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

Rena · April 30, 2024, 10:55am

I thought about answering and trying to explain the opinion about Jiluka being expensive to @CervaCannibale but you know what?

You’re right, if it’s VK you should just go and pay it and don’t question the price, so that VK won’t die out.
I hope Jiluka and other bands will learn from that and sell their tickets more expensive, if they ever come again.

But let me pull out another hot take.

Visual Kei bands that play Metalcore or Deathcore, are nothing more than a blunt core band when they drop their visuals.
The only reason Jiluka, Deviloof, Dexcore and the other smaller core band are “special” is because they wear make up, basically.

Let me add here, I don’t think those bands are musically bad. They make some good stuff. But the only reason they stick out from other metalcore bands is the fact that they call themselves visual Kei band

CervaCannibale · April 30, 2024, 11:04am

I said the discussion about the ticket prices sparked the thought, not that there is no reason to complain, tho.

Is that even a hot take??? I mean of cause visual kei bands become just plain music of their respective genre if you take away the visual part. Some more some less of course. But it’s the same with stuff like k-pop or even Taylor Swift. Take away the “show” and it becomes kinda boring. But it’s a packsge deal so get it with visuals.

zeus · April 30, 2024, 12:55pm

I don’t like Taylor Swift. I’m not her target audience. But to even imply that she doesn’t put on a spectacle when she tours is patently false. This woman puts on an absolute show, from wardrobe changes to synchronized lights, fog machines, etc. She has a production value most visual performers can only dream about.

Let me find a visual kei band that brings a damn house to the stage.

And she’s not the only one. Beyoncé goes hard when she’s on tour too. She’s riding a goddamned metal horse!

This is Madonna’s set up from her tour.

Lady Gaga was literally playing with fire.

Even traditionally “boring” bands like Mastodon have absolutely fire aesthetics live. A Mastodon show is an absolute trip and if you’ve never been, I highly suggest you do.

Here’s another band called Ghost live. They put on an amazing show as well.

One of my favorite Japanese bands, Tokyo Jihen, also has amazing live shows, and they’re not visual kei.

tumblr_ffb8b7e1d21afb3476552e31d4b3e9bf_160287a7_640

And because BTS was brought up, I have to mention that they do have good aesthetics.

This is what your average visual concert looks like:

Kizu

main-part-royz-2-1
Royz fans doing furi

The GazettE live at the end of their WORLD TOUR

Arlequin live

MUCC

In my honest opinion, Tay Tay’s production quality is absolutely slaying all these visual bands. 99% of us aren’t going to visual kei concerts; the concerts are coming to us. And in order to come to us, they have to make compromises and scale down the spectacle and the show to the bare minimum. I have to say I’ve been to a handful of visual kei concerts and they have been some of the most aesthetically flat presentations I’ve ever seen. So what if the outfits are cute? Unless you’re in the first three rows, you aren’t seeing shit! You have to actually squint to see their outfits in these pictures, and the photographers were relatively close!

And if they’re indie? Forget it. They don’t have infinite money. They might look flashy in their promotional pictures, but their live presence is not guaranteed.

Is it fair to compare tiny indie bands to established rock and pop acts? No! One has far more money than the other. But it is equally as unfair to even imply that no other musical act is capable of aesthetics outside Japan. That’s not even a take that’s based in reality.

So my unpopular opinion is that I hate this false dichotomy between “visual bands” and “non-visual bands” where the former has elaborate shows and make-up and the other plays in jeans and a t-shirt. It’s just not true, has never been true, and is more likely to be the other way around.

This is why it’s good to get out of the visual kei bubble every now and then and try something new.

EDIT: Pictures can only tell so much. Here’s a video of indie visual band VanessA doing a live:

Tiny ass stage with barely any room for anyone to move. The minimum of lights. It’s just them, their outfits, and their essential equipment. And I bet that show rocked like hell…but in terms of theatrics and stage performance there’s a world of difference between this band and the legions of artists I posted above.

And visual kei bands are more likely to be closer to VanessA’s situation than anyone else.

