what??? I almost exclusively go to metal shows locally. Our shows here are full, I don’t understand this comparison at all lmao Death metal is still insanely popular, it’s just not mainstream and never will be (which also makes it an apt comparison to VK, just not in the way you used it).
Was this comment even necessary? Why the hostility?
This also doesn’t hold up to what any of my friends who have been to lives recently say. You really think underage girls go to all the concerts, buy all the merch? Young adults perhaps, but not <18. Doesn’t mean there aren’t any, but to imply it’s most??? Wha?
I simply was expressing what my perception of the scene is. Honestly, it was similar back then, but I think back then we had a lot more people who were very dedicated to the indies bands and seeking out new ones as compared to now. When people join VK servers it’s invariably always “Malice Mizer, Jiluka, DazzlingBad” or so. No judgement on who the bands are, just what I noticed is all.
First off all i was attacked for being closed minded, of course i will go on the defensive.
I gave my examples of what basically is what vk and the actual fandom is like. And metal shows here in California, if there’s no big name acts, playing, no one is going to show up. So if lets say, a band like suffocation shows up, of course the small venue is going to get packed.
I’m sorry you feel as if you were attacked, but I don’t think anyone was attacking you or calling you closed-minded for what it’s worth? I think something was misunderstood there. (If you mean my mention of bias and trying to remain open-minded that was a general statement, and not geared at you. Hell, I have to remind myself of that too ^^) It was a nice discussion
Thanks for many replies, it has been truly interesting to read.
But if let me say something…
Many write “it because you are old and Japanese rock/VK is just as good now as then” - I say NO WAY. I am not sure how many of you were there around the time it peaked, but there were so many good bands that released quality stuff constantly. Thats why they even got many fans abroad and started to our outside of Japan, at least a few bands did.
Today… it just feels like a shell of its former self, like someone said. For me the only band worth checking out anymore is DeG. Now I sound like the biggest DEG fanboy ever but really, what other “big bands” are there out there that still deliver somewhat decent stuff?
Goes back to listen to Yume yori sutekina by Raphael on spotify
Good old times.
I didn’t want to go back and comment on this, but I feel like it’s necessary to make some additional comment/clarifications since I think we’ve been conflating a bunch of scenes here. While these assumptions are understandable because, musically, they’re rock and metal at their core, there’s a lot of complexity on the cultural side that is wholly unique to visual kei.
My additions below are not going to do this justice, and I’ll be leaning on the specific knowledge of the much more seasoned members (namely those who’ve extensively frequented lives in Japan) on here that I’ve come to grasp over time.
When we’re talking about NUMBERS, the VAST majority of visual kei bands are inextricable, cannot be untangled, from their scenes. You’re talking nightlife, jourens, mitsu, etc., their whole financial model is unique. The content, the lyrics often being self-referential, scene-specific. Then you have to understand that all this is relegated to a couple years b/c the newest batch of bangya are into the newer bands on the block. It is only bands who “make it” that have the ability to choose to strip away the nightlife and retain their audience, income, and artistry. Again, going off NUMBERS, the bigger takeaway is that the larger bands who become the “face” to gaijin are the exception to the rule rather than the norm, which is why we have these differing perspectives in the comments.
To top off an already unstable predicament that is visual kei, sustaining profitable livehouses, the basis for all of this, have been at risk in recent years. Enticing younger fans to your music doesn’t require the host and/or sleazy side of vk anymore, you can just have social media presence, and that is enough nowadays. Those who remain have to REALLY like vk culture or REALLY like the nightlife nowadays, nothing in-between. You can also get away being “vk-lite” or just have a visual aesthetic but not participate in the culture anymore. Look at these vk idol groups.
