Naw, a certain country’s current culture not being an aspect of things? It is always a part of the equation. Not doing me just literally repeating what every other person in this country and scene recognizes in the current side of things, kind of a fact. Look at what other genre Like An Edison produces and sells now 
facts be factual.
I don’t get how people can’t see that inside Japan itself, visual kei is literally dead. You can go up to any panpi and ask them about your favorite vk band and they’ll be like, WHO? If you mention Yoshiki, they’ll be like, yassss queen werk. Even Royz was featured in DDR A, and go to a random Japanese person on the street, they’ll be like, WHO? The only people keeping it alive is the people who love it or people trying to get mitsu. The society itself sees visual kei artist as high school/secodary school dropouts, like those school bully gangs.
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Maybe it’s just that people have vastly different definitions of “dead”? There are still plenty of fans. There are still bands that play shows. There are still new bands forming and events being set up all the time. CDs (or digital downloads) still sell, there’s still a fandom. I don’t view that as “dead”. Lower activity, sure. Are there issues in the scene? Sure. There’s always been some kinda issues like that, they just change over time.
Also I feel like I’m pretty sure even in the mid 00s if you asked a random panpi and asked about VK they’d look at you like you had 5 heads on your shoulders. I don’t think that was really a good judgement point. Even if you bring up Dir en grey or Gazette, there are still shittons of people who’ll say “who the hell is that?” Same with metal, too.
People tend to think that the music in “their day” was the most passionate, the most unique, the most exciting, and of course to them it was, so it’s all true.
@wing I agree with your points 100% I think the thing that makes the difference is being aware of this bias, and trying to open yourself to new things if you’re still interested in the scene.
If someone’s not, nothing stops them from listening to the old stuff. People just get tired of the never ending comments that ‘visual kei is dying’ (and I know it’s not just me that’s really tired of hearing it for the last damn 15 or so years) I saw this same kinda thing in the metal scene as well, and it sure as hell isn’t dead.(And if you think there aren’t a lotta metal guys playing in bands to get laid just the same as VK guys, idk what to tell ya.)
Also the point of saying that guys are just doing it now to get mitsu/money, that they aren’t doing it for the love of it, or are forcing themselves to play genres they don’t even like? Yeah, I heard that exact sentiment back in 2005 when a certain band I loved broke up. So how long has it been “dead” then? 
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Exactly this. I can see why OP might not like MUCC anymore if he got into them in like 2005, but their recent album Aku was their most sold album ever. So subjectively OP definitely has a point which many other “old farts” share, but objectively it’s just a biased misconception based on own experiences/taste. I remember overseas fans (especially the metal oriented ones) starting to hate MUCC in 2007 because FUZZ was “too electro” and claiming they lost their soul, their music got bad, nobody likes them anymore,… while it was just them personally.
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There are still bands that play shows. There are still new bands forming and events being set up all the time.
I’m pretty sure you could still tell this about idk, jazz music, but it’s nowhere expanding or evolving.
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Yep. I mean it’s valid to be disappointed. It’s valid to express that disappointment. But that disappointment does not equal “the scene is dead” imo
I’m definitely an “old fart” and I used to really really love Dir en grey, Gazette and MUCC. Of those, I only still like Dir en grey’s current work. Is it disappointing? Fuck yeah, but oh well. That’s what happens with long living bands quite often, I think.
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You both generally seem to think that you have an utterly unique and important insight and also specifically don’t seem to actually be listening to what I have been saying, both of which is your prerogative. You do you. Hope you’re well!
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Guys, I understand lamenting the current state of the scene but let’s not be overly dramatic. For the record, I’m not very enthused about where things are at either, but I’m also not into self-fulfilling prophecies. So I’m going to think about it wholistically. Please correct me if I’m wrong anywhere.
The first thing that I wanna get out there is that nostalgia is a bitch and you have to take off several layers of rose-tinted glasses before we arrive at a balanced view of how things were. I’ll be generous and say the visual kei boom was around 2006-2009. In my opinion, 2009 was one of the strongest years for visual kei releases ever; so many of my favorites were released on or around 2009. The internet of 2009 is just as different from the internet of today as it would be for the internet of 2005. Technology and the internet rapidly progressed around the peak of the visual kei boom which I believe is very important to how we all are perceiving it. Facebook was founded in 2004, opened its doors in 2006 to anyone 13+, and then passed MySpace in popularity by 2008. Livejournal was at it’s peak around 2006-2009. Batsu was a forum was in full swing at this point and the beginnings of Tainted World are pegged in 2007. Google Translate debuted in 2006. Ameblo staff blog started in October of 2004 so by the visual kei boom it was around long enough attract consistent usage. TIME magazine considered YouTube the best invention of 2006 (YouTube itself was founded in 2005) alongside the Tesla Roadster and a 60 second infrared alcohol test. 2009 includes the six legged space rover named ATHLETE, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, high speed helicopters, and a microchip implanted in the eye so the blind can regain vision.
