helcchi

Yeah, now he looks and sounds like Kyo's middle brother acting like an idiot to get attention. 

Hello...this is edgelord EMMNY herself...reporting to you live from some MESS
the main question is whether you think that it'd be possible to effectively crowdfund an indies band and or organize gofundme projects for their fav bands. the context behind this is a (now cancelled) fundraiser set up for doguramagura in which the organizer would be approaching people to donate to their alleged upcoming studio expenses as they'd require 1000 dollars (if im not mistaken) before the 25th or else (for what, i don't know).
the issue here is that there's no way any donor would know exactly where the money would be going, especially considering this is a band with a lead vocalist/porn star so mentally unstable he makes akane look like a saint (sound off in the comments with receipts ladies cuz its messy). this band's awful reputation aside, i can't see any of this as ethical considering the nature of the indies scene. ignoring how poorly this was done/planned, i think this could actually work in direct co-operation with the band where they'd outline their expenses and ask for financial help from foreigner fans. they could even offer perks for helping, like cheki or handwritten notes or even ensuring an exclusive press of a CD for crowdfunders (assuming the band is entirely self produced). 1k for studio expenses seems off but like, if a trash indiefag band got $45 bucks in one day, then i dont see why more popular and reputable indie bands can't benefit.
i want to know if you'd think crowdmitsu i mean crowd funding your fav's studio/live/etc expenses is a good idea. sound off in the comments, i found this really interesting!!
 
(drama aside with spoilers, not relevant to situation)
 

HOW did you predict this is exactly what's going to happen this summer???
 
 

*prayer circle around Mucc*

And Budokan would finally be used for its original purpose xD
 
I always imagine bands literally battling each other whenever I see "vs" in a tour title .
I hope DIR EN GREY vs PIERROT's photoshoot will look like this:

 

And Budokan would finally be used for its original purpose xD
 
I always imagine bands literally battling each other whenever I see "vs" in a tour title .
I hope DIR EN GREY vs PIERROT's photoshoot will look like this:

 

And Budokan would finally be used for its original purpose xD
 
I always imagine bands literally battling each other whenever I see "vs" in a tour title .
I hope DIR EN GREY vs PIERROT's photoshoot will look like this:

 

And Budokan would finally be used for its original purpose xD
 
I always imagine bands literally battling each other whenever I see "vs" in a tour title .
I hope DIR EN GREY vs PIERROT's photoshoot will look like this:

 

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.
 
 

tbh, VK has already hit that all time low in the 90s. It's popularity in Japan is debatable. As many others have noted, VK isn't totally obscure there (though I guess it has a bad rep, so many people wouldn't ever admit to like it) but not really as popular as it was. And no, I don't think Visual kei was always as niche as it is now in Japan. Back in the old times when VK wasn't such a widely used label bands of that caliber used to fill stadiums and had regular TV and radio exposure. There's a reason why some describe the early 90s as the band explosion era, particularity in regards to the Nagoya rock music scene.
 
But yeah, those days are long gone. hell, most of us gaijin folks have no real clue about it, since the time we got introduced to Vk it was already old hat in Japan. You had to be there for yourself in the early 90s to really see and feel it – but how many foreigners, save for a few, had the privilege and luck? When bands like Luna Sea started to kick off and Malice Mizer rose to fame I was in friggin' kindergarten. Sure, I like to diss the modern scene a lot (because I simply don't like the type of music the bands are playing now), but even I know that I am not a special snowflake and a "trvuer" fan.
 
But to get back to the core of the thread: it's true that in the west VK has lost attention and Fans. people in this thread have offered enough explanations and hypotheses for it's fade in popularity. I am just here to give my two cents on the extinction of the local VK scene in my country (if you can even call it that way):
 
As with others, it all started in the early 00s with the Manga and Anime boom. I really doubt any one in Austria and Germany could have known about VK without either moving to Japan, getting introduced to it via websites and communities specializing in Glam- or Japanese rock or Anime/Manga. Most of us peeps were too young and too poor to go to Japan and most of us had no internet at home. So that leaves us with Manga and Anime. I remember I used to buy these Anime magazines of which there were plenty on the market and many of these papers tried to market japanese culture to us impressionable youths. So they had lots of articles about japanese food, society and of course music. 
 
And some might also remember that Neo Tokyo's (a japanese Manga store in Germany) founded their music publishing label (?) Gan-Shin, which brought to us some of Dir en grey's discography. Only shortly after (or before? I don't remember that well) they started playing in Germany. And as stated before in this thread, due to the Anime fad being so closely related to the J-Pop and VK boom many Manga/Anime Conventions went a great deal to get some bands, including bloody the Gazette, to play at their conventions. And it was a self fullfilling cycle that simply worked: people got to japanese music via Anime and Japan culture based media, they participated in local communities; these were lured to leave their money at the conventions and these in turn invited bands to play to bring in the fans.
 
