Komorebi

I think a lot of that feeling of people coming and going stems from the western boom years and like other people said, from the fact that it has somehow been hogtied into the same brain rot caravan with Kpop and therefore people tend to become aware of both simultaneously, allowing for lateral movement between the two. Then there's that other breed of us getting into our 30's finally coming to grips with mortality and that this is a very fruitless endeavor, so now there's also these existential crisis' going on with the older guard. This basically goes a long way to explain why everyone in this scene is so fucking stupid, you were either into a dumb fad when you got in or you were dumb enough to stay for too long. 
 
But like, about the psychology of people who come and go, being gya one day and rastafari the next — I never got that. I have, my entire life more or less, liked the same things and I never really dropped out of anything. There's some faux pas you'll find from the times when I was like exploring stuff like western metal when I was 16, but everyone goes through that one way or another when you build your frame of reference and refine your taste and ideas of what music should be about. The people who change every word in their bio on an yearly basis with only the words "I stan" remaining in place can't be counted on for anything. How do they even finish meals is beyond me let alone stick with something when everything they do is so dependent on if the weather is fair. They're the same people who'll abandon their folks into a home, but take a taxi from another city once the inheritance is on offer; just picking the carcass of cultural capital that other people worked for, that other people laboured to put out there. I'm in this shit for the long haul and this relationship will end only when one of us dies, either me or the scene. No matter how reprehensible I think the scene operates or what I think of the fucking people in it, it's still important to me. 

This has already been kinda touched upon earlier ITT, but one thing I've noticed within the VK fandom more than within basically ANY of the other music spheres I've dipped my toes into is that a ton of people who get into VK seem to act as if the only bands that exist are the ones that are currently active, and any group that's disbanded/on hiatus/whatever just vanishes into oblivion as soon as the new looks and singles stop popping up. There's this tendency for people to basically treat the scene the same way tons of anime fans treat anime - "if it's not part of the current season then i pretend not to see it". Considering the ridiculous turnover rate that most VK bands themselves tend to have, this can easily lead to situations where people suddenly find themselves left without their faves even within the span of just months. 

I think one of the reasons VK might have such a high turn over rate is that a lot of people who listen to VK seems to listen to VK only. That's not an healthy way to approach an "hobby", and one is bound to get tired of it. It's also hard to follow bands for a long time since the lifespan of a vk band is shorter than average, so that might be turn off for people after a while. 
 
Also the way VK is "marketed" is closer to idol music than it is to """normal""" music, and just like how people stop following idols at some point, the same happens with VK. I dont consider the visual kei > kpop passage to be moving from one thing to another, but moving to a different version of the same thing. 

Maria Cross is probably Monochrome Heaven's guilty pleasure XD

Ryou from Luna Sea singing 'prick-ed' instead of 'pricked' in Rosier.
 
I love the song but it bugs me way too much.

The world is in a precarious state right now, and If shit were to truly hit the fan, all these ideologies and beliefs that people are so deeply invested would no longer matter. What is your political identity gonna do for you when it's a famine and niggas is literally beating down your door trying to take your food cuz they're starving (and don't care if they have to take you out in order to do so)? What is feminism gonna do for you if the world literally descends into an actual rape-culture and you don't have any real men around to protect you?  What are your thoughts on race gonna matter if it's life or death and you have to depend on people that don't look like you?
 
I think about shit like this because it's frightening how detached we are from reality. I mean, if people can't even deal with dissenting opinions online, I fear for how mentally and spiritually equipped these ppl will be if shit get real out here. It's like ppl have built their entire lives and identities around computer programs, not realizing that the computer itself could one day lose power, crash, or simply be turned off.

The most scrutiny they faced was self-induced when they made a diss-track ...

lynch. stans on twitter are calling me a racist because I, a latina actually living in South America, dared complain about my own culture’s shenanigans and used a slur to describe an attitude. Sorry if me calling out latino immigrants committing tax fraud strikes you as racist but last time I checked, I can actually talk about MY OWN CULTURE however I want without a white SJW policing me on how to do it. 
Also, fwy cultic, I’m nowhere near thirty, I’m in my mid 20’s and if I have trouble socializing it’s because I’m fucking autistic, not because I‘m “a racist bitch”. Come to me directly next time y’all have an issue with me instead of talking behind my back.

lynch. stans on twitter are calling me a racist because I, a latina actually living in South America, dared complain about my own culture’s shenanigans and used a slur to describe an attitude. Sorry if me calling out latino immigrants committing tax fraud strikes you as racist but last time I checked, I can actually talk about MY OWN CULTURE however I want without a white SJW policing me on how to do it. 
Also, fwy cultic, I’m nowhere near thirty, I’m in my mid 20’s and if I have trouble socializing it’s because I’m fucking autistic, not because I‘m “a racist bitch”. Come to me directly next time y’all have an issue with me instead of talking behind my back.