CervaCannibale · April 30, 2024, 1:45pm

But I did with no word say that she didn’t put on a show is my english that bad??? I said they all have in common that they don’t JUST do music. They all combine it with something visual. Vk has the outfits the mvs, k-pop has the dancing and taylor has the stage shows. If you’d take the visual part away all if these would be less fascinating. Music would surely still be enjoyable but the combination makes it what it is.

GreatNorthernVK · April 30, 2024, 1:46pm

Hot take that I’ve kind of expressed before:

The experience of waiting for VK lives to come to us, especially if you live in North America, is a crap shoot. If you live outside of the one or two cities that bands always seem to come to (or lately, only really LA), you are travelling to see them either way.

The issue isn’t the face value ticket prices. It’s the flights, hotels, Uber costs, food, other attractions if any, missed days off work, etc. All to see one band play a “lite” version of their Japanese shows, with one or two t shirt offerings and some copies of their latest cd. You might get a photo with the band and a bonus merch item if you pay triple, and if you’re going all the way out there for one band, then why not?

The success of these tours is not always the best indicator of the band coming back. Miyavi probably internationally tours the most out of any of the acts that I saw, and his concert in Toronto that I caught had the smallest relative attendance vs the Gazette and Dir en Grey shows that I saw. It has more to do with how much they rely on that as an income stream, or how much the artist wants to promote internationally.

Some bands just don’t care as much about promoting internationally, because they tried it almost 20 years ago and it wasn’t as easy as just staying in Japan and waiting for new fans to stumble upon them. So some bands will get an idea every five years to hold a small tour somewhere outside of Japan, and the first question is usually “how can we monetize this later for the Japanese fans?”

So what to do?

Well, if you want more out of being in the VK community buying your occasional releases, I’d recommend booking a specific block of time, around an event that you know you can get a ticket for, and just going to Japan. From there, other concert dates will open up that you can secure tickets for. If you have a day of no concerts? At least you’re in a primo tourist destination and not a standard city in your continent.

And the best part? Other than the flight, every other travel expense will be a fraction of the cost of its US equivalent. Food? You can get a cheap bowl of ramen for 600 yen, no tipping. Transport? Super safe, clean buses and trains are literally everywhere in the cities. Attractions? Most cost 600 yen or less. Hotels? I’ll be spending an average of $100 CAD per night next month.

I did the math, and ten nights in Western Japan will literally cost me less than if I wanted to spend six nights in LA to see both Fukuro and Jiluka. 18 bands vs 2 (6 if you count local openers).

So, go for it. If you go to small Taibans and the guys start roaming around at the end, go talk to them. Say where you’re from. I have a suspicion that you’re probably going to make more impact showing up in person than streaming from afar, or even casually buying releases at home.

zeus · April 30, 2024, 1:50pm

Double feature time!

The comparisons between visual kei and K-Pop are valid. Visual kei’s international golden age was between 2005 and 2010. K-Pop started gaining significant international traction in the 1990s and 2000s, with the catalyst being 2012’s “Gangnam Style” which cemented K-Pop’s niche place in the global sphere. They’ve only gone from strength to strength since.

Visual kei used to have an almost exclusive grip on those looking to get deeper into Asian culture. But there was a mass exodus from visual kei to K-pop around 2009 to 2012, because we lost a lot of fair weather fans who were only into visual kei because they thought the bassist was cute and they fantasized about fucking him. It wouldn’t even be much of a stretch to say that some were fans of people more than the movement, so once those bands disbanded and those musicians disappeared, they did too!

These are the same exact fans who for years seethed vehemently at “American metal” sounding Dir en grey and insisted that no other bands could do what visual kei bands were doing, just to jump ship to K-pop because they discovered it hits all the same beats in a different way - cute boys, good aesthetics, catchy tunes, the ability to parasocially attach yourself to someone who doesn’t even know you exist - except it is seen as more socially acceptable to listen to.

Even today, if you tell someone you listen to K-Pop, they might think it’s a little weird but they’ll know BTS or EXO and might be able to have a conversation with you. I can walk by my coworker and he’s playing K-Pop at his desk. You tell someone you listen to Japanese music and you still get that weeaboo stigma, except it’s almost guaranteed no one’s heard of Dir en grey and the GazettE.