Then there were online communities like Animexx, where we weebs gathered en masse and talked about our bandomen all day and night, spent all our time drawing and writing shitty slash fanfics and Mangas. It was like paradise. But yeah, around 2009 the German and Austrian scene started to crumble like an old ruin. Suddenly all the people crazy about Moi dix Mois (of which there were MANY here. They even called it a "Manamania") switched from VK to JPop and what they deemed "more sophisticated" music. They also sold all their previously well treasured Moi-Même-Moitié dresses and Sexpot Revenge clothes to go either "normie" or "gyaru". I noticed weblogs of people who loved VK previously popping up with lamentations about how stupid they were for liking it, that it was just a phase and that VK is actually really dumb and shitty.
 
And of course there was also the huge amount of people bickering about how the post 2009s scene wasn't as good. Tbh I can kinda related to it, because in that timespan I also stopped giving shit about newer bands. But I still like to listen to my oldies. Many others for whom it was really just a short fad, stopped caring about it entirely. 
 
Indeed, Social media and the way we consume media and music today, compared to ten years ago, factor in this as well. But the once really big German-speaking scenes, which were infamous enough to be featured regularly in sensationalist  TV formats and press, already died before all these changes could have affected the decline of interest in VK. The truth is simply that liking Visual kei was a fad and it's success in the western world a short-lived hype. Most people have since moved on or hopped on the newest trendwagon.
 
And if I am honest: I do not miss it. I think it's just fine if VK stays obscure. I have moved on and no longer care about old skewl VK being dead. As already said, many music scenes have died and never came back, and that's a fate you have to accept . Though I disagree with the notion that the current goth revival is so bad. It's not the same as the 80s, sure, but it has some fun and redeeming qualities and it's not mainstream. So, if it comes back, it will probably never reach it's former glory. And that's okay too.  A friend of mine also once said that certain eras of VK needed a certain Zeitgeist. And that Zeitgeist is just strongly tied to that specific era. If that era is over than the atmosphere that made it special in the first place is gone too. Hence some of those old music styles no longer work outside the context of so called retromania. Of course, VK has the benefit of being a patchwork genre, it can and has to adapt to survive and it will probably carry on existing in some way (or will influence something else that exists in the future). But it will never be the VK we used to fall in love when we discovered it (and that counts for all eras).
 
I also do not think I ever want the local VK scene being as big again, because I remember that it was mostly a large collection of the most immature, hysterical and downright creepy individuals I have ever seen. Some of these self-called "Visus" looked cool, but were really uncomfortable to surround you with.

i hope when the countdown hits 0 they're gonna add akinori's face in the background in the style of this:

 
 

what if ryo joins them? At least he knows how to play violin significantly better than hazuki...
 
he should be able to play 5-string bass, right?

because sometimes technical proficiency isn't the most important reason, and definitely isn't the only reason, why people listen to the music they listen to and fall in love with the bands they fall in love with. this thing we call "taste" is nothing but an amorphous placeholder for an incredibly complex web of factors including instincts and temperament, environmental and psychological factors, linguistic/cultural affiliations, etc. that no amount of theoretical analysis can ever hope to untangle. even in the extremely rare instance that you can find another person who agrees with you on every single point you make about a band both of you mutually enjoy, i'm willing to bet that the basis for your value judgments about the band will still diverge, simply because, if nothing else, you are two different people.
 
if i'm to push this even further: many people seem to think that 'technical proficiency' is a clear-cut term that requires no further explication. that's far from true. while it's the case that fans would be deeply relieved to find their favorite singers hitting the notes they're supposed to hit and their guitarists executing their tremolos and harmonics competently, it's too easy to name instances where artists who do things generally not recognized as 'proficient' actually making a difference. the pianist claudio arrau, when he was still alive, was constantly ridiculed by musicologists and critics for how slowly he plays his beethoven sonatas (check out his "walden" for starters), but he's now posthumously credited with reading beethoven insightfully with an introspection no beethoven specialist had possessed. likewise, in the realm of art, when henri matisse became bound to his wheelchair in the later part of his life and could no longer hold a paintbrush, he began making 'cut-outs' as art (hardly the pinnacle of artistic virtuosity, you would think...), yet on hindsight his technique directly spawned at least three different art movements in the mid-late 20th century. so if there isn't even a ahistorical standard of what qualifies as 'technical proficiency' in the realm of high art where you'd think experts would have come to some sort of agreement after centuries of bickering debate, attempting to hold it up as some governing authority that ought to adjudicate people's tastes in popular music seems to me rather presumptuous.
 
but to quote you again:
 
 
and with this you basically just answered your own question. even though music traverses linguistic boundaries, its cultural influences remain unique. musically that's definitely the case (just look at how prevalent the major 7th chord is in japanese pop, compared to western pop). then there's the issue of language that comes into play. it would take a separate long post for me to defend why some people find lyrics to be important, but suffice to say, a song by definition has words, so unless we are going to pretend that all songs are operatic arias in disguise, it's only to be expected that some prefer how meaning is communicated in one language to another (which again has to do with a whole bunch of linguistic features: syntax, structure of address, sociopragmatics, and so on). you might not find the words in the song to be particularly important to your enjoyment of the music (and ofc there's no reason why you should), but it shouldn't be alarming that there are people who attend to that aspect of the song because it's important to them. there's also the phonetic aspect that some people above have already mentioned.
 