Do you see where I’m going with this? The visual kei boom happened to coincide perfectly with the beginnings of modern social media platforms and rapid technological progress. I would wager what we think of as the peak of visual kei is actually the international scene being able to form and connect for the first time, and then also being given tools to somewhat overcome the language barrier. Visual kei was really difficult to get into and keep up with prior to like 2003 - you had to be really looking for it - and even if you were you were limited to fansites and AIM chat rooms and whatever resources you could be linked to from there. I remember following a few bands more than the scene as a whole…because I was 11 and I had no idea where to find it! Things were just so different back then that I look around at all the information that we have at our fingertips today and I’m glad at the progress we’ve made and just how many things exist that we take for granted.
That’s why I’m not too worried about whether visual kei is “dying” or not. For one thing, I’ve personally felt that visual kei is like rebellious expression against Japanese culture. As long as Japanese culture retains it’s unique traits - positive and negative - then there will always be a counterculture brimming underneath. What that is changes with time, and musical genres, popularity, and once again tech all change over time too. Each has an effect on the others. It gets too laborious to detail it all but I’m sure you can probably come up with examples.
For another thing, visual kei never really had a pulse to begin with in Japan for the majority of the time I’ve been heavy into the scene. Some people might argue that the true apex was the 90’s with the Big Four and we’ve been dragging a necrotic corpse around ever since. There’s some merit to that thinking, but I think it’s overly negative. Rather, I think we’re looking at two moving targets: one is tech progress and the other is our collective understanding of how everything in the scene ticks. As we all mature as fans, as some of us learn the language and do the research and share the history, as some of us collect music and document trends, or host blogs and maybe do some sus things, our collective knowledge as internet fans grow. Vk.gy is a testament to just how much stuff there is out there to know.
Knowledge is power and the more we learn, the closer we get to the source of the scene, the more our impressions change. We all walked into the scene as innocent as butterflies at one point, and now we’re relatively well seasoned. We don’t look at it the same way but we stick around. And the longer we stick around, the more we’ll continue to change how we look at visual kei. Don’t be disillusioned by the slow rate of new band discovery and say “back in the boom I was finding new bands all the time”!
Yeah back in the boom almost every visual kei band was new to everyone, because all of the stuff I just mentioned opened the floodgates to discovery which were previously so inaccessible that the scene was small and fragmented over disparate communities. @koutetsuhime can attest to this because she’s been around almost as long as I have and yet somehow we’ve never run into each other until just recently.
There’s a lot more to it than just activity or genre. There’s external factors at play that should be considered, and when I consider them I think that the visual kei activity has been rather consistent and we’re the ones who have changed.
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I agree on that.
I can say that to a certain extent for myself however it’s just partly nostalgia for me. There are bands and/or songs that I didn’t listen to for years and when I do they don’t sound that good but I still love them and that definitely is for nostalgia.
But aside from this I also am someone who barely gives much about new bands nowadays. Depending on how I feel the moment I see new bands announced and some music snippet or PV or whatever is available I try them or I don’t. For some I definitely know I won’t be getting into them when seeing the lineup (and which bands they’ve been part of before) so I skip them immediately. However some bands still do surprise me and that’s why I don’t skip every, especially when there’s no musical past.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been in the middle of my 20s when I got into VK, my taste in music being more solid already which led me to stick to that stuff still. But that’s not nostalgia.
Since I got into VK by MUCC and didn’t like a lot of stuff they released throughout the years I have to get in here. xDD
I’m not that much into the newer stuff myself but exactly for that reason, that’s my taste in music. I already partly dropped out of MUCC’s music in 2008 with Shion and even more with their next album, got back in 2010, because I loved that album a lot (I barely can recall the titles). I loved T.R.E.N.D.Y which was so much more like what they released in 2005/2006 which always will be what I love most about MUCC’s music. Until the Kowareta piano release I didn’t like much of what they put out and when it comes to Aku I really like the first track on the album and I liked some more but didn’t listen to them much though. While I really loved their GONER/WORLD single again.
And I don’t care. I listen to what I like and skip what I don’t. There might be points to measure, whether songs are bad or not but then maybe what technically actually were considered bad might be something that perfectly meets what someone else likes. Is it really bad then? Or again just a matter of taste? Without trying new things a lot of what we do know now wouldn’t have been existing.