I feel like I see the same patterns and behaviors today, of people insisting visual kei is some special movement that can’t be replicated, but can’t distill the essence of what is so special. It’s really not that special, since K-pop ate our lunch rather easily, and I often believe the people that insist visual kei is so special the most are the first to burn out and go listen to the same music they scoffed at five years ago.

But that’s just my unpopular opinion.

CervaCannibale · April 30, 2024, 1:59pm

I’d like to try! I think what can set vk apart from k-pop (and other stuff) is the unashamed weirdness and often darkness of it. Like a combinstion of what makes k-pop attractive and metal/goth. And the amount of people who want this particular combination is limted

Yes, my unpopular opinion now is vk is basically goth-metal k-pop…

zeus · April 30, 2024, 2:05pm

Swedish rock band Ghost is the closest thing we have to a non-Japanese visual band that’s dark, unashamedly weird, and full of aesthetics. I went to a Ghost concert to catch Mastodon and Spiritbox and the fans were dedicated. Full-on corpse paint, slutty goth priestesses, slutty goth priests, someone walking around with fishnets and tape covering her nipples, and then me and my friend in milquetoast hip-hop and metal band T-shirts (there was also someone seated in the crowd writing a term paper while vibing out to Mastodon). They don’t have the extreme sound that some visual kei bands do, but I guarantee you that if there was a Japanese clone of this band that considered themselves visual that they would accelerate to the top of the scene in no time flat.

And really, I come from a time where visual kei had no “defined sound”, so even the sound not matching up 1:1 doesn’t matter to me. I come from an era of Laputa, Rentrer en Soi, post-VULGAR Dir en grey, Gokusai-era MUCC, 8-eit, and 9GOATS BLACK OUT all being considered visual while having wildly different sounds. So there’s plenty of room for a Japanese interpretation of Ghost too!

Here’s some more pictures of Ghost:

And a music video!

I guarantee the biggest barrier to adoption on this forum is that they are not Japanese and don’t sing in Japanese, not that they aren’t visual or have bad aesthetics.

GreatNorthernVK · April 30, 2024, 2:15pm

I think the exodus might have also been due to becoming jaded with the VK scene, and disappointment that the “boom” fizzled out after bands tried touring internationally, collaborating with Western bands, only to give up when it wasn’t an effortless success the first time. I might have been in the same boat had I had anything but contempt for boy bands and the Korean/Japanese idol industry.

K-pop hasn’t really delivered on having large scale international tours either, instead choosing major urban centres to hold the occasional show much like VK bands, but the merch availability and the fact that K-pop management encouraged fans to share videos instead of trying to gatekeep it only for paying customers did a lot to at least convince those jaded by VK to jump ship.

zeus · April 30, 2024, 2:22pm

I also believe the secret to longevity in this scene is to periodically take breaks instead of immersing yourself 100% in the online culture. I’ve said it over and over again, but I’ve been around since 1999. There are not a lot of international fans from 1999 that still listen to visual kei in 2024. I’m one of just a few left. I’ve been in and out of the scene several times - never leaving 100% but having moments where I was more into it than others - and I can tell you that I think the average fan lasts 5 to 6 years before moving on to something else. If you make it past year five in visual kei waters, I’m pretty sure we’ve snagged ya for good.

That’s not normal for other scenes. Fans of The Grateful Dead in the 70s tend to still be fans of them today! Fans of Metallica still listen to the new Metallica albums, even if the band themselves has changed since the 80’s. Fans of 90s hip hop still bump 2Pac, Big Pun, and Biggie. It’s only in visual kei where it seems like the majority of international fans hyper attach only to fall off and go stan something else.

We might scoff at Taylor Swift, but there’s a lot of overlap between how her fans today act and how visual kei fans of 2005-2009 used to act. And I’m not a betting man, but she’s so massive that there’s a non-zero chance that one of her fans used to be a visual kei fan, fell out of the scene, got into her music and cult of personality years later, but hasn’t really changed how they interact with music so they act just the same.

GreatNorthernVK · April 30, 2024, 2:46pm

Yeah, taking a break to focus on Western bands did leave me out of the loop from 2011-2015. It was VK vinyl collecting that ended up roping me back in, funny enough. My observations about what a typical western concert experience is like vs the average western VK show doesn’t exactly render me popular among the VK-only cheerleader crowd, though.

