I have been listening to vk for over a decade and since that time vk has been “dying” (supposedly). I want to see this death because it sure has been a looooonnnngggg ass time and I’m still waiting for it to happen. When it does die please someone let me know. I was also formerly a member of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh forums and this same nonsense “X” is dying discussion comes up at least once a year. 
Find something better to talk about even if it is/was who gives af that discussion has been had over and over.
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Was thinking this. Been seeing those comments sooooo long, even back when Dir released Vulgar 
Music scenes change and fluctuate in popularity over time. It seems to still be chugging along to me, although it was of course certainly heavily impacted by Covid. I think it’ll bounce back some more once the whole pandemic thing has calmed down. I don’t think the whole subculture is just gonna up and vanish anytime soon.
Maybe been said already, but here’s my hot take that’s gonna get my head put on a stick by some: I think both Malice Mizer and Mana are great but hugely overrated and I’m a little surprised they’re still so insanely popular. Seems like every new fan I see is in love with MM and has an obsession with Mana (I assume probably because they are popular on Tiktok?). Anytime onnagata is brought up, someone always uses him as the prime example. There are other bandmen! lol I have nothing against him, but sometimes it feels a bit like Mana is the only bandman some fans know 
I’m sure the same has been said about Dir en grey and Kyo too, lol
Probably not that unpopular, but to contrast the earlier mention of osare: I still really can’t stand the overly saccharine, poppy, bubbliness of like 90% of osare / kirakira bands. Disliked it since the mid-00s, still do- it’s just sooo not for me. More power to ya if you enjoy it though 
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Most of these vk bands be lookin cool, but they music be STRAIGHT ASS
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Yeah I have to agree people are constantly on about how crappy a band is. Just look at the comments on Deviloof or DEXCORE’s new album for reference. Literally every other comment.
And honestly it’s been that way imo since Tainted World became Monochrome Heaven. On T-W people didn’t really seem to be as negative. Maybe I just wasn’t paying close enough attention.
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Any thread of Nocturnal Bloodlust looks pretty much the same.
Maybe its just a problem of those heavy bands? 
On another note, its nice to see some positive voices for bands inside the negative ones, isn’t it?
On another note,JRO feels like one of those places you can criticizes a band without having half their fans run after you for criticizing them, so maybe thats why it accumulates here
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Current vk scene compared to past vk is the same energy as
Current WWE compared to past WWE/WWF
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Nah that’s not true people on TW we’re super negative too. It’s just that there were lots of people also saying positive things so it didn’t seem as extreme.
My unpopular opinion is that vk fans care too much about what other fans think. Like what you like, dislike what you dislike. Don’t feel the need to be superior because of who you do or don’t follow. Stop requiring validation from others because you won’t get it. It’s not hard.
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Totally agree with this sentiment. As far as T-W goes like I said before maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention lol.
I got another spicy take for y’all, but mostly for fans of Japanese post-rock.
I think Mono is the most overrated post-rock band of all time by a long shot. I have nine of their albums on iTunes - which isn’t all of them because at some point I stopped following them - and with the exception of one song from one album everything else is interchangeable. I remember where I was the first time I heard “Hymn to the Immortal Wind”. I remember where I was the first time I heard “One More Step And You Die”. I also remember where I was when I heard “You Are There”. By the time I was that deep into their discography, I had gotten bit with the bug and was interested to see how deep the pool went.
Imagine my surprise when the water comes up to my ankles.
The problem I have with Mono - and I suspect I am not alone in this - is that a vast majority of their songs follow the same template. It starts out slow with the faintest reminder of a melody like I’m sipping on LaCroix. It goes on like this for an eternity, instruments layering on top of each other in slow motion until a slightly more gripping melody bubbles to the front. Maybe the drummer kicks and does a little cymbal roll to let you know he’s there, but often he’s silent for the first few minutes. Don’t expect anything interesting from the bassist either. After the heat death of the universe, the song finally kicks into gear. A new melody was established so there’s even more build-up as the song gets more and more defined, finally hurtling towards some climax. We spend a few minutes playing a slightly louder variation of whatever the main melody is supposed to be featuring some tremolo picking somewhere before the song either ends or pulls back into another interlude before exploding again before the finish.
