the new single is in an bottle of psycho love, it’s on the front of LA’s Chinese Theater, it’s teaching melania trump how to play drums, it is inside of our hearts
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Hes recording it/mixing in new york, paris and seoul, and a bunch of other cities, so it will take some time. Be patient.
Do they really have a sizeable western fan base? My hunch says they arent that many. If you ask 1 million people in the US maybe one person has heard about one of them. I might be wrong. If they have a concert abroad people fly in from all kind of nearby countries.
The more time passes, the more I question this project.
Not even the quality of their output or anything, but it seems like it wasn’t planned at all. With streaming and short lived trends, you have to announce a project like that and have already recorded 5 singles you can put out within the next 6 months. The hype is completely gone.
It doesn’t seem like they had anything prepared and just rushed the “Hey, how about a super group?!???” idea like they did with S.K.I.N.
My assumption is that they maybe release one or two singles this year and put out an album at the end of 2024. In 2025 they have concerts in Taipei, Shanghai, LA, NY, London, Paris and Berlin and we never hear from them again.
My guess is that Yoshiki just wanted a dopamine kick from being “relevant” again, since media in japan wrote about them/had it as news on tv etc. They even paid foreign press to write articles about it.
Give it 1-2 more years and the project has gone completely radio silent, permanently。
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they may have paid foreign press to write about them, but they save a lot living rent-free in y’alls heads so it evens out
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l’arc played the biggest american concert from a Japanese band attendance-wise
music business really does no favors for asian acts, but I can’t think of anyone else who would have hyde’s pull, not even the big Y
miyavi would hypothetically be on gazette levels of revelant, considering the latter largely kept their legacy stans, and myv lost them, and now makes bizarre cross-over of valuemeal-RuPaul club music and tiktok swill
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That’s cool but I can’t imagine they would be able to tour at bigger venues in the us for example. People must have come from USA, Canada and south America to that one concert.
Sorry for being cynical. Of course many japanese artists deserve so much more attention for their music. It’s the stupid brainless companies that cut them off when japanese rock was on the rise in the early 2000s, due to their stick in the butt nazi-copyright laws.
no one is talking about bigger venues.
they played a single date in a 12,000 arena in Bangkok in 2012 (which also would be the only time I’ve ever heard casual people in the streets mention l’arc, girls working in 7-11 in the building I lived at the time were chatting about the gig when the advertizing started), but as far as mainstream promotion and recognition goes, west wouldn’t invest into east, and it’s too risky and expensive for a japanese act to attempt breaking through.
if it did not happen when anime and jrock culture were at their rise, it won’t happen now. they’re miles ahead of non-vk asian artists, if that matters, so wigs, hair styles, and fine dresses were worth it in the long run.
I also don’t believe that tiktok does shit when it comes to bringing someone over, because so and so have to pick up the tab and book a venue first, and you can’t crowdfund that w/o a local management company being involved.
I would personally point my finger at certain people in music industry management preferring to avoid allowing Asian influence over the culture, preferring to deal with fiscal loss, but keeping the upper hand when it comes to shaping the taste & range lanscape in the music market + layers and layers and layers of very asshole variety of whitey-ish racism, but that’s my personal POV, and if you mostly socialize in Europe you won’t really get it until you see it.
let’s just say music business often operates by closing more doors than opening them.
speaking of venue size, their debut gig in Japan was in ariake arena built for 12k, which is kinda hot as far as a concert with under 10 new songs goes, but it’s nowhere on the levels of like luna sea or x-japan numbers - they didn’t even bother going straight for the tokyo dome
yoshiki might be a huge diva, but he isn’t delusional
Hello again buddy.
I dont mean to argue but japanese things are much more popular in southern asia than the west, same with korean stuff. They literally see kpop stars as gods in thailand, philippines, vietnam etc.
It might be costly to break abroad but i sadly think there arent enough people in the west for any japanese band today, maybe they can do like one concert like the one you mentioned. My hunch tells me that they probably had to scratch together people from the whole continent to fill up that concert.
West in general, maybe when it comes to a bit older people, have 0 interest in asian things. I tried to show my mother some korean shows on netflix but once she heard they were korean she said “no please stop”. That is indeed very ignorant but that type of mentality is extremely common in the west. Hell, even european language shows americans watch with american dub.
But it will change when the “young take over” so to say. I still personally wonder if japanese entertainment, ok lets say japanese music, can ever get another try at it. Hopefully they can but then they need some fresh new and really good bands, crap like Deviloof (who once kicked ass tho) that seems to be the biggest new act from Japan wont do it. Their last single is so shitty its almost impressive how bad it is.
We will see!
Cheers!
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we’re way out of the thread subject, but I’ll leave you with this bit on warner music group (same company kamijo is signed with in Japan) new, so, technically, young CEO sharing some thoughts:
the only positive takeaway I’m seeing over there is his optimistic outlook in regards to the market growth from now on.
I don’t follow kpop scene and don’t have an opinion on that one; the thing with asian culture is that there’s actually pretty good demand for many visual japanese exports in the West, and it has been the case for over a century. anime in particular is still reasonably profitable enough. japanese fine art, fashion, design works, videogames all have huge demand — which entirely excludes music. there’s no one interested in investing into bringing that over. there’s way more investment into exporting beigie lilywhite fluff back into Asia and upselling it over there.
(oh, and idt the young generation of anyone in north america, which seems to be the default subject, is any less racist than the ones before them once the financial angle is involved, sorry, which will only get worse once that generation grows older and more rigid in their ways.)
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Yoshiki starving us of sweet sweet TLR content is driving people crazy
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The main challenge with playing North America is the size, spread of fans, and relative cost to travel and stay somewhere. To be honest, unless you live in one of the major cities that bands always seem to play, you’re better off just saving up and spending twice that amount to go to Japan and see a dozen bands.
Less chance of stuff going tits up, longer set lists on average, more merch options, furi participation (if it’s that kind of band).
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They are featured in tekken 8 that just released. I don’t think they are deflating… But I was never interested in them to begin with so I really don’t know how to read the room on this one.
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Soooo… THE LAST ROCKSTARS (2022-2024)? Any signs of intentions to continue this “project”?
Nope, media isn’t writing/reporting about them anymore so yoshi-sama lost interest.
Sugizo has said a couple of times over the past months that while it does absolutely look as though nothing is going on, there is activity going on “behind the scenes”.
He has mentioned that music has been, or is being, created and they do have meetings (assumingly with some sort of regularity), however, they are working on “Yoshiki time”, which basically means that there’s a lot of waiting on Yoshiki, so moving forward is a slow, slow, thing.
Supposedly, a Spring tour is being worked on, mentioned by Yoshiki when he finally (as some people did expect this) confirmed the cancellation of the (stupidly) postponed LA show.
I’m not 100% sure with Miyavi (I know he’s doing a Japan tour soon), but Hyde (Now through August, if I recall) , Yoshiki (August?) and Sugizo all have an active / busy summer (Sugizo is touring until mid November w/ Luna Sea, and has been since the end of May).
So, not likely to hear anything TLRS until at least until fall, at the very earliest.
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Yoshiki spends more time on promoting Yoshikitty than TLRS 
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I accepted the fact that this is a band to talk about rather than to listen to.
I don’t really care about their tours, I’ll never see one. I want songs, releases. Good, bad, I don’t care. But there is nothing.
So the only thing left is to talk about the yoshikiness of everything
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Is “Yoshiki-time” really a thing? That things can move veeery slowly 