desparejo86

Gackt was just one of three different singers Malice Mizer had, he had nothing to do with their breakup.
 
Never heard that rumor before; 100% started by a western fan who was pulling stuff out of her ass. Anyone with a musical ear can tell that Mana and Kozi had no hand in writing Gackt's solo material. Apples and Oranges.
 
Gackt was likely not at Kamis funeral for the reason listed in my reply below. 
 
 
I don't know what official statements Gackt, Mana, or Kozi have made because we don't really need to, ya know? None of them will tell you what occam's razor will, because it's not flattering to either party.
 
Nippon Columbia decided that Malice Mizer were small potatoes and Gackt was the star. And they were right! Gackt wrote the highest charting single on Mervilles, Le Ciel, which also happened to be the most commercial song on the album. Gackt had the great voice, incredible looks, a legion of female fans and he wrote the biggest hit on the album. He was poised for stardom, Malice Mizer could hold him back. 
 
So Nippon Columbia put their money on Gackt solo and ditched the band, and their gamble paid off in spades. People tend to gloss over/forget, possibly due to Kamis death, that not only did Malice Mizer's label give Gackt a solo deal, but they dropped Malice Mizer. That wasn't a coincidence.
 
It is what it is. I hate Gackt solo, but wouldn't trade Bara no Seidou or the Klaha singles for anything. I just wish we'd get one more album out of MM.... instrumental, with Klaha, a new singer... I don't care.

Gackt was just one of three different singers Malice Mizer had, he had nothing to do with their breakup.
 
Never heard that rumor before; 100% started by a western fan who was pulling stuff out of her ass. Anyone with a musical ear can tell that Mana and Kozi had no hand in writing Gackt's solo material. Apples and Oranges.
 
Gackt was likely not at Kamis funeral for the reason listed in my reply below. 
 
 
I don't know what official statements Gackt, Mana, or Kozi have made because we don't really need to, ya know? None of them will tell you what occam's razor will, because it's not flattering to either party.
 
Nippon Columbia decided that Malice Mizer were small potatoes and Gackt was the star. And they were right! Gackt wrote the highest charting single on Mervilles, Le Ciel, which also happened to be the most commercial song on the album. Gackt had the great voice, incredible looks, a legion of female fans and he wrote the biggest hit on the album. He was poised for stardom, Malice Mizer could hold him back. 
 
So Nippon Columbia put their money on Gackt solo and ditched the band, and their gamble paid off in spades. People tend to gloss over/forget, possibly due to Kamis death, that not only did Malice Mizer's label give Gackt a solo deal, but they dropped Malice Mizer. That wasn't a coincidence.
 
It is what it is. I hate Gackt solo, but wouldn't trade Bara no Seidou or the Klaha singles for anything. I just wish we'd get one more album out of MM.... instrumental, with Klaha, a new singer... I don't care.

>be a bandman
>play shitty american cons for years
>no one cares about you in japan
>finally start to come up, band does well
>almost make it to your 20th anniversary
>vocalist gets a bunch of absolutely heinous vocal conditions
>forced to disband
>over two years later, he's finally better and you can keep doing what you love
>some guy on a forum calls you cringey for taking a cute photo with your bandmates

I lived in Tokyo and went to all their local shows and many of the away ones too during their second period in the 2000s. Something that I think isn’t fully appreciated among international fans is just how unpopular and broke Lareine was during that time, and how desperately and passionately they worked despite the obstacles. But every concert was magical. It had to be. There was no reason to do it otherwise, and a million reasons to quit. It felt like borrowed time, and I was always so happy and grateful to be able to see them despite the bittersweet feeling they would have been better off doing something else.
 
They always looked exhausted at events, rarely had new costumes, rarely even had new goods because I think they had trouble coming up with deposits. Cheki didn’t start to become a thing until late in their history (2005-ish?) when they’d already spent years grinding away with little return. I suspect the reason why they were able to put out as many releases as they did is because back during Lareine’s Sony days Kamijo invested in buying a bunch of his own production equipment. I think normally an indie band at that level wouldn’t have had those resources.
 