I feel you 100% on this. As an African Descendant of Slavery, I've experienced similar situations. Who would be more qualified to speak on a culture than someone who's already fully immersed in it? I hate when I see these non-"black" SJW types parading around as "allies", when over half of these muhfukkas don't even truly fuck with "black" ppl like that. Most of these ppl don't even want to live around "black" folk, which tells you how they REALLY feel about us. And a lot of these SJW-types champion ideologies that are harmful and destructive to "black" ppl in general.
 
But yeah, I wouldn't even sweat those people. They're more interested in policing the thoughts and actions of others than their own. They wanna change the world by changing other ppl instead of just being the change they want to see. It's ass-backwards...

lynch. stans on twitter are calling me a racist because I, a latina actually living in South America, dared complain about my own culture’s shenanigans and used a slur to describe an attitude. Sorry if me calling out latino immigrants committing tax fraud strikes you as racist but last time I checked, I can actually talk about MY OWN CULTURE however I want without a white SJW policing me on how to do it. 
Also, fwy cultic, I’m nowhere near thirty, I’m in my mid 20’s and if I have trouble socializing it’s because I’m fucking autistic, not because I‘m “a racist bitch”. Come to me directly next time y’all have an issue with me instead of talking behind my back.

I’ve experienced that in VK twitter. 

I’ve experienced that in VK twitter. 

Can confirm. They're one of the best live bands I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot. RIcko is always on key, they have such good chemistry with each other and their energy is always on point.

I feel this way about Kizu. Lime is heavily involved in the whole creative process but you can still tell they are being produced a certain way.

I covered this pretty much in the bad bandmen topic as someone who is actually in the scene here but: 
 
Ghostwriting has been going on in vk since the 90s but is now much much more prevalent. 
 
A good sign that a band is using a ghostwriter is that they do not gradually grow in production and songwriting but suddenly have fully produced looks and releases under a label. 
 
The music industry is a cut throat business, even more so in this age, so one can understand why the labels choose a mechanism that produces money(making bands pay for ghostwriter and costumes from the start means even if they do not sell you get the money plus rights. ) 
 
In the past you could have the pop music support risks in underground music, watusi from coldfeet taught me that was the normal in Japan. Big labels would basically say "do whatever you want, we have a budget from the pop sales" but now that is non existent. 
 
It is a case of do not hate the player but hate the game. While I hate fake produced crap I understand it helps prop the scene up until hopefully there is a mass revival amongst all the plastic stuff. 
 
If you enjoy a band, even if they use a ghostwriter that is not bad, life is too short, get any enjoyment you can. 
But make sure to support the real underground stuff, even if foreign fan support is 1% of what a band gets. 
 
You would honestly be surprised by some of the bands using ghostwriters, I am here and have been shocked honestly. But I love VK so much to have dedicated my life to it, even if some elitist views are uncomfortable to you f@ck it, just listen to what you want to, but realize the scene is full of lots of bands not making their own stuff. 

I feel this way about Kizu. Lime is heavily involved in the whole creative process but you can still tell they are being produced a certain way.

I'm far from an old hand in the fandom but I think I know what you're getting at. I’m actually gonna invert the question order because my thought process caused 2 to lead to 1:
 
2) From my perspective, Idol Kei is made up of Kawaii af Oshare Kei bands that don’t have a special sound to them and sound like they could’ve been mass-produced.  They're really successful despite being run of the mill and may just be industry plants. I don’t want to name names because it's just conjecture and they could be innocent. One of the biggest indicators, to me, is a lack of previous band history, i.e this is either their first or second band they’ve been a part of. It’s usually never more. It’s especially telling if they never had some dumbass high school garage band that was… Well, doing something. Or in the rare exceptions like Lunacy, showing some real promise and raw talent that just needs to be polished up. Tangent note, I’ve noticed in the VK fandom that we’re anal af about listing out a member’s previous band history. I’ve seen people write out band histories that span like 10 different bands for each member in forums and comments sections. Could this be a by-product of wanting to see the artistic process and evolution, or to check for industry plants? Well, that’s just conjecture...
 
1) That leads me to here. Stuff that makes me think, “Huh, is a debut band like this really making stuff that sounds this polished already? And damn, they kinda sound just like [some other band that sounds generic]” makes me wonder if they really did write it. One big indicator that a band isn’t ghostwritten is when the band members have a history that I can follow around. When I follow that history, I can usually find patterns in songwriting that trace to one member. Such as a love for that new wave sound he grew up with as a teen or a jazz influence from his formal lessons. Also, artistic evolution is a big indicator of a band being 100% "real", if you will, such as incorporating different genre elements as time goes by or being able to hear their music evolve as the members gain more experience with writing and performing songs.
 
3) That’s… Tricky. I’d go back as far as the early 2000s when An cafe existed, but were they really that manufactured? Maybe later then, but then I wouldn’t really know what year exactly. The jury’s out on this one 

4) As biased as I am to old school stuff and underground stuff that sounds