involement after he got out of prison, but i wish they should just keep that out for 10th anniversary collection. (could make the collection even more worth it) I often got confused of people saying the Buried is one of their best album. (Technically it IS their “Best” album. Similar to how Mucc’s TINGH is Mucc’s “Best” album)
But the difference between the songs on the Buried and their previous versions is much more noticeable than the songs on Sinners and their previous versions, so how would they be just as pointless? Isn’t the reason people would consider a release pointless that they could barely tell the songs apart from their previous versions?
Please take care with what you say, he didn’t go to prison. They had him leave the band for a year as public punishment from the band side.
Also i am sure he had to do some public service or anything, but i am very sure he did not go to prison.
I am mentioning this because people might take it literal and think he spent time in prison.
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It’s just my opinion that i don’t see the point of re-recording tracks that aren’t even 5 years old at that point. (unless it’s an A-side track from the single) besides, just like i said, imo the original tracks (gds and Underneath the Skin) is better than everything in The Buried. Well to be fair, you’ve might argue that there’s alot of inferior re-recordings out there, but at least they’re old enough to be re-recorded. (like Alien Tune for the ETERNITY single)
Apologies for the lack of research.
sukekiyo are the perfect band and everything else fails to measure up to the perfection of it.
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Perfume of Sins is a masterpiece.
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You spelled 9GOATS BLACK OUT wrong 
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D’espairsray’s REDEEMER is not a bad album. and was a GOOD follow-up to MIRROR.
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