But time to write and rehearse seemed like a scarce commodity too back then. There were times when Kamijo looked half dead. And every time Lareine did a little tour we could watch Kamijo perk up day by day, at the same time as us fans with normal lives were getting more and more tired as the tour went on. It always made me wonder what on earth kind of awful schedule he normally had in Tokyo, juggling the band and probably a part-time job, that going on tour would feel like a vacation to him. (Later on when I read Versailles interviews, they mentioned that Kamijo and Hizaki first met while working at Third Stage.)
 
Unfortunately by 2003 Lareine was already perceived as old, out of date, and uncool. A ‘90s band. If they hadn’t paused in 2000 maybe things would have been different, maybe they could have built a solid base like Dir or Pierrot. But coming back in 2003 it was too late, the trends had already changed. Lareine had few fans back then, and it seemed like all of us were fans from before. I never met any Japanese fans who said they were new. (only international fans) Young VK fans didn’t care. Lareine wrote some of the currently trendy themes into their music in ways that were interesting instead of pure copy/paste, and us old fans had fun, but nobody else cared. They did some amazing experimental stuff on stage, and nobody saw it except us few old fans. To give you an idea of how young fans perceived them, there was a big outcry when Versailles was announced because people didn’t think a pansy weak vocalist with a thin high voice like Kamijo should be playing with awesome (but unknown) guitarists like Hizaki and Teru. They really got outraged when we heard Versailles was going to have a heavy sound. I got in a lot of arguments online at that time with people who clearly thought I was a delusional fangirl for saying that Kamijo’s voice is powerful enough to sing heavier music.
 
In February 2006 Kazumi announced that he was leaving Lareine and retiring from music. I never blamed him, I was thankful that he had done his best to help bring us great music for so long despite the hardships. But this was really the beginning of the end. Lareine put out big ads in the major VK magazines looking for a new drummer, and they even went out of their way to explicitly write that they would take applications from anybody regardless of age or sex or nationality, as long as they could play and would love the band. I think that would be shocking to see in a band’s want ad even today, and this was in 2006 before the explosion of international tours had happened. But they weren’t able to find a drummer, and then during the summer Mayu vanished again. Honestly I can’t even blame Mayu either for wanting to quit under the circumstances, but it was terrible that he vanished without communication or warning. The Club Citta live they did in October was originally supposed to be a Halloween Party event live with multiple bands, not their last live.
 
I went to as many of Kamijo’s anniversary tour dates as I could, since it was so special. The Tokyo final with everyone was amazing. So glad I went.
 
p.s. “Drama” was so great live that to this day I can still half-hear the performance in my memory, even though they only played it twice in Sapporo in February 2006 before Kazumi left. It was so powerful. Kazumi and Emiru were much louder than on the studio version; this song actually has a really sexy rhythm when you can hear them. Mayu took the electric part instead of the acoustic one. They came together solid and strong booming on the beat in that last chorus on the song, Kamijo singing powerfully instead of gently, and hard on the beat like the others. I regret not bringing my MD recorder to Sapporo, but I never imagined that those 2 nights would be the last times we could enjoy Lareine normally.

In a way Kisaki is the ultimate bandman
 
constantly hustling
abuses both women and children 
betraying bandmates
evading taxes
breaks the law
been around for way too long and there's no signs of him stopping

damn u @God  wrong miyabi x

Mid-2000s corporate American radio-rock a la Breaking Benjamin is exactly what we want out of our jrocker idols, bro.

glad to see linkin park resume activities with a new vocalist

this sounds REALLY outdated, ugh

"Comical" is the word that comes to mind.

Language barrier and the fact Japanese Popular music largely copies musical trends in the West.
 
As a rule of thumb: if a certain sound becomes popular in the west (like a type of pop music, or metal subgenre), it will become a popular trend in Japan 3-5 years later. This is why nu-metal suddenly became a thing years after it hit in the West. This is why metalcore suddenly became a thing years after it hit in the West. This is why hardcore suddenly became a thing years after it became popular again in the West.
 
