NICKT

"graphic design is my passion"

now all arlequin has to do is open a fanclub named PIERROT and we'll go full circle

Twice as long, but with 2--5 poor(er) songs thrown in. Aight, sound great.
 
 
Would not buy.

12 but if the songs are bad even an EP can feel like an eternity

i rarely sit down and listen to an album all the way through, i usually just let the songs show up when i'm listening to music on shuffle. so, the length of an album is something i'm not really concerned about. however on the odd chance i do sit down and listen to an entire album, the "perfect length" solely depends on whether or not i like the band or genre (as others have mentioned. it always just depends.)

That's what you get for using that shit-arse font.

I'm surprised that 2009 was the peak. It was already around that time I was complainin' how there's no good shows to attend lol. With that said, those shows that we did have sold very well and a few bands could even venture to have gigs in the second largest city of the country as well. 
I reckon the pop culture peak of visual kei in Finland was in 2007-2008 when the odd few bands made the telly and got gifted some magazine space. Shows were packed, the fashion was wild, no koreans gnawing in on the real estate, events that were associated with visual kei could actually be held at relatively low risk.
 
 
What's up for debate though, is how the new fanbase of the peak years wasn't able to recover from the crucial wave of hiatus', disbandments and stylistic changes that the most popular bands went through around the turn of the 2010's. Everyone should recall how often one heard people lamenting on the state of the scene with ambiguous claims of a lack of X, Y and Z, setting the scene for the gradual petering out either to the clutches of the koreans or just general normalcy. This is the way of the flesh for a fad certainly, and nobody is able to sustain creative output nor popularity for an extended period of time, but that's not all that there is to it. I suppose among great many other things, it's not unjust to consider public merely as fickle if their visual kei habit was dependent on the existence of Dio and Unsraw. Visual kei on the internet had good enough infrastructure to allow these people to discover new and old bands with relative ease, but one should still never underestimate the stupidity and the incapability of the rank and file to utilize such tools perfectly well in their disposal. There are still people who'll waltz into a conversation, feigning willful ignorance, saying "OH THESE BANDS OF TODAY AREN'T LIKE THE GIRUGAMESH OF YORE. SO WHAT HAPPENED WITH THAT VISUAL KEI?". This means that relative interest is there; they haven't forgotten about it, so what gives? 
 
A certain contributing factor that I don't think gets brought up enough is the bush league organising and the sheer ineptitude of the promoters. The fad really blew its wad during the two years it was at its peak, and it wasn't sustainable. Absurdly dumb, dead certainly set for failure, shows got booked even as late as 2015: and anyone with a lick of sense ought to know that in the long term a no-show is always better than a small-shit show. When you're flopping the proper course of action is never to keep on flopping until you can flop no more, but to change the approach. Rest assured a lot of money and contacts have been squandered by idiots already one foot out the door. Unsraw's European tour is a classic example, and Merry's a more recent one. If you're not able to project that there's no demand, and that by booking this there'll be no demand in the future, then you're simply not helping.  
 
The networking on the local level wasn't great and at its worst there were even open divisions between the fanbase of privileged rich blogger cunts and those who took the train to shows from their shit provincial towns who could barely afford the mcdonald's and second hand converse ( I confess my dislike of the former, but I'm not merely projecting it. I heard many other people voice it also, completely unprovoked by yours truly. ) When enough shows and events are abjectly booked to fail with a lack of camaraderie to match, the rot is aggravated to spread into the brain, and eventually even the life support in form of a Gazette european tour won't do you no good. Their 2016 show in Helsinki did not sell out. That's equal to the sky falling out in visual kei terms.
 
A curious example of grassroots level organising seemingly done correct: take a look at the pictures of SANA's recent solo tour from from the backarse of eastern europe. Going through all those pictures you'll notice that while the central and western European crowds are only a handful at best, the Russian and Ukrainian shows pull a kind of a crowd that man of SANA's stature has no right of pulling. I'm terribly interested to find out how they've managed to do this. The only reason I can manage to come up with by speculation alone is that the fans of "Japanese stuff" are so organised, if not rabid, that when something is organised, enough effort is done that it'll pull enough solidarity to maintain the scene's health. I swear to God one of those Sana crowds has equal heads to what EAT YOU ALIVE or heidi had here in the past three years. It can't be that there's more fans of this shit there than in here just by sheer chance, luck and coincidence. 

Noticed something interesting when I was exploring worldwide trends for the search term "visual kei" on google - that tiny spike earlier this year just happened to be when youtubers react to visual kei came out:

 
So visual kei is dead. And at the rate it is going now, will be even dead-er; A scene stagnating on the same looks and sounds, rarely venturing out musically if at all. But it wasn't always that way. Although it would be  appropriate to refer to the 90s golden era of vk to remind us of how opulent the scene once was, I want to bring back memories of 2009.
 
In October 2008, Kerrang ran a feature on jrock, publishing an article predicting jrock to go big in Europe in 2009.
And sure enough, google trends highlighted the correlation clearly, confirming that the search terms "j-rock" and "visual kei" did indeed peak between January and March 2009.
 
However, following vk's brief global success was a period of near-exponential decline - to what we see now as the lowest point of popularity vk has ever experienced in a 12 year time-span. Even that spike in August wasn't enough to break above 2004's lowest point.
 