Every. Single. Song. What songs does this apply to? I’ll name a few, since it’s legitimately so easy to find a song that follows the Mono formula:
- Requiem from Hell
- The Flames Beyond The Cold Mountain
- Ashes in the Snow
- Recoil, Ignite
- Legend
- 16.12
- The Battle to Heaven
That’s literally enough music to keep you busy for an hour, since Mono likes their long songs. These post-rock “magnum opuses” they shit out every few years go on for anywhere between eight and thirteen minutes a piece. You can listen to one of them and you’ve heard all of them, because they essentially all follow the same construction.
In my mind, the best Mono album is the most experimental one which is “One More Step and You Die”. The second track “Com(?)” breaks all modern Mono conventions in a way that no track has done before or since. They use noise in this track to great effect when most of their other tracks are too focused on being pretty and ethereal. The melody is gripping from the first second instead of having to wait a few minutes for the below-average foreplay to subside. The climax is actually a climax!
If you’ve gotten this far into my rant and haven’t heard “Com(?)”, please find sixteen minutes to do it. That’s the only Mono track I would actually ask for you to listen to in full. When you listen and compare it to any of the other tracks I dropped in this post, maybe what I’m trying to get at will become more clear.
Oh, and for the record it’s not about “not getting it”. I get their intentions perfectly. It’s just fucking boring.
tl;dr - I think MONO is overrated and stale because they’ve relied on the same bag of tricks since “Hymn to the Immortal Wind” to create an epic, sprawling soundscape and it becomes pretty stale quick to anyone who listens enough to peep the formula. MONO’s best song is Com(?) by a long shot and if you don’t agree your ears are broken.
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They’re absolutely killer live - and I admittedly have a soft spot for them from when I was a Post-Rock Teen - but you’re totally right. The title track from Requiem for Hell is their most recent track that I’ve revisited at all. You’re not in a great spot as a Post-Rock band if groups like God is an Astronaut are somehow releasing fresher material than you
I’m not sure if this is an unpopular opinion, but it’s a spicy take so I’ll leave it here anyway.
I read the title and laughed and dismissed it out of hand. Then, I actually read this and wanted to bury my head in my hands. It’s less that the author completely missed the mark and more that they took an impossible task upon themselves. Rule #1 of the visual kei club is that you do not try to define visual kei. You could get ten vk fans in a room and ask them to define what the scene is, and you’d get ten different answers with varying amount of overlap, and maybe even some contradictions. @gilnyangi said it best on Discord; it’s easier to define visual kei by what it isn’t than what it is. So any article that tries to sum up the history of a complicated scene in a few pages is going to miss a lot of stuff.
Lashing out at the picture is low hanging fruit, but I gotta do it anyway, because it sets the stage for the rest of the article. Who is that? Actually, it doesn’t matter, because when I reverse Google search the image I get stock photos. It’s not a visual kei artist. Why use a stock photo? This article name drops several visual kei bands. You couldn’t use any of those pictures? Not one? Last.fm has literally hundreds. Gimme a break. I really don’t like the association between “visual kei” and “quirky, eccentric visuals”. There haven’t been a plethora of quirky visuals in the scene for at least a decade. There are also tons of other visuals in the scene. The article name drops GLAY, who are one of the biggest visual bands of all times and have rather subdued looks. So I’m just left very confused.
And then it all makes sense.
Many years ago, I was an awkward high school teenage girl obsessed with rock music and manga. I’d never even heard the words “visual kei”. But one day, I trawled through YouTube and stumbled upon a music video by a Japanese band. That music video was “Filth in the Beauty” by the GazettE. Intense makeup, dazzling outfits, and a dark aesthetic unmatched by the rock bands I was used to.