 

Zeus breaks it down pretty well.
 
To add a smidgen of my opinion, I think that Visual Kei's western popularity (U.S from my experience) greatly paralleled the interest in emo/counterculture in the mid 2000s. They both had similar aesthetic and garnered similar fans w/ plenty of overlap. That interest has largely died out and has re-surged into -core genres and melded itself into other indie acts. Visual Kei, being a physically distant/foreign genre, in-turn became a niche interest again.
 
Additionally, Japan is still the premier example of Galapagos Syndrome and is pretty self-reliant. K-pop, on the other hand, is dependent on a global audience and embraces Western interest which reciprocatively affects its own music industry. Also "Cool Japan" hasn't helped jack-squat with well-known figures like Gackt being critical of it (it's futile when the industry at large is isolated.)
 
Finally, Japanese music just sounds different. I try to link to this reddit thread w/ nonotan's comment when I can b/c I've always felt there was some underlying music-theory reason why J-Music attracts and repels certain groups of people. There are a lot of people that I've met that have thought Japanese melodies were cheesy so this helps explain that a little. 
 
-
As an aside, I'm a bit more on the pessimistic side about anime becoming more popular (rather than just accepted). I still think the combination of the "nostalgia factor" and internet culture have drawn more (perceived) attention to it than genuine interest... But, the $$$ points to it growing so we'll see. Maybe I'm more of a skeptic w/ the rate at which recent boom in interest has happened.
 

It's not in English. I don't play Japanese music for my friends often, but when I do it's instrumental or with good English vocals because the minute they hear Japanese, I know 95% of them will stop listening. People want to understand what the song is about and you can't do that with Japanese music if it's all in Japanese. The vocals that are in English still have a distinctly Japanese quality to them, and that turns off a lot of native speakers. That leaves a very small group of people to make a big impression for everyone. Not a great way to start.
  Rock music is not mainstream in America right now. It's hip hop, pop, and r&b that runs the air waves. It's not a bad thing, but I find i digest these genres of music differently than I do rock and metal, and people that have not grown up with rock and metal may never have developed a taste for it. I've always heard that rock and metal is the closest thing to classical music in the modern era, and on the same note I don't find many people appreciate Bach and Mozart for what it is. It just doesn't "move them".
  Anime was considered taboo and nerdy up until recently, when now all of a sudden it became cool to watch Dragon ball Super and My Hero Academia and other big-name shounen. Anime and Japan are always seen as synonymous to the barely acquainted, so anime and rock music are also tied together by virtue of this rock music being from Japan. Stupid associations, but that's how it is. Considering just how bad a lot of anime themes are, I can see people associating the worst of J-pop themes with all Japanese music.
  Consider this 3.5, but the people that were first promoting the music were deep into the scene, like "appropriating parts of Japanese language and unironically dressing like a visual kei rocker" deep. They...did not make the best ambassadors for visual kei music. On the other side of the coin, the Japanese indie scene has always been a smaller group covering a wider range of music, cloistered and secluded on private servers and trackers. They wanted to preserve their culture the way it was, so they weren't exactly interested in proselytizing their music to a wider audience. Y'all gotta realize peeps like @CAT5are the exception to the rule.
  Japanese record companies in general do a pretty shit job of marketing themselves and their music to a wider audience, which is perplexing to me because the anime industry is absolutely KILLING IT right now. They jumped onto the digital distribution wave too late and by that time, the fad had already started diminishing. We have no equivalent to Crunchyroll to have a legal bridge between record companies and interested Western audiences. HearJapan was close, but in some ways I think it was too ahead of its time and never got the support it needed once everyone involved realized it wouldn't be a 1-2-3 smash hit.  
I always maintained that I would be a sensation or "the next Jimi Hendrix" if I took a bunch of my favorite J-Rock and visual kei songs and sung them in English...