Now you could also say visual kei is transforming, but it’s like… If you replaced all of the organs in your body, how much of you is you? I guess it’s the spirit of vk that is dying or vk is finding new priorities. I̶d̶k̶,̶ ̶i̶t̶’̶s̶ ̶f̶u̶c̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶l̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶b̶r̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶l̶f̶-̶c̶a̶p̶a̶c̶i̶t̶y̶.̶ ̶T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶e̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶s̶e̶n̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶m̶o̶r̶r̶o̶w̶.̶ Made some changes where my explanations make more sense here.
@Baroque
Some of the drama in here aside, this is a good conversation to have once in a while. Thanks for bringing up the topic. Bless you if you read all of these posts cuz I ain’t XD.
Kiryu. if you liked them back in the day, they got bigger and sell really good without really washing out that badly. SID seems like they’re still in this generation’s L’arc en ciel heavy weight selling tier (I find them unlistenable, but that is what apparently sells in Japan, while falls under “somewhat decent” description.) Kamijo and the gothvamp gang all have been pretty active and they are doing well.
this board tends to worship the ground that sukekiyo has walked on, but I really find myself wondering what the scene would be like if Daisuke from kagerou and Isshi from Kaggra were still around. no one with the same artististic streak in them has came in to replace both.
there’s going to be way more vk related stuff this year because as covid slowly backs off, some activities that were planned but got postponed surface again slowly, and there’re little surprise come back things happening all over. new Deg album will spawn a bunch of copycat bands/replicas from other scene core-bros. Karyu from d’espairs ray just announced a solo project as well, which will be at the very least decent since he typically composed the best tracks in angelo.
Sexworkers are not any less fans than anyone who works in an office, has rich parents or whatever to support their hobby/interest.
Have you ever thought about taking a dip outside of the VK scene? @colorfuljinsei mentioned it already that the non-VK Jrock scene differs from VK itself and is doing quite well.
And you can find “big” bands that deliver quality.
If you need recommendations, i am sure there are enough here who can help you out. Also looking past more poppy acts like One OK Rock
@Anon308 made some good points too. VK is still stuck on their thing of not being really open towards oversea fans. It did change a bit, but its slow. Definitly slow.
Although i sometimes wonder if it has to do with the fans too.
Popular VK bands get comments from some unhinged fans. And i mean this unhinged in a negative and not funny way. Those fans spam any twitcasts in english, often dumb rubbish or insider jokes, comment crap like “if you need a dog, i can bark” under posts etc
And i havent seen that kind of “little kid behaviour” with jrock bands. Or it happens somewhere where not everyone can see it.
I am not an expert either, but i think thats something that was just percieved like that to foreign fans.
One OK Rock, Bump of Chicken, Orange Range, Uverworld, some older bands like B’z or Mr. Children. I think the problem is a lot of foreign fans never ventured for most of these bands past their anime openings. But they was/ are popular in Japan.
Never said that. Jouren=Fan that attends almost every live as much as possible. Throwing in sex workers in there happens to be true, because these mitsu happen to be host/sex workers most of the time.
Now im not going to go on with this thread, as colorfuljinsei intricately put what i wanted to say in a neutral point of view.
I can definitely understand why you would see it that way, but there’s layers of selection bias at play here. As some have mentioned earlier, the music we grow up with has a special place in our hearts. It’s comfort music. Listening to it will always bring us back to younger days.
But on a more basic level, that kind of music resonates with us because it was good. If I mumble the words “2006 visual kei”, most minds in this topic would wander to Dir en grey’s “Withering to death.”. It was a seminal album that opened international doors for them and got the Western metal scene familiar with their name. No one - and I mean absolutely no one but myself - will ever mention Seeles Klar Unend in any context (and yes, this did drop 2006-04-29 even though it sounds straight off a cassette from 1994). They were absolutely terrible, even for visual kei standards.