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You make us sound ancient almost lmao (I guess I am, 22 years as a vk fan jfc where did time go)
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its all good haha ^v^ my english has been crap too so if read something wrong thats on me.
It is really weird how this genre of music has slowly been warped and shaped by a culture based on nightlife/borderline and sometimes straight up sex work though. I’ve never seen an instance of something like that in music before seep into shaping a genre so much so from personal experiences and what people around me have echoed it does feel unique to this strange culmination of things tbh.
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Especially because 95% of the people who were into vk back then listened to the same 20-30 bands. Bands who were popular outside of Japan were the big ones in Japan and not some obscure act sharing a concert with 12 other acts at Takadanobaba Area and only having released one demo. You were lucky if you could find a whole discography of a band online. You’d even download PVs in *.avi because that was the only way to watch them with Youtube not being a thing. That’s why VK/J-Rock releases outside of Japan are pretty much dead (compared to like 2006): People either buy the Japanese version (I remember Amazon JP only accepting Japanese credit cards etc!) or they only stream it. With Japanese labels uploading releases on streaming services themselves, there’s basically no need for European/American labels anymore. That doesn’t mean that it’s not popular anymore though, consumption behavior just changed.
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For sure, the specific manifestations are super interesting! What has always stood out to me is how blatant it is, super interesting and definitely gives everything its own colour.
Sometimes it feels like now the majority only listen to like the same 3-5 bands lol
There were definitely smaller groups of us who were dedicated to finding all sorts of indie groups, but that involved translating Japanese and trying to trade on Japanese filesharing programs. Not easy at all. But we did have Livejournal communities that were geared towards sharing mp3s, videos, and even scans, and that made it so much easier. Now a days it’s a lot different because there’s no real place that anything is centralised anymore. I think that also can make it feel like it’s a hell of a lot less popular too. I know I find it hard to judge myself anymore. So I’m not 100% sure if it truly was more popular in the 00s or if that was just my perception as someone really, really active on livejournal, forums, and mixi/ameba 
So I would say not only consumption behaviour has changed, but so has the social aspect as well. Tanuki seems to still be poppin’ off the rails though 
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High school me circa 2001. Later I was able to find a few more tracks, but 6/7 random LAREINE (and a few more X-Japan ones) tracks was all that I had to make do for a few years.
I still remember those more than 1 hour long dowloads (with the pay-every-minute-slow-56k) for each of those 5+ minutes tracks.
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I’d just be regurgitating the comments of others if I put my full take in here, so I’ll actually address a small point you’ve mentioned.
If we’re talking about Jrock (as a whole) here, I wholeheartedly disagree with that sentiment. In fact, I think Jrock has been the MOST diverse and active it’s been since inception. There’s a metric fuck-ton of bands out there, and Japan has “mainstreamified” the streaming model in recent times, so it’s easier to disseminate and monetize music. Also, in parallel to the West, there’s a lot of mainstream stuff now that is imbued with indie flavor, or rather, indie stuff reaching a larger audience.
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Visual Kei turned into host-kei.
If you don’t give your fav member a shitload of money and any gift he want. you better not supporting vkei bands at all. How many bandman wear damn expensive clothes nowadays? and other brand stuff? Even a bandman I knew kept on asking me for expensive shit, while I was like… dude… I’m not even your girlfriend? And after all he dumped me as a friend, because well I guess I didn’t gave him expensive gifts?
There are still some true younger bandman around who don’t really care about money and also don’t really see the point of dressing yourself up in expensive clothes and being surrounded with expensive things. They just make music because they enjoy it and don’t give up their dream that easy.
To me vkei turned into a genre which money and brand stuff are the only important things now. Just wear make-up act like a host and you earn money without working hard. easy live-boy-life.
I also think “Japanese” people do feel that way and then why should you go to your fav band live while they only have eyes for that one RICH girl who can afford to buy anything for her fav band(man)? You would prefer to stay home right?
And no… vkei isn’t less popular because its maybe more easy to download/buy music.
It’s broken because of the behavior of younger bandman who just broke the scene down themselves and it’s not because of the fans overseas. (bands never really cared for their overseas bands)…
They just fuckt it up themselves in japan…
And once it’s less popular in country of origin, it also gets harder and lesser interesting from the world outside of it.
And another reason why vkei is simply less attractive to people it’s because it’s still weird to most people that normal guys dress up like a woman and wear make-up. Show a photo to your parents or anyone who doesn’t know anything about vkei and their (negative) reaction is how most people think. Of course some do react positive but… it’s just one out of 10 or so.
