I’m surprised no one mentioned The Piass yet. I was just listening to their songs (Akinazuna. Great song.) last week and wondered where Takayuki is now.
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Welcome To Yoshiki! God forbid he can ever keep a single Promise or Prioritize anything within his life 
Ok, Unpopular Opinion: I’m in no way even a Fan of Taylor Swift- But like… Unironically, I thought that Cover Nocturnal Bloodlust did was actually kind of awesome! 
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- Gackt just… The fact that He’s been able to get away with HALF of the awful shit that he has done… and fans still continue to defend this egomaniacal @$$hole- all like “stOP aCcUsInG hIM fOR thINgS hE dIDn’T dO~”!
Ooooohhh~~~, so you mean like TAX EVASION!!! ~~Potential R*pe and Sexual Harassment allegations towards him that were SWEPT under the rug as fast as they were made public??? Making the most disgustingly Innaprpriate/Sexually explicit comments on his PUBLIC twitter account??? Should I go on!!! 
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The sexual harassment/r*pe claim was investigated by police and he was found to be innocent.
The saddest thing about Gackt for me is his development of a vocal condition that proceeded to get worse to the point where he can’t sing anymore. He had such a beautiful voice.
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Too many untimely disbandments, e.g. KYOKUTOU GIRL FRIEND is one of the saddest for me.
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Taste of Chaos 2008. In partnership with Jrock Revolution, brought on MUCC, D’espairsRay, and a rebranded Trastic Nerve (The Underneath) on the North America wide tour nicknamed “Winter Warped Tour” for how far of a reach this festival had.
The bands would all play after one another, on a two stage set up. The festival also featured Avenged Sevenfold, Atreyu, Bullet for my Valentine and Blessthefall.
Things are looking good initially, the VK bands get mixed reviews from total n00bs, but they’re getting their names out and earning some fans.
Problem is: By now, it’s about half way through the US leg, and Canadian dates have yet to be announced. People are starting to get impatient. And the American fans are seeing the frustration, clearly. On the forums, it’s literally half the discussions.
So after a couple weeks of the fans hassling Kevin Lyman and team, Jrock Revolution makes an announcement clarifying that the VK bands will not be on any Canadian dates. By this point, the tour is already 66% over. Anything east of Saskatchewan has already had their closest US date pass.
Canadian dates were announced, and…we got a half tour. That ended in Saskatchewan. He would then scramble to cobble two Quebec dates together a few days later. Seeing that shit was turning south, Bullet for my Valentine also peaced out back to the UK after Seattle.
So in the end, the Canadian dates were badly organized, and only had half of the original lineup. Needless to say, people were pissed. Both the VK fans, for obvious reasons, and the non-VK fans who felt ripped off. This kind of soured a lot of people’s impressions of bands from Japan, as it was the most obvious cause of the confusion.
So someone finally got a response from Taste of Chaos’ team, explaining the rationale. According to a team member, it was decided by someone (never clarified who) that the Canadian market “just wasn’t ready” for these particular bands.
I personally find it doubtful that it was Taste of Chaos’ management who decided this. They would be sabotaging their own tour by not having replacements ready to go for the Canadian legs. The most logical explanation was that they wanted the bands to play every NA date, but were told after it was too late to obtain replacements that they would leave after the Seattle date.
Taste of Chaos would go on to have one more year. They did visit Canada, but in much smaller venues this time around.
The bands released statements apologizing to Canadian fans for not being able to make it, promising that they would return eventually (D’espairsRay would go on to play Toronto, but nowhere else, tmk).
The situation could have been mitigated by at least letting Canadian fans know the situation from the start, so that they could have tried to make alternative arrangements. But instead, this went down as probably the most high profile blunder of the brief VK boom and any collaborative opportunities between the two scenes dried up quickly.
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for me, it’s yasu’s disappearance due to his accident. i want him to come back.
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Dokuga disappearing just as they were getting started. I followed their every show for a year while they were playing as TSKMJ and they had received such a positive reaction from fans, they were already bringing in groups larger than some formal bands who had been around longer (and a good portion of them were male fans which is even more rare during the “project band” stage).