Personally, I'd been a passive fan of visual kei for many years prior to 2009, but it wasn't until 2009 that I became fully engaged. One prominent catalyst was Japanese blogging platform Ameba launching its virtual community ‘Pigg’ that year, becoming a game changer in the way fans and bands could interact. Popular musicians were also given accounts powered by ameba, a la twitter's verified personalities.
 
I remember 2009 as a year that several vk bands were going major and gaining international recognition. It was no surprise that vk reached its global height by being much more accessible through social media and other digital channels. This momentum seemed to be gaining quickly until 2010 brought a sharp turn of unfortunate events within the scene and the emergence of kpop poached a large part of the international vk audience.
 
However, the situation in Japan is a bit different, as vk has been pretty steady since it had already declined by the turn of the century. The search term "ヴィジュアル系" on google trends says as much.
 
A few years ago, major labels published all those visual kei cover albums probably in an attempt to raise the relevance of visual kei, but the hype had pretty much died by then. The drought of talent and variety meant that each band was no better than the other, and was enough for many people to lose interest. Stricter piracy laws also meant that music had become less accessible, with people being reluctant to pay the exorbitant prices of some CDs. Not to mention the discontinuation of many vk magazines as an indication of the scene's current degradation. Marketing and business models that worked in the 90s and early 00s struggle to find significance in the present day, yet management has not evolved to adapt to current trends (or have done so poorly).
 
Now that the last of the influential underground vk labels is defunct, vk doesn't have the backing and budget as it once did. X Japan and Luna Sea are like the only lifeline left for vk - there can't even be a vk festival without either X Japan or Luna Sea in the lineup.
 
I remember reading an interview where Yohio mentioned that he kinda killed western interest in vk, but I don't particularly attribute that to those western vk acts damaging the reputation of this uniquely japanese scene. Bands such as D'espairsRay, girugamesh, the Underneath, Rentrer en Soi, Dio, UnsraW and Black:List etc who laid the groundwork for vk to make its mark in the west are no longer around. I'm surprised lynch. didn't carry the torch.
 
I don't want this thread to sound too much like #resurrectvk, but instead I want ignite a discussion (and maybe create a dialog) - how did the vk boom of '09 affect you in your country, what could've been done differently, or the best things to come out of  that little modern renaissance of vk history.
 
 

Stop it. Stop playing with my heart. 😔

2016, people bitching and moaning about being charged and shit for weed.
Here I am, personally wondering why if it isn't a "big deal" to you guys then why do you do it when it's 100% clearly illegal?
 
Like, jesus fucking christ, guys. I don't care if it's literally the shits of God, you don't fuck like that with your government. You've got the means to challenge laws, go do so, but don't do it by being a dumb fuck cunt rebellious teenager and then bitch about it later when it finally bites you in your arse.

dun dun dun another one bites the dust

2016, people bitching and moaning about being charged and shit for weed.
Here I am, personally wondering why if it isn't a "big deal" to you guys then why do you do it when it's 100% clearly illegal?
 
Like, jesus fucking christ, guys. I don't care if it's literally the shits of God, you don't fuck like that with your government. You've got the means to challenge laws, go do so, but don't do it by being a dumb fuck cunt rebellious teenager and then bitch about it later when it finally bites you in your arse.

2016, people bitching and moaning about being charged and shit for weed.
Here I am, personally wondering why if it isn't a "big deal" to you guys then why do you do it when it's 100% clearly illegal?
 
Like, jesus fucking christ, guys. I don't care if it's literally the shits of God, you don't fuck like that with your government. You've got the means to challenge laws, go do so, but don't do it by being a dumb fuck cunt rebellious teenager and then bitch about it later when it finally bites you in your arse.

2016, people bitching and moaning about being charged and shit for weed.
Here I am, personally wondering why if it isn't a "big deal" to you guys then why do you do it when it's 100% clearly illegal?
 
Like, jesus fucking christ, guys. I don't care if it's literally the shits of God, you don't fuck like that with your government. You've got the means to challenge laws, go do so, but don't do it by being a dumb fuck cunt rebellious teenager and then bitch about it later when it finally bites you in your arse.

Develop one's faculties, for example:
 

lynch.
years: 11.5 years
unique songs: ≳120
time it takes to listen: 7.2 hours
productivity rate: 10 songs / year
 
I thought that was deathgaze lol

nah, deathgaze just folded when they ran out of static-x and slipknot songs to rip off :^)

This is really interesting. I want to look into some older bands like MUCC and BUCK-TICK to see what the numbers say but they got like 20 years of releases to sort through so this may take a bit of time lol.

what a year

because disclosing their burial location so that the rabid fangirls, local and not, could hang their moist pantycranes as a gesture of love and devotion only makes sense??????

im as shook over shoxx as i am over brangelina...mega shook

I liked Taking off, but anything with Avril just turn me off. Damn

well they got tha skill of stealing like a real artist mastered
 
wrapping up the goodwill lycaon starting pack trifecta with peculated aesthetics,
now probably getting prepared to claw that coveted # 1 stan heart from their warm body.

Disbanding by Christmas 

I hope they will keep that name - and twitter - after reveal.