Date yourself without dating yourself. Filth in the Beauty dropped in 2006. You said in the article you were a teen at the time. That would make you…literally the same age as me. Maybe a little younger, if you didn’t find Filth in the Beauty until a few years later. I’m not gonna be a creep and dig deeper to verify. This would be right around the time when visual kei had those wacky, insane visuals from bands like【_Vani;lla】, An Cafe, and Lolita23q, but it hardly dominated the scene. It’s precisely the kind of thing I would remember out of hand ten years later when the specter of visual kei creeps into my subconscious out of the blue.
What I’m getting at is that this article sounds like it was written by someone who came into visual kei during the boom, left at the crash, and then rediscovered it several years later. There’s elements of this article that make me think “okay, so this person knows some things” and then other elements that make me go “please, just stop”.
Just so we make a few things clear:
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Golden Bomber shouldn’t be used as an example of a visual kei band because they are very clearly parody. That’s like saying Weird Al is a rapper because he released “White & Nerdy” riffing off of Chamillionaire. No.
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The section “Mixing Music with Politics and Social Commentary” comes so close but leaves me feeling unsatisfied. This is a personal qualm. The article is in English, so you can already assume the audience the author is trying to target. I really wanted her to dig deeper and find some information I didn’t already know. This entire section was a cursory pass at a subject that I think even die-hard visual kei fans would find interesting, because a lot of us follow the scene in spite of the language barrier. Actually understanding what my favorite artists are saying is a treat. But the entire section comes and goes without stating anything thunderous, and that surface level overview of what is admittedly a rich and complex scene is a motif repeated throughout the entire article.
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I also had a talk with gil about this and I do not agree with a lot of the colloquial terms that even we use to describe the scene. I don’t blame the author for using these, because you can’t get very far without tripping over any of the various *-kei’s and their definitions. There’s an entire wiki article detailing these - I don’t blame the author for using them. But the fact that they are used and defined in the article is where credibility is lost for me. Any attempts at trying to organize the subcultures of visual-kei is as pointless as subdividing a hair follicle. Anything labeled *-kei is suspect. 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. Half the “Nagoya-kei” bands out there are just various projects by aie. And please don’t get me started on “neo visual-kei”. There is no such thing as “neo visual-kei”. NEO VISUALIZM is a term coined by MIYAVI on his 2009 single “咲き誇る華の様に -NEO VISUALIZM-”. Here are some lyrics to the song. Read the lyrics and come to a consensus on what it means for yourself, but I think we can all come to the conclusion that he’s not explicitly defining a new wave of visual-kei in the song. So I’ll never understand how overseas visual-kei fans have collectively decided that “neo visual-kei” means anything visual after 2010. WTF? “系” LITERALLY MEANS STYLE! What style is considered “neo visual”? It could be anything! Not to mention that “neo visual-kei” doesn’t have a defined end date. Bands from ten years ago sound nothing like bands from today, even if they play the same genre. The sounds have progressed.
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Finally, and I think this is the biggest sin of all, but how do you not drop vk.gy as a source? They are literally THE source for all visual kei information on the planet. There have been times when I’m reading up on artists I follow, only to find out new information about a band I’ve followed for years. The creators and maintainers of vk.gy are doing Kami’s work. If you’re writing any English-facing article about visual kei and you don’t use the premier source we have then I really can’t take you seriously.
I don’t want to rip the author a new one. They clearly had good intentions at heart and we’re only trying to spread awareness of the scene. I thank them for that. Seriously. But the problem is that your information becomes outdated quick unless you actively keep up with the scene. Hell, it’s already hard enough to keep up as is with the language barrier in play! The article is filled with half-truths and anyone looking to level up their knowledge about visual-kei by reading this article will get incorrect impressions, impressions that will take a while to undo.
@colorfuljinsei said it best; we need some knowledgeable peeps from here and vk.gy to sit down and write an article.
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- I dont like dir en grey and prefer dimlim over them.
- I like 2010-2020 vk over all other vkei era’s
- The gazette is overrated.