And even though I can be accused of cherry picking - and I might be - the point I want to make is that there were Z-tier shit-kei bands even during the most recent boom from 2006-2009. There are always Z-tier shit-kei bands lurking around every corner; we just don’t give them the time of day because none of us enjoy authentically shit music. They come and go like a fart in the wind, as indie visual kei bands are wont to do, but no one really notices or misses them because they suck. The further back we go, the less likely we are to remember some random shit band (and this goes for every scene) because only the cream of the crop will stand the test of time. That’s why from this perspective it appears that the boom was much more creative; we have very selective memories about what the “boom” actually was, and if we sit down and compare notes we’ll notice quite a few places where our experiences differ.
But I’m starting to get off topic. Music is a very competitive space, so you don’t even have to “suck” to fly under the radar. You have to just fail to garner enough interest to sustain a fan base, even if your music is theoretically sound. Hell, 95% of the bands we dropped in this topic up to this point are under the radar because they’re in Japanese. And also, the Internet is a relatively recent invention and then the development of an Internet Archive is even more recent and incomplete. So yeah, there are layers to this onion, but we’re entering an age as a society where we track a lot more things digitally, so it will be easier to find things in the future. That’s how I found the video for Seeles Klar Unend…
But I don’t want to give off the impression that “yeah things have slowed down tremendously” or “visual kei is dying” or any other bite-sized digestible quips without looking at it from many different perspectives. To me, the rate of music discovery slowing down over time is quite natural. For one, people lose interest in it over time and will prefer easier methods of music ingestion like Spotify over manual, more shady methods. For another, there is an infinite world of music out there to discover but not all of it is for everyone and once you start your journey there will always be a little less left. You will almost always consume music at a faster rate than it can be created and discovered. Visual kei is big but not that big. I really don’t feel comfortable saying things are slowing down without also recognizing that I have slowed down too, and that my attention is split here and elsewhere (musically), and that there are too many factors to put the blame squarely on the shoulders of “the scene”.
In addition, it’s also like a live-service video game. Once you reach endgame, you’re sitting in circles doing dailies until the next expac. Same shit, except there is no “expac” for us visual kei fans. We are all at “endgame” and have to wait until the next big band sparks a fire. And even when that happens, it’s just one band, not an entire scene of bands at my finger tips, so I have to temper expectations. It’s taking a minute, but COVID didn’t help any so I have to continue being patient. I have faith that it will happen though. Like @nekkichi said, bands are finally getting back on tour. The stew is simmering.
Ah…The Ship of Theseus. Philosophical debates aside, my answer to the question is that the “ship” changes with every item replaced, so that by the time it is complete it is both the ship and not the ship. Visual kei is very similar in my head. It’s always changing slowly in many directions at once, and then every once in a while there’s a big lurch in an unexpected direction. Think back to 1999, at the tail-end of the “kote” sound. The time between 1999 and 2001 was a gigantic lurch in a new direction - and a lot of fans left the scene. It “died”. It didn’t sound the same anymore. All the bands even changed visual styles! And you know what? All of those old fans who left made room for the new fans to enter. So yeah, even though visual kei is always changing if I can identify it as visual kei at every step then it hasn’t become unrecognizable. That’s the important relationship between the two to me, which is why your analogy works for me.
So yeah, visual kei may be dying for US but the scene will change to something that attracts a new wave of fans. Maybe it’s idol-kei like @Rui was hinting at and we’ll incorporate some more pop into music. Maybe we’ll continue messing around with extreme metal. Maybe some band will tune their six-string guitars to Open C, mix extreme metal and pop, and come up with Japan’s answer to Strapping Young Lad. We just don’t know, and being overly negative about the future of the scene is a sure fire way to miss out on it’s developments, so let’s collectively stop sipping on the Negative Nancy Juice and just wait for developments to occur.
If the scene dies there’s nothing we can do to revive it, so let’s not hasten it’s demise either.
I was like “WHO ARE YOU?” and then I saw an unrelated post and I was like “oh that’s Jrockdrama”. And then I read your name and I was like…do I not understand English anymore?