Gackt was just one of three different singers Malice Mizer had, he had nothing to do with their breakup.
 
Never heard that rumor before; 100% started by a western fan who was pulling stuff out of her ass. Anyone with a musical ear can tell that Mana and Kozi had no hand in writing Gackt's solo material. Apples and Oranges.
 
Gackt was likely not at Kamis funeral for the reason listed in my reply below. 
 
 
I don't know what official statements Gackt, Mana, or Kozi have made because we don't really need to, ya know? None of them will tell you what occam's razor will, because it's not flattering to either party.
 
Nippon Columbia decided that Malice Mizer were small potatoes and Gackt was the star. And they were right! Gackt wrote the highest charting single on Mervilles, Le Ciel, which also happened to be the most commercial song on the album. Gackt had the great voice, incredible looks, a legion of female fans and he wrote the biggest hit on the album. He was poised for stardom, Malice Mizer could hold him back. 
 
So Nippon Columbia put their money on Gackt solo and ditched the band, and their gamble paid off in spades. People tend to gloss over/forget, possibly due to Kamis death, that not only did Malice Mizer's label give Gackt a solo deal, but they dropped Malice Mizer. That wasn't a coincidence.
 
It is what it is. I hate Gackt solo, but wouldn't trade Bara no Seidou or the Klaha singles for anything. I just wish we'd get one more album out of MM.... instrumental, with Klaha, a new singer... I don't care.

He doesn't want to be found. He's been working at the tire yard for almost a decade and has probably worked his way up to night foreman. He isn't about to throw all that away for the $263 cash infusion he'd receive by participating in a Malice Mizer reunion. 

I spent a month and a half hunting down the PV before youtube was a thing. Good memories....

Hm, it was Malice Mizer at first as I found out about them around... 2005 or 2006? Too bad they weren't active anymore back then ^^

Omg beast of blood was one of my first songs too. I showed some friends during computer class in lie 7th grade and I thought I was so cool. 

My first introduction to visual kei was in early 2004 by some friends in university. The first thing they showed me was Dir en Grey (Yokan, then Raison D'etre in quick succession XD), however my first favourite that I had to have EVERYTHING of was Miyavi. I'm pretty sure I have a complete physical discography of his up until 2009 sometime, actually XD Favourite song is probably the one that got me obsessed with him in the first place: Ashita, Genki ni Naare. First *band* that I loved that much was Kagrra,, and they remain my number one band to this day, with Urei being my favourite song of theirs.

Malice Mizer
 
I stumbled upon Bara no Seidō while searching for some goth bands on the internet. I can't remember but finding Malice Mizer may have been how I got into gothic lolita fashion as well. That happened at around the same time. Then I became more interested in visual kei as a whole and the rest is history.

Gackt was just one of three different singers Malice Mizer had, he had nothing to do with their breakup.
 
Never heard that rumor before; 100% started by a western fan who was pulling stuff out of her ass. Anyone with a musical ear can tell that Mana and Kozi had no hand in writing Gackt's solo material. Apples and Oranges.
 
Gackt was likely not at Kamis funeral for the reason listed in my reply below. 
 
 
I don't know what official statements Gackt, Mana, or Kozi have made because we don't really need to, ya know? None of them will tell you what occam's razor will, because it's not flattering to either party.
 
Nippon Columbia decided that Malice Mizer were small potatoes and Gackt was the star. And they were right! Gackt wrote the highest charting single on Mervilles, Le Ciel, which also happened to be the most commercial song on the album. Gackt had the great voice, incredible looks, a legion of female fans and he wrote the biggest hit on the album. He was poised for stardom, Malice Mizer could hold him back. 
 
So Nippon Columbia put their money on Gackt solo and ditched the band, and their gamble paid off in spades. People tend to gloss over/forget, possibly due to Kamis death, that not only did Malice Mizer's label give Gackt a solo deal, but they dropped Malice Mizer. That wasn't a coincidence.
 