Their sets had crazy energy and they didn’t have a single song that wasn’t a banger. It really looked like they were set out to be the next big indie band. Only to have it all come to an abrupt stop with them suddenly ghosting us and not giving us even a single hint to what was going on. No hiatus, no disbandment, no reasoning, nothing. Just a “we’re cancelling all our upcoming shows and have no scheduled future appearances, sorry” note on Twitter. This was the day before one of the shows too. Six months later and we still haven’t gotten sh*t. It would’ve been their one year anniversary since formally becoming Dokuga next month and it still sucks so bad.
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Echoing Zeus being right about S.K.I.N., that probably is one of the things that started the scene’s ultimate decline even if it’s still going.
A couple of my own:
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I recall a time when Amy Lee met with and interviewed with Mana. I thought something more was going to come out of that, but it was also around the time Amy was having record label troubles and Mana is just so hit and miss with recording music.
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The disbandment of Deluhi hit me kinda hard, especially watching Juri do whatever the fuck he thought he was doing before Breakin’ Holiday, but even at that… Their releases are inconsistent, impossible to find, and they’ve been laying low recently.
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ClearVeil’s disbandment, they were really good.
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Cula pausing activities after an incredible album release.
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D’espairsRay, Dadaroma, Deathgaze disbandments; Disappointed in Fukuro as their music isn’t really for me and disappointed that Ai hasn’t really been doing much with Darrell it seems? I haven’t heard of new music recently and I’m not on Twitter to follow him anymore.
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DIV’s Disbandment, though Acme made up for that.
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Gackt retiring.
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2020 Hizaki Grace Project and Versailles comebacks completely shelved. Kamijo’s Persona album shelved too, I guess, with Oscar to come out this year and then fucking postponed again.
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Izabel Varosa’s Original Think album
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Juka retiring.
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Where the hell has Jupiter been?
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Kaya missing in action for an album of original content in like, 9 years. Hopefully Rose even still happens this year.
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Kisaki.
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Malice Mizer, Klaha, and all that noise.
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Mana, too, just in general… Being one of my favorite Gothy Boiz and then just ghosting
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NoGoD’s seemingly questionable future has me bummed. At least one member left and all of their plans they had in 2020 seemed to be ruined and they haven’t done much of anything since.
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Rides in ReVellion post-The Light
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Royz’s endless singles with no album
Ya know what I should stop before I make this too long.
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Ai seems pretty busy with DARRELL actually. They’re constantly posting about live shows, and they just had a maxi single out last year. They might be a bit slow on releases, but they’re still active thankfully ^^
But otherwise 200% in agreement with #5 
D’espa was really sad, because we didn’t know if Hizumi would ever be able to sing again. I’m glad he is though!
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Kagrra,'s demise and isshi passing just before his solo project came to be.
I’ll never stop crying about it.
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You legend 
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There are two visual kei suicides I know of that stem from members bullying them, one I know for sure was because the label even asked for it. Power harassment Japan sucks. Wont say who cause im still active in the scene.
Kagrra’s isshi dying still makes me tear up every time I listen to them 
Daisuke passing from the mistake of pills and drinking too.
Of course hide is the saddest, always thinking of what heights he’d reach if the planned Marilyn Manson tours happened, in that late 90s industrial and numetal boom.
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that member of Angelo dying was super sad for me as was kami’s death since they were 2 bands that I started listening to and having a member die and the band dissolving afterwards
Yes, ((after he paid off his record company to clear the whole thing))
IM SORRY- WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN?!!!
wait who died???
@suji I was about to ask the same… none of them died? They went on hiatus and paused activities but that is it?
@Varosa - breakin’ holiday have all but their latest single available both physically and digitally on their BOOTH store I believe. They have 2nd presses for their first two singles and some limited live one available too.
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This case was apparently reported by a crappy tabloid. From my searches, I believe it was Sankei Shimbun, a far-right paper that previously wrote articles denying Japan’s involvement in WW2 atrocities. And they supported anti-Semitic books by running ads on them. So yeah, not very credible.
There was a police investigation and the allegations made against Gackt were discovered to be false.
Unless you can provide proof, please kindly stop speaking ill of a man who was found to be innocent.
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