NewsMan · April 30, 2024, 2:50pm

I’m not as familiar with Jiluka’s music so I can’t comment there-
Dexcore is cool but yeah, pretty middle of the road. By no means terrible, I certainly enjoy the music, but it’s kind of a mash of a handful of different -core bands I grew up listening to. Half of the leads on Still Alive sound like something JP wrote on old August Burns Red records

Deviloof I think is a PRIME example of “the visuals make the band.” I’ll admit I have built-in bias, I don’t like deathcore that much as a genre, but I feel like Deviloof are the most possible generic version of the genre. The whole of the ‘Song for the weak’ EP was imo just a grab-bag of modern deathcore and recording-studio-trick-metal tropes. If it weren’t for the visuals and the fact that the bassist plays fingerstyle (still impressive to me!!), I don’t think they’d get anywhere near the hype that they do

Forest · April 30, 2024, 2:54pm

Dexcore at least stands out for retaining some semblance of visual kei-styled writing, at least when it comes to the choruses, though. I can’t speak for Deviloof or Jiluka since I haven’t listened to too much of their discog

NewsMan · April 30, 2024, 2:57pm

So maybe it’s a combination of a few things (mostly not getting into the scene until the mid-2000’s due to my age and my entry to the scene being Dir en Grey’s heavier music since I’m coming in as a metalhead) but can you explain what you mean by “visual kei styled writing”? I see this sort of sentiment every now expressed in a few different ways, and then and I’m never quite sure what anybody means by it

Forest · April 30, 2024, 3:05pm

I guess the term styled writing might’ve been the wrong choice of words, but the structure of the songs having that sort of J-Pop styled chorus is something I associate with Visual Kei song structure, especially with heavier vkei bands. I think of Withering to Death especially when I say that, or even early Dimlim.

I also hear it listed as reasons that super srs m3talh3ads can’t take vkei metal seriously, because they can’t take the juxtaposition of extreme music and melodic, poppy-chorus

zeus · April 30, 2024, 3:12pm

The only thing I can think of that even remotely applies is royal road progression, like @Forest was referring to, but that’s honestly used just as much in J-Pop so it’s not exclusive to visual kei or anything. That’s why I said above that people insist visual kei is some special movement that can’t be replicated, but can’t distill the essence of what is so special. I’ve been dealing with this for two decades, even tried answering it myself multiple times, but there really isn’t any one thing that’s so special. It’s changed far too much over my entire time here to really say!

I’ll die on this hill, but kotekote was more distinct and more unique than any of the metal bands this scene has to offer. We have an entire topic where we find riffs from visual bands that were lifted from non-visual bands, with the not-so-subtle implication being that these visual artists that we like to listen to are heavily influenced by metal bands we largely ignore. You know what’s largely missing from that topic? Trick question, the answer is nothing! Visual kei bands lift melodies and find inspiration from a variety of artists, genres, and scenes. You’ll find comparisons to Iggy Pop, Finntroll, Nirvana, Donny Hathaway, even the Backstreet Boys! And that’s barely mentioning all the melodic references to domestic acts we aren’t aware of.

But you know what I can’t find? An international equivalent to kotekote.

nekkichi · April 30, 2024, 7:36pm

look no further x

unfortunately, that + gackt’s VK concept tours (that he officially retired from doing) were the only time vk bands actually had the opportunity to truly splurge

majority of glay and l’arc en ciel lives from 1990s-early 2000s that I remember were quite uneventful stage-wise etc, but maybe someone can correct me if they did elaborate with stage design and props at some point.

Japanese bands don’t make comparable money to any major mainstream American act, too, especially nowadays.

rsm_rain · April 30, 2024, 9:08pm

i can’t answer this question at all with technical terms but in my mind, Shrezzers is 100% a visual kei band, no joke or sarcasm etc. They’re from Moscow, don’t sing in Japanese, dress like every cishet band dude in a t-shirt and jeans etc - but play a song of theirs, ignoring the visuals and language, and imho there’s nothing separating them from the current (or, late 2010s) vkei sound at large.

i don’t know if every track is Royal Road! i bet some use it!

but things like frivolous jumping between “genres” in the same song, pulling motifs from other cultures and scenes, not to mention vocal patterns that last 8 bars instead of 4 - none of these are exclusive to vkei ofc but the three put together seems to have a more vkei spirit.