I’m not here to either confirm or deny what you’ve witnessed, but rather to turn it on it’s head. You’re relying on lived experiences to relay information about how things are to a group of people that don’t know. It’s an invaluable perspective. But I think that our collective lack of understanding is one of the things that ties the international scene together. Most of us know that we don’t know details. Details like this are valuable, even if they’re not necessarily painting the scene in the most positive light. But what I’m trying to say is that even though I’ve known about all the links to sex work and other, seedier underbellies of Japan, it never really got in my way of enjoying any of it. Ignorance is bliss LOL. I’m never gonna get to go to lives, collect tons of merch on the levels that you have, actually interact with fans in line for concerts, fuck a bandoman and pay his bills, etc. This site and community is the best I have. Everything I read and understand gets filtered through the lens of JRO.
So yeah, I wouldn’t get hung up on experiences that differ from yours too much. Both sides may be right depending on hypothetical circumstances and perspectives, but I always find that road not fruitful to travel down because I just…end up right back where I started.
I know you said you weren’t going to respond openly to this topic anymore so feel free to shoot me a PM if you have any thoughts!
This is exactly what I meant, sorry - I meant late 90s/early 00s and didn’t realize my typo. I am coming from a place in which I was a big UVER fan in the mid 00s but they didn’t really “exist” in the mainstream before D Tecnolife which was released in 2005. Similarly, I think of OOR as a band of the '10s even though they were active before and I say this as a formerly-big NEWS fan (the Johnny’s group Taka was once a part of) . I was checking lineups of old rock festivals in Japan (like early 00s - I was actually attempting to find out if emo was ever a thing in Japan but then realized other stuff.) and I feel like there were a lot more vk bands so I am under the impression that was an era in which vk felt more poppy and less secluded. And again, that’s not necessarily a good nor a bad thing.
When I say mainstream of course I mean bands that reach an international audience too, even more so in the days of dial up internet and P2P music sharing. We had to hear about them somewhere, and I do feel like we didn’t really talk about non-visual jrock bands in the early 00s, but again, I was too young to really remember. Maybe AKFG and to a lesser extent Tomoko Kawase or Puffy-like artists but even Orange Range which seemed to be already pretty popular in Japan I don’t remember THAT many people talking about them overseas. And again, I think that there were plenty of reasons for that - vk had an aesthetic appeal that surpassed language barriers, the music was actually very different from what would play on western MTV in the early 00s, it was/is strong on a fanservice culture, etc. Now I am guessing but maybe the ordeals in late 90s vk turned it into a topic popular enough to reach a western audience (seeing as X was already quite popular among metalheads AFAIK) ? idk. And I suppose this is how it went “pop” in a way in the 00s (with that comes the band boom, Yohios, Golden Bombers etc.) and then not anymore for a plethora of reasons.
Nowadays rock simply isn’t popular in the west anymore (yeah, revivals and all that but. Nowhere close to the early 00s tbh. ) but on the other hand it is still somewhat popular in Japan and I feel like, even because of anime, many foreigners still listen to jrock in general. The vk scene feels like something else and it’s very uhh, Japan-oriented I guess. But it’s not like artists such as Nightmare aren’t playing anime OST anymore. It’s just that they went beyond the vk thing, and the “vk thing” doesn’t seem to be mainstream anymore and my point was exactly that 1) I don’t think vk artists are that interested in going mainstream anymore anyway (what with the sex drugs and rock n roll local culture etc. it doesn’t seem to be a Goal smh) 2) and there is nothing wrong with that.
Dude did this even make any sense? I am bad at explaining things and I am even worse in English. I envy people who can explain a point in 2 sentences
In short (trying to be) if I were to say “no one is doing it like 00s oshare!!” that would be so true, no one is, really. But like, is it a bad thing? For me, yeah. But. things change (and nobody was doing it like Gravity in the 00s which is an improvement to me so, YMMV.)
