Post your "UNPOPULAR" Japanese music opinions! / aka "HOT TAKES" :P

the era when amber gris, dolly, 9goats, and moran were all active was a literal golden era in my eyes and nobody can tell me otherwise.

also d’air > izabel varosa x

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I’m so sorry guys-- but I wrote this all out when I got here to vent and now I see I can post it somewhere. It’s late, yes, please skip if you’re over it.

"I am about 15 days late to the reveal of Merry’s new album STRIP and their new look.

As a black person-----
Start. I think Yuu is a mannequin on his IG, then I see the album photo and thought OH they’re ALL mannequins! Then I see Gara “half stripped”, particularly with the revealing red paint between his “skin” and the black mannequin paint. Then I see Nero’s red lip(s) obviously connected with his entire white shirt “splashed with blood”/red paint.

After thinking this is awesome with a touch of old school scruffy class given their wardrobe, I see the comments telling them it’s wrong to do black face and this is offensive to your black fans, blah blah blah no doubt mostly if not all from non-black people… End.

Why can someone paint themselves all white, but being painted all black is a no-no? This was possibly meant to add a LITTLE bit of shock value >it’s Merry and they’re Japanese> but black face is more than black paint and red lips. HECK it can be dark brown paint and pink lips, but the crucial characteristic to black face that is bad is that they act as a “Negro”. Nero is not filling in for a negro they couldn’t hire, he’s not pretending to be a slave or chauffer or butler or driver or cook or uneducated urban worker or an evil neighbor. Let it be what it is! ART. Art with a statement! And if that ruffles your butt feathers then they win and you can shove Nero’s “bloody” shirt up your ass!

(Make sure to adjust the nazi uniforms, upside down crossed gothic vampire cathedrals, middle fingers and all eroguro to make room.)"

But I haven’t been liking any of Merry’s recent music for a while so I have doubts about the new album lol ok done.

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I kept reading this over and over agreeing but realized I thought you wrote Screw! rofl

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Opinion 1: vk scene is actually dying, there are barely any new bands forming (even before the covid and stuff) and their quality is even worse than the early 2010’s shitkei. Put this together with many big bands disbanding (Girugamesh, Mejibray, Born, Screw etc) and newbies failing to become big except a few like Kizu and… yeah.
The mid 2000’s anime boom really did skyrocket the scene but the effect is gone now.

Opinion 2: I like Dimlim, even Misc, but some people saying that they perfected what vk aimed for in the late 2010’s is overstatement, they just played metalcore with wigs in japanese.

Opinion 3: the Toxic/Division/BD era was good

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Definite agreement on opinion 1. I’ve been trying to do a deep dive in to some modern VK and there just seems to be so little, 90% of what I hear is some variety of metalcore and/or high pitched synth stuff.

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here’s another one: i hate how versailles/jupiter/matenrou opera started the trend of every “tanbi” kei going full power metal instead of the more pop-rock styles of lareine, izabel varosa, d’air, charles, etc. scarlet valse and synk:yet (or w/e they’re called) bore tf out of me.

lareine’s best song is tsukiyo no kageki.

and megamasso is/was slept on. ryouhei is a genius songwriter and lyricist.

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It will forever go beyond me how this song was never re-recorded with some budget as the Chantons l’Amour version was among the best those 4 delivered.

I like the more metal approach in tanbi as well but I do get where you’re coming from.

Why are you attacking me so brutally? What have I ever done to you?! :sob:#edgy4lyfe

Anyway as for unpopular opinions, while I like vk from each decade from the 90s onward (not saying I don’t like vk from before the 90s I just haven’t listened to enough of it to form an opinion) the vast majority of my favorite vk bands are from after the year 2010, so I guess that’s my favorite decade of vk.

Also I think it’s kind of unreasonable how harsh people are on bands for copying other bands because I don’t think its usually intentional, I can’t recall how the majority of songs I’ve heard go off the top of my head and I don’t think that’s something most people can do so not really sure how they could be certain what they write isn’t something that they’ve heard before but maybe my memory is significantly worse than other people’s, moreso than I thought.

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Mine has to be personally I think mejibray is overrated other than これを依存と呼ぶなら I couldn’t get into any of their other songs.

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I don’t know why a lot of the bandmen seem to have shit personalities at first sight. Still enjoy the music though I guess that’s what counts.

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A lot of VK fans have to stop seeing VK as superior to non-VK music.
I can always notice how the enthusiasm of a lot of VK fans goes down, the moment i recommend non-VK bands. :smirk:

Another one
Fans have to stop throwing weird shit into band members dms, comments, replies, whatever.