(editing to add Periphery, specifically the album Juggernaut, bc this is a vkei-sounding album thru and thru, in a way that their first two certainly aren’t.)

i think i heard somewhere Japanese modern guitars music, including vkei but not limited to it, spends more time with melodies in pentatonics rather than the whole scale. I think leaving out what’d be the 2nd & 4th scale degrees of the majour scale?? but that’s complete guesswork and somebody can more than likely correct me. I just know when i play melodies using all 7 notes of what we call scales in english, there’s two notes that if i feature prominently in a melody will make that music bit sound ‘not vkei’.

Saying nothing about traditional Japanese music bc that’s a complete black box of non-understanding to me (& therefore i’m not talking about Kagrra, or even Kiryuu here) when vkei bands write w/ greek modes, i hear a shitton more of the other five than ionian/aeolian i’m used to from american/european guitars music. we typically hear Majour & Minor as the two Allowed Music Shapes (that’s ionian/aeolian), but consider Mucc who writes about half their discography in dorian. I could be wrong on this, haven’t looked at the notes but just based on vibes, this one sounds mixolydian!
This one i have checked out (Sinners by Naitomea) - it’s normal for them to do verses in aeolian and move to the relative ionian for the chorus (ie same allowed notes, just lower minor and then jumping up to higher notes in majour) which they do here; but if you hear something in each verse that sounds ‘not exactly right, not exactly wrong’, that’s bc they’re moving for one measure into the parallel mixolydian. so a different set of ‘allowed notes’, iirc two notes going up or down a half step, to give a different mood/sound within the same range.

all that to say - that’s not unique to vkei, but is usually found in weird technical metal acts or pop music from before the 2000s in america/europe. i’m not used to any other scene that pops these strange melodic/harmonic movements into contexts as non-pretentious and poppy as Naitomea’s songs for anime openings.

rsm_rain · April 30, 2024, 9:20pm

also re: Deviloof, Nazare, br00tal kei bands in general…
my personal imho is i feel comfortable calling them vkei as long as they interact w/ other bands in teh scene, are influenced by them and have an influence on them, play at vkei livehouses, and sell CDs or hold events at vkei CD shops.
but that’s a discussion that’s had a hundred times on this forum lol

considering Deviloof, i don’t think anything after Newspeak has any vkei sound to it or reminds me of vkei if i saw them in isolation except some members’ visuals. But looking at their second album, to me this is a vkei-sounding album easily, just on the fringes of what’s been expressed in the scene. Check the last track, 流転 - the clean vocal performance at 2:26 on is incredible, skillfully/tastefully executed, and imho exemplifies that traditional meets modern, east meets west concept vkei is best at.

After Newspeak, i think you could replace their vocalist w/ the vocalist from Knocked Loose - a skilled interesting creative guy, no complaints etc - and the sound of the band could feel largely similar. But imagine swapping Mio from Nazare out w/ a metalcore/deathcore guy - Mio does the exaggerated Kyo vocals and some funny grumbly shit, so it’s a lot easier for me to hear Nazare as certainly a vkei band, even if it’s mostly bc of the vocals.

DIMLIM is an all time fav of mine, i really enjoyed their last album. ofc it took so much more influence from chon/polyphia/animals as leaders and other mathy acts - i feel like i’ve looked up a lot of their music & couldn’t find what i liked from DIMLIM in them, even trying to consider just the instrumentals, leaving the vocals out of my mind as best as i could.

zumbah · April 30, 2024, 9:34pm

This description probably fits most metal made over the last 20+ years - from nu metal to metalcore.
Bands like Asking Alexandria and Motionless in White have music that sounds very similar to what bands like Dexcore are doing that’s approaching 20 years old now. Not that there isn’t a smidge of Japanese-ness in parts of their songs but 99% is within the conventions of the metalcore genre.

I love Deviloof they’re so goofy. At least they have that.

Your English is fine I understood exactly what you were saying. I’m not sure what happened there.