It is what it is. I hate Gackt solo, but wouldn't trade Bara no Seidou or the Klaha singles for anything. I just wish we'd get one more album out of MM.... instrumental, with Klaha, a new singer... I don't care.

Gackt was just one of three different singers Malice Mizer had, he had nothing to do with their breakup.
 
Never heard that rumor before; 100% started by a western fan who was pulling stuff out of her ass. Anyone with a musical ear can tell that Mana and Kozi had no hand in writing Gackt's solo material. Apples and Oranges.
 
Gackt was likely not at Kamis funeral for the reason listed in my reply below. 
 
 
I don't know what official statements Gackt, Mana, or Kozi have made because we don't really need to, ya know? None of them will tell you what occam's razor will, because it's not flattering to either party.
 
Nippon Columbia decided that Malice Mizer were small potatoes and Gackt was the star. And they were right! Gackt wrote the highest charting single on Mervilles, Le Ciel, which also happened to be the most commercial song on the album. Gackt had the great voice, incredible looks, a legion of female fans and he wrote the biggest hit on the album. He was poised for stardom, Malice Mizer could hold him back. 
 
So Nippon Columbia put their money on Gackt solo and ditched the band, and their gamble paid off in spades. People tend to gloss over/forget, possibly due to Kamis death, that not only did Malice Mizer's label give Gackt a solo deal, but they dropped Malice Mizer. That wasn't a coincidence.
 
It is what it is. I hate Gackt solo, but wouldn't trade Bara no Seidou or the Klaha singles for anything. I just wish we'd get one more album out of MM.... instrumental, with Klaha, a new singer... I don't care.

Gackt was just one of three different singers Malice Mizer had, he had nothing to do with their breakup.
 
Never heard that rumor before; 100% started by a western fan who was pulling stuff out of her ass. Anyone with a musical ear can tell that Mana and Kozi had no hand in writing Gackt's solo material. Apples and Oranges.
 
Gackt was likely not at Kamis funeral for the reason listed in my reply below. 
 
 
I don't know what official statements Gackt, Mana, or Kozi have made because we don't really need to, ya know? None of them will tell you what occam's razor will, because it's not flattering to either party.
 
Nippon Columbia decided that Malice Mizer were small potatoes and Gackt was the star. And they were right! Gackt wrote the highest charting single on Mervilles, Le Ciel, which also happened to be the most commercial song on the album. Gackt had the great voice, incredible looks, a legion of female fans and he wrote the biggest hit on the album. He was poised for stardom, Malice Mizer could hold him back. 
 
So Nippon Columbia put their money on Gackt solo and ditched the band, and their gamble paid off in spades. People tend to gloss over/forget, possibly due to Kamis death, that not only did Malice Mizer's label give Gackt a solo deal, but they dropped Malice Mizer. That wasn't a coincidence.
 
It is what it is. I hate Gackt solo, but wouldn't trade Bara no Seidou or the Klaha singles for anything. I just wish we'd get one more album out of MM.... instrumental, with Klaha, a new singer... I don't care.

It bothers me that Malice Mizer has and probably will never reunite and make another album. I think they would have already had the financial prospects been attractive enough, but I've always believed money was the reason they broke up in the first place (too much overhead), and Mana is fine with doing M10M. Cheaper band to run and he keeps the lion's share of the money.
 
But I don't like M10M and Kozi's ZIZ band is awful. I wish Mana could talk Klaha into quitting his job at the car wash or whatever the hell he does these days and give it one more go. Yu~Ki is probably bartending or something, he can't get one night a week off to practice? Come on.
 
I'd also love a Die in Cries reunion but that won't happen because of D'erlanger.

Inoran can't sing for shit, but this performance still absolutely gives me chills. Incorrectly dated, this was years after Luna Sea broke up and no one was playing LS material solo. First time I saw this... man... let's just say it got me feelin' a certain kind of way. The roar of the crowd when they realize it's "Gravity" ... not a dry eye in the place. It was something special.