The next one is not my opinion
(Apparently there are kids who use jpop as a term to reference to all of japanese music, ita from twitter and the girl blocked me so 🤷)

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Regarding your first point, that is something I’ve noticed on this forum as well. People always react on new VK bands and news, but outside of VK no one really seems to give a shit. Not too surprising on a VK focused forum though haha

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I noticed it outside this forum as well. People seem to get less enthusiastic when i start talking about non-VK
I mean its even fine, when someone prefers VK over non-VK, i just don’t like when people think one is better than the other
About the forum, well JRO is supposed nto be a forum for all JRock stuff from what i know, but of course a lot of users immigrated from MH and MH was a visual kei forum



Another opinion, that has to do more with fanartist.
Dont comment under any fanart stuff like "its nice but cant you draw “insert xy band or bandmember here*”
There are bands, artists who see the fanart made of them and maybe the fanartist will feel bad when there is such a comment then underneath the fanart.

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  • i really dont care about the “classic” vkei groups that were the pioneers of jrock or vkei, i can respect what they did for the scene but i have zero interest in bands that no longer exist
  • i prefer supporting bands that are young and new bc that’s what the scene needs to stay alive, even if people whine and complain about how vkei now is all derivative, artless garbage. I’d rather support the new kids and give them a chance to develop something new
  • a lot of vkei fans take vkei WAY too seriously (i think its crossover from metal scenes) and think theyre all serious music critics that refuse to allow music to just be enjoyable. Music doesnt have to be “good”. If someone enjoys it, then that’s all it needs to do. I think a LOT of people here have a tendency to give negative feedback more than positive, which just kinda makes you look like a killjoy that doesn’t contribute anything meaningful.

Like, seriously, the amount of people that come into threads of a band that THEY DON’T LIKE only to make a disparaging comment is disappointing. If you don’t like it, that’s totally fine, but stop acting as though your opinion is somehow valuable enough that it must be shared…

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@iheartman8008135 I’ve merged the thread that you’ve created with this existing one, since the topic are quite similar and we don’t need to have 2 separated ones.

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There’s a couple of good ones here that I’m pretty much in alignment with.

  • The era from around 2005 to around 2013/2014 was still, for the most part, a decide of sustained growth and creativity, especially when you compare any 7 year stretch from that period to the going down from the present to 2015. Back then we had multiple labels with strong rosters with actual identities that set themselves apart. What do we have now, BP Records? Give me a break.

  • Visual kei really is dying. If you disagree, feel free to start posting some metrics. Concert attendance and record sales; the amount of media attention and presence in popular culture; the general consensus on the quality of the music being put out. It is all spiraling down in a severe, potentially fatal decline that COVID-19 is accelerating at a shocking rate. Oh, “albums don’t sell that much these days because of piracy”. Yeah, that doesn’t hurt any scene of music that’s actually popular or has sustained a stable community with purchasing power. COVID-19 just hit the business model of visual kei exceptionally hard compared to other scenes of music that rely less on the livehouse circuit and physical sales, and the concurrent years of less mainstream exposure has depleted the stock of potentially talented bandmen. The reason why the post-boom period of the 2000s was still very good was that all these kids grew up when visual kei meant something in Japan. Now we’ve had a decade of Golden Bomber being the biggest vk band in Japan, and that’s basically a death sentence. I am sure also that the average age of bandmen active in the scene has risen. A band like Luna Sea managed to put out all of their important albums while the dudes were in their 20s, while now the biggest trendsetters like The GazettE and Dir en grey are either 40 or well into their 40s. That’s the definition of a style turning geriatric, before passing away. Sorry. Go and ask fucking jazz or swing how they’re doing these days compared to their peaks.

  • I also don’t like the power metal tanbi kei but the pop sound of Lareine was the shit.

  • The osare hate from 15 years ago was laughable but I’m glad we all realised together that it was all great stuff

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Who cares if vk dies? :joy: Like Ivan Drago once said, “If he dies…he dies.”

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for the last 30 years, so many great VK songs have been lowkey ruined by death growl/chant over generic dissonant riff sections that are literally only in the song for a びっくり aggressive moment at live concerts.

i can accept this when the band has a full time dark/dissonant/no clean vocals theme, but it seems even the most cheery oshare band had atleast a few of their songs tainted by these sections that sound nothing like the rest of the song.

when you’re actually listening to a CD/song/etc, and NOT at a gig, it adds nothing to the song
it’s completely predictable and uninspired 99% of the time

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I mean how is general rock music doing these days? I’m so out of touch with what western rock and metal artists are doing, but I was under impression 2010s wasn’t a decade when rock music set any new records.

no matter how behind japanese market is trend-wise, the overall stagnation still would reflect on them too - you can’t recycle slipknot for 20 years straight unless your band is called lynch., and you’ve got that major label deal you dreamt of already.

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Visual kei really is dying.

Is that really an unpopular opinion/hot take?

I am sure also that the average age of bandmen active in the scene has risen.

I don’t think that’s the case or at least the reason is a different one:
It’s just way harder to make money as a newcomer band with five twenty year olds than it was in 1995, 2000, 2005 or 2010. Young newcomer bands are dying out in general and there are waaaay less ones that are successful on a big scale, at least in a sustainable way.

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