There are pockets of metal fans out there who yearn for the aesthetics and sounds of 80’s glam and hair metal and don’t know that visual kei exists. As you said, musical and visual trends are cyclical, but I just realized it’s possible for a trend to die off in one country and resurface in another. It’s the kind of thing so obvious to all of us that I took it as truth, but really without glam metal specifically visual kei would have never gone as deep into the aesthetics as it did when it started. Early visual bands look a hell of a lot like '80s American hair metal bands, and that’s changed over time too! But like you said, is that a bad thing? It depends, I guess. I’m not really expecting 00s oshare to resurface elsewhere, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one or more elements of the oshare sound pop up in a different context in a different rock scene elsewhere. I guess this is why I decided to study music - so I can find definitions for these long sentences and then bring together artists that sound similar. But I digress, I just wanted to poke your brain
Exactly this, really. From what I can see even from this topic, the “death of vk” in Japan actually meant the time in which it went mainstream - and guess what, going mainstream meant western kids started hearing about it, downloading it, etc. So, it changed. For the better, for the worse? Well, this is just a matter of perspective IMO. I have gotten only recently into Buck-Tick (life … is irony) and watching old interviews and stuff I find myself laughing at this vampiresque dude throwing a long hair on national TV in early 90s Japan and girls in the audience squealing while a very confused TV show host stares. I don’t think vk was A Thing in the west in the early 90s but surely it was, already, in Japan as far as I can see.
To me it’s always a good thing that trends change, disappear and resurface. As long as it’s genuine IMO creativity is good and generally makes for good music. And there’s still YouTube so I can still listen to 00s oshare. Best of both worlds tbh
tangential to the main topic but i usually end up more interested in wondering what the current direction is rather than what’s dying - like people say ‘host kei’ but thinking of the softest most innofensive bands like Daizystripper/Lost Ash from the early 2010s, i couldn’t see a band w/ that style doing well now - that’s a 2010s sound imho and lives in those few years
i also don’t see many bands feature singers who do what my friends outside vkei call ‘the vkei voice’ - that low octave, full throat, wide vibrato like Kamijo in Versailles. Maybe i’m just not looking in the places that’s found? But excluding old bands who’ve just kept at it, i can only think of Neth Priere Cain, but they’re kinda a retro revival act anyway…
disclosure that i found the scene in 2010, so 2000s kei is all before my time, and early MoNoLith, Royz, D=Out, Daizystripper, and Mejibray were my intro to the scene, aside from mid-discog Mea, Diru, Gazette, etc.
when i think of bands now i think ‘bright’ & ‘fresh’ sounds seem to be what bands are chasing - imho Nurie does this sound ‘best,’ or at least most on the nose. DIMLIM ofc did that whole album on a tele, and idk how to describe 仮病 but ‘bright’ is definitely part of it
& i don’t think ‘poppy’ is necessarily always related - bands like DazzlingBad & 蟻 kinda seem to be min-maxing dark/heavy elements with this bright freshness, in a way that’s more ‘mid-scooped’ (both literally & figuratively) than how bands would sound in the last 20 years
technically speaking, i think swapping mic-recorded drums to resampled tracks has been a huge part of this - it’s been going on for for 20ish years but seems like the effect gets stronger each year, more noticable, and the compression can choke a little tighter as a result
and while fully-digital guitar recording has also been a thing for a while too, i think only recently are bands moving away from aiming to replicate an analog sound w/ a digital signal chain. So the ‘warmth’ & ‘atmosphere’ that others might call ‘noise’ & ‘bleed’, instead of engineering those back in i think in the mix they’re just left out - and the compression can choke a little tighter as a result
ofc these are all just dumb thoughts from some american on a computer - not like i’ve talked to anyone or seen anything firsthand, just loose observations while i’ve been curious what’s different between when i first got into the scene & now~
(edit): i keep asking myself “why doesn’t xxxx sound vkei anymore?” for example アルルカン, Dezert - but maybe a reason why is bc vkei is finally starting to move outside ‘koteosa’ as its near exclusive definition.