Also we should not forget that young people nowadays are desperate for K-POP. So they are more busy to check out their fav kpop group than even caring about Japanese bands… the kpop section in Japanese music stores was really HUGE in 2019… so I guess it’s still or even bigger now? And also the world has more eyes for K-POP or other korean things than anything from Japan (beside sushi lol).
I also went back in time… and vkei was popular until about 2012~2013. It also made a huge fall back when MEGAUPLOAD went down (2012). But around that time also K-POP slowly got more popular and popular and popular and when PSY hit the wordlists in 2012 and kpop fan friends already told me… Oh actually the kpop community was already huge by then but it received another boost to be even more popular…
So well… and kpop stars look just perfect… even those boybands so I’m not really surprised that vkei guys turned into hostkei looking guys and that their behavior also turned more into host-behavior.
How can vkei be saved?
Well when oji-san vkei bandman will step into the world again and show those young guys that not everything is about money, woman and fame and that music is about real JOY.
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Just some thoughts and ramblings:
My last good feeling about anything remotely new when it comes to J-rock and visual kei was dexcore when they released the 9gatsu YT album. I felt like that alone revived my love in this small music community. However, after that it kind of faded out again. I’m not interested in anything from newer bands and the newer content that the OG bands come up just isn’t my cup of tea. It’s not that the quality of music being released is lacking as of late but I just can’t seem to “vibe” with it, I guess. And I think age probably is a factor in that.
I don’t really go around driving to J-rock or VK anymore like I used to. Aside from this community, there isn’t anyone to really talk to about it anymore. In my youth, I’d always introduce bands like Dir en grey, MUCC, kagerou, D’espa to friends and coworkers. Times have definitely changed.
This brings in the J-pop and K-pop fandom as well, for me anyway. In 2011, while already extremely deep into J-rock, VK, and even J-pop, I also discovered K-pop. I would thank the now defunct girl group 2NE1 for that. I also remember around that time with TW/MH, Turntable was just becoming prominent. I would foolishly sneak in a 2NE1 song during our setlists. Good times. Anyway, 2NE1 was catchy as hell. I was living my gay life. Their sass, style, obviously music. Reminded me of early 2000s American pop girls and I was here for it.
Fast forward to just a few years ago, I’d say maybe 2016. K-pop is now a household name. Groups like BTS and Blackpink are the biggest acts right now. Over the years, I’ve did what I did with introducing J-rock groups to friends and co-workers and it seems like, due to their radio-friendly and easy-to-listen to music, they are really accepted. As of late I think I can “vibe” more with K-pop than J-rock.
I think that’s where the age factor really comes in. I’m in my mid-30s now. When I play video games, unless it’s a really intense game that rock is needed, I usually just put on a pop song or K-pop as background noise. Not to mention its easier to play pop music while party chatting over headset than guttural screaming and crazy guitar riffs. My poor old ears really can’t handle it much. It was a lot easier in my youth to really connect and get into the music of J-rock because I was obviously young, trying to come of age, find myself and that music just resonated at the exact right time. Now, I know who I am, what I’m into, and just blasting Blackpink in my car driving to grocery shop at Walmart is what hits the spot.
It’s really a “we been known” that music evolves over time. Genres disappear and come back after a decade or so. The past few years disco was a big thing. Artists and bands emulated that sound and became big hits and the younger generations ate it up. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing Dua Lipa’s “Future Nostalgia” tracks and BTS “Butter” and “Dynamite” all over TikTok and YouTube. Before the “disco resurgence”, we had the 80’s pop sound come back. The Weeknd was what really made it big again. And K-pop artists like “Everglow” also emulated that sound.
There is hope though. It seems like the “emo sound” which was rumored to come back years ago is finally coming true. Artists like Avril Lavigne and willow (Will Smith’s daughter) have had extremely popular comebacks with an early 2000s emo and pop punk sound. willow’s “Transparent Soul” and “Meet Me At Our Spot” were huge hits on TikTok. And Avril’s recent album “Love Sux” charted at #3 on Billboard. If she were to’ve released that a few years earlier, I don’t think it would’ve achieved such a feat. You also have huge, sold-out festivals that are going to be happening over the spring and summer with big major artists from our past (My Chemical Romance, Dashboard, etc.). So, it’s quite possible that if the “emo sound” continues to progress, the younger generations (and I guess our generations) continue to support and show interest in it, that J-rock (maybe not so much VK but) might show its relevancy again like it did in the early 2000s. For nostalgia sake, I wouldn’t mind another J-Rock Revolution.