For me personally aside from otherwise "relaxing" flow and other phonetic mumblejumble it was also about unorthodox vocal-arrangement combinations in otherwise rather casual genres (who would think that fitting baritone/nasal-ish vox with symphonic/power metal would work well as a case in point?) AND allow me to recap myself:
 
 
(Carm's note: you gotta thank folks like Beatles and earlier black Jazz musician figures for playing around with this progression - as we speak, gospel music often plays around with same chording ideas, funny huh?)
 
Skip the intro and check the ending - there's a huge pool of subtopics related to this subject Friedman was discussing what I would call "Japanese progression". Not saying this would be literally EVERYWHERE (e.g. my standom for Pura merely started out from Britpop fanboying and affinity for special phonetic stuff) but I could honestly say nowadays that this pretty much separates my "palatable japanese taste" from "palatable western (my culture) taste".
 
 
Speaking of some western figures usually slamming us into "deluded, closed-minded listeners" because of such affinity - lemme counter this with my own take: Japanese way of conveying otherwise "western" genres helped me to look and keep my *EAR* on nuances I usually either missed or never paid attention to in otherwise very "familiar, palatable" english/mother tongue-based music.  But then again, that is if you allow yourself to evolve with your tastes per se (whether you "progress" in your taste or not is not dependent on whether you represent the "weeb" culture or otherwise "palatable" culture). I could go on and on about this variety of examples that reformed my musical aficionado self into more "curious" one but that would be just pure thread derailing.
 
So to summarize in a bit more coherent way, two things: 1) "unorthodox, yet oddly palatable" approach in regards to flow, pop songwriting 2) "Same, familiar basis but different interpretation and nuances". I might express my thoughts rather oddly as some may point it out but I am hands down sure at least some "matured " (not to belittle younger generations ofc) J-music listeners get what I am saying...
 
 

One thing connected to this whole language bias-based hypocrisy business I always thought to be funny is when people are like, SUPER insistent that they listen to Japanese music because they think 'the lyrics are deep'. I'll be up front by saying that IMO listening to music solely because of the lyrics is already kind of ??? in general, but this situation remains funny to me regardless.
I guess it's mostly amusing because, quite often, the people exclaiming that kind of stuff don't even speak a single lick of Japanese outside of entry-level anime vocabulary and pretty much almost entirely base their opinions on translations that have most likely been done by some college student who's two or three months into their Japanese Culture BA sitting with a thesaurus on their lap in order to find the longest and fanciest words possible in order to translate their aidoru's "wooooooow i dont wanna go to bed at 9 pm mom im 12 now"-tier lyrics because only they truly understand their poetry

inb4 Ryu stays on as Scapegoat's second vocalist
(i'd be totally down for this)

They're dressed by DRESS en DORIS who also designed all the Starwave costumes, so that might explain the similarities in their looks

A few of last year's looks and releases
THE BLACK SWAN

 
RIBELIO

 
Balalaika

 
DADAROMA

 
FAR EAST DIZAIN

 
Zonbi

 
SCAPEGOAT

 
 

Some background info on what I'm working on for my final project. 
Everything is still not textured   but I'm working on it 
 

 
 
- Witch's Beach Hut - 
 
Some assets from the house
 
 
 
Sappho (The witch)
 
 
Sappho's selkie girlfriend
 

A few of last year's looks and releases
THE BLACK SWAN

 
RIBELIO

 
Balalaika

 
DADAROMA

 
FAR EAST DIZAIN

 
Zonbi

 
SCAPEGOAT

 
 

A few of last year's looks and releases
THE BLACK SWAN

 
RIBELIO

 
Balalaika

 
DADAROMA

 
FAR EAST DIZAIN

 
Zonbi

 
SCAPEGOAT

 
 

rip kusokei icons
avanchick had a shit reputation among...pretty much everyone involved in the scene lol so i don't think noah will join a new band. if anything he'll go solo, he's too good at doing what he does, plagarizing the gazette I MEAN writing catchy af vk songs and his blind girls (what an ironic fan name LMFAO) will follow him regardless.
that dude from cindykate needs to make a new band and debut it on that other guy from cindykate's label so he stops flopping. rei should join him, the bassist's good too. idc about the drummer he can go n get a real job
 
i liked avanchick (from a distance) and i hope their new band (sounding like noah minus noah) goes big

Kisaki Project feat. Noah lol