- Nogod is corny
- Almost every early 2000’s artist i have listened to so far sounds like the dusty old amp in the backyard that no one uses with a couple exceptions.
- Half if not more then half of every single vkei PV is shot lazily in a warehouse or some inconspicuous location of the band playing music where nothing interesting is happening at all.
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I just came here to say that you spelled my handle wrong but I am tremendously smug about being used as source material uwu
It auto-completed I thought I had it right 
99.9% of all VK bands suck and there are only a small handful who ever produced anything of value. Including:
X-Japan
D’Erlanger
Raphael
Dir en grey
Kagerou
Everything else is garbage. Sometimes I like garbage, like the Gazette and An Cafe; but it’s unequivocally garbage.
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The album “division” from the GazettE was sick and their old electronic vibes worked better than their newer electronic vibes. Come at me.
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The osare hate from 15 years ago was laughable but I’m glad we all realised together that it was all great stuff
Sometimes I think about how I PASSED on the opportunity of seeing An Cafe live not once, NOT TWICE, BUT THRICE (technically. actually I was a minor so only 2* but still.) and want to self-harm
My unpopular opinions:
- One thing I have always hated about the western community is how some folks are just metalheads who go “ew” at the mention of “I like this visual!” . Yes? I like this visual? This thing is called “visual style”? Why do I have to pretend I don’t like their crazy cosplay antics
- Vk is not dead cuz they’re undead but if people keep hating on the visual thing it’s just rock/metal isn’t it Having said this, I enjoy the crazy cosplay antics and kirakira vocaloid utaite cheki-selling jrockers and all that stuff. I am not crazy about it, but I appreciate how struggling post-golden-era vk artists went this way. The easy, quick, cheap way of building an international audience and making pocket money on YT. Vocaloid is fun. Doing shit while dressed up in kira kira cosplay is fun. Signed polaroids are fun. H̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶c̶l̶u̶b̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶b̶a̶b̶l̶y̶ ̶o̶n̶l̶y̶ ̶f̶u̶n̶ ̶w̶h̶i̶l̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶’̶r̶e̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶f̶f̶e̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶i̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶d̶i̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶n̶o̶r̶ ̶d̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶t̶ ̶a̶ ̶c̶a̶r̶ ̶c̶r̶a̶s̶h̶ ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶d̶r̶a̶n̶k̶ ̶t̶o̶o̶ ̶m̶u̶c̶h̶.̶ ̶O̶r̶,̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶k̶n̶o̶w̶,̶ ̶s̶p̶r̶e̶a̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶S̶T̶D̶s̶.̶ ̶D̶o̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶k̶n̶o̶w̶,̶ ̶n̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶w̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶.̶ Anyway, I like their style
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I agree with this wholeheartedly. I’m not a huge Mono fan but I like “Hymn to the Immortal Wind” and “Under the Pipal Tree” enough to have bought it with my money. The only other album I’ve fully listened to is “Requiem For Hell” and I found that extremely boring.
As far as post rock goes, I find them to be above average but not the standard. If we’re exploring sub-genres within post rock, then I think they’re even less remarkable. I do tend to like a heavier sound and Mono just doesn’t get heavy enough for me. And when they do, it isn’t interesting.
I will have to check out Com(?).
You’re onto something! I think Division had some great compositions and agree they had at least some solid implementation with electronics (“Dripping Insanity” I still love). But I also think it had some of the worst electronics I had ever heard in any music. Aside from “Depth”, the instrumental tracks sound tacky with corny as hell voice samples saying generic ass phrases like “dubstep” or “raise the connection”. And the full electronic tracks, I felt, tried too hard to shoehorn in dubstep. One of the strongest examples of “How do you do, fellow kids” I’ve witnessed in the scene.
I still like it too though. It’s got a handful of excellent compositions that I think still hold up today, allbeit in a slightly unfinished state. I personally find their more recent work more compelling and better executed overall but would rather listen to the best parts of Division over albums like “Dogma” or “Ninth”.
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Please let me know what you think of Com(?)!