So, in conclusion, I’ll always listen to J-rock. I’ll always come back to the older music that I listened to in my youth. girugamesh, Dir en grey, MUCC, Miyavi, Rentrer, they’ll always have a soft spot in my heart. However as I get older, I won’t go out of my way to listen to the music. I have to be in a certain mindset - maybe when I’m just laying in my bed or researching, doing something productive on the computer. Now, like I said, if I’m driving around or throwing a party or whatever, you’ll probably see my throw on some pop (regardless of J-pop or K-pop).
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Yeah, I might add that the era (and whatever neovis bands constitute that) most people are nostalgic about also coincided with the surge of emo/-core bands, which themselves had similar audience demographics outside Japan and have also fizzled out bar but a handful of bands that still remain in the mainstream consciousness.
I mean, like what everyone has mentioned. It’s a story as old as time, ebbs and flows with culture, etc.
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While there is a lot I could say on all of this I would be basically just agreeing with @wing , @zeus and some others. Things change, things come and go, worldwide fads come and go and things can’t remain the same in order to stay fresh just how fast the night changes yadda yadda.
But more importantly, I agree with @colorfuljinsei in that the jrock scene has never been more active, prolific and interesting. And, please correct me if I am wrong because I am no expert unlike many in here, but I feel like there was a time (around late '00s / early '00s maybe) in which pretty much every mainstream jrock act was (or at least had been in the past) a vk act, from X to GLAY to B-T to Malice Mizer to Gazette to AnCafe to everything and anything in between. I was literally too young to remember much but I am sure that even in the early 00s there was a strong element of erotism to vk as a scene. The sex industry ties to it aren’t new. So vk is dead only if we compare it to non-vk jrock which is doing great as opposed to then.
Though I was very obviously a jrock fan at some point in my life, as I would check every release on YT/k2n (shout out to ppl who dld jrock albums there too before it turned into a kpop dl www!)/etc. I have never personally regarded myself as a vk fan because other than the erotic appeal I wasn’t and still am not into the more metal/screamo side of things either … and vk is/has always been a smelting pot of musical trends so when people say “ohh old vk, that was real vk, great bands !!” I have a hard time getting what they mean lol. Of course I know they mean the sound of bands that got hugely popular worldwide in the early 00s but that’s never been the entirety of what vk means and I would probably still claim to hate vk if I hadn’t heard less popular bands or even popular bands’ less appreciated albums/eras ; To me there were more changes to the aesthetic and of course there’s also a political / social meaning to this and I think most people miss the aesthetic or the spirit more than they actually miss the sound but yeah anyway… if we’re talking sound of course everything that goes mainstream gets less artisanal and more pop … . And then VK did this 360 where underground weirdos went mainstream → suffered its ‘drawbacks’ (plagiarism, mass-produced soulless pop acts, etc. I don’t see the late 00s so negatively but I know some folks do.) → went niche again. I know current vk isn’t for me at all and doesn’t try to be and whatever in me resonates with some of it still does so only because I grew up with 00s vk but I am not in any way a Japanese kid doing mitsu and s. Pretty sure it remains like this because there are core fans in Japan who love the format shrug
And just like @Guyokai said we’re all old - some days I feel like blasting heavier jrock but not every day. Back in the days I was a weirdo for loving “boring jrock bands” like Aqua Timez but not vk (which actually had, you know, fanservicey content ie. interviews to be consumpted therefore had more fans) . Nowadays you have vk bands that are basically unreachable to a worldwide audience (by which I mean I just purchased tickets to see a SEVENTEEN movie in my local theater with subs in my native language while vk acts I enjoy keep releasing untranslated lyric MVs and live-only albums lol and if they’re happy with it that’s great) and “boring jrock bands” that make anime OST so it’s the norm now. There will always be the language barrier when it comes to Japanese content but I feel like there is room for current jrock going mainstream in the west again even more than before. But vk isn’t even trying, and it’s fine and genuine and I respect that
As a sidenote since we are talking about nostalgia. I have been happy about the gyaru revival. I am very excited about the scene kid revival - I wasn’t even super into it back then, or at least I think I wasn’t but lately I have been embracing every old picture and playlist going “look how emo I was” lol. (that was my best attempt at emulating Kera and H.Naoto vibes with local brands but hey.) The other day I was having a class with freshmen who are 10 years younger than me and there was a small group of boys excitedly talking about anime which I couldn’t foresee in the early 10s at all. If we’re talking vk I am glad Nightmare is back with songs that remind me of when I fell in love with their sound. etc.
tl;dr: Things come and go, chill
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