Not trying to sound smarter than you or anything, but they really seem to have a hard time to make any money recently. A once quite popular band “MERRY” is only playing at super small venues now for their new album. I even heard rumors that there is so little money in VK that some are literally doing porn… Don’t know how true this is tho.
never heard anything about porn but yah even bands you perceive to be “big” are drawing in less than I was getting at my events in california before i moved here.
Getting girls to pay you mitsuge to survive though is a big thing in vk,
if you are actively hunting for mitsuge though you can often end up being just some kind of man prostitute depending on how you go about it, so that is similar to porn i guess haha.
I’ve been a part of the scene for about 17 years, and I think the original point here is pretty valid. Though, what I will say, is that it seems that the “scene” ebbs and flows over time. This wouldn’t be the first time fan-exhaustion is being spoken about because… Yeah, a lot of the stuff going on these days is just not that interesting. I think the pandemic destroyed most of it, I always go back to Kamijo/Versailles/Hizaki comeback in July, 2020, that just got cancelled entirely because of the pandemic. Those would have been incredible releases to revitalize the interest.
Instead, we get Tatsurou’s two solo albums and a MUCC album every six months like was said in the OP. It’s kind of disappointing, because it just feels like the same artists are the ones releasing all of the time and I don’t really get attached to songs when they’re released ad nauseum like that.
By “they” do you mean Buck-Tick ?? Yeah, I mean, … not everyone can keep doing the vk vampire gimmick for what, almost 40 years now. Some people resort to swearing they’re going to release an album while they travel the world taking pictures with international celebrities and others resort to teaching dick exercises on national TV to keep making money. To each their own lol (but, respectfully, maybe I still like B-T better. They’re still making good music and doing the vk gimmick even though vk isn’t mainstream anymore … mad respect.)
As for the porn thing, yeah, like I was saying, I don’t think it’s a new thing at all? I have a feeling that there’s been a trend of vk artists who work as hosts on the side for at least a decade now (no idea about before because, again, I was young and not into vk lol) ? And if you’re doing the mizu shobai thing in Japanese society to make ends meet it’s not a huge leap to do porn I guess. Of course - but this is exactly what I was saying (or tying to…) before - when vk was mainstream, bands that got huge in the scene got huge outside the scene too, thus, made more money. Less popularity means less money in general… unless you have fans who make a lot of money as sex workers and such and pay huge sums for fanservice stuff. I think it ends up having all these close ties - I remember watching a documentary on Japanese sex workers saying they hated their job but then spending much of their hard earned money in mizu shobai because they wanted to de-stress by chillin with their fav hosts or whatever. So when you factor in the whole fanservice ordeal that goes on in vk to make money … I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar logic applied there.
Moreover, I feel like vk bands of the 2010s just don’t go mainstream anymore. Personally, at least, I can’t think of any vk bands that broke the mould recently. Every band that is still “widely popular” (and yeah, I am talking about MUCC and B-T and everyone else) was already popular in the 00s. “Average” Japanese people can probably name these bands or at least go “oh yeah, heard of it” but I can’t think of any (honestly) hugely popular 2010s vk acts sadly. Do you get my logic? They’re not mainstream anymore → the core audience of fans who (through sex work, family or whatever else) have money to spend is pandered to → they’re making money somehow, and it’s probably hard to visualize … a band that has sex workers, menhera kids and scums for fans going mainstream and keeping that audience. I do think there is some kind of logic like that going on. And, again, is that bad? I don’t know. Artistically, it doesn’t change a thing, bands can be niche and still thrive artistically so. I am sure fans who were used to mainstream vk in the 00s are saddened. But again, this is akin to me saying “>:( no one is doing it like 00s oshare !!” . Really, no one is, but fuck you my sister
(If you mean my mention of bias and trying to remain open-minded that was a general statement, and not geared at you. Hell, I have to remind myself of that too ^^) It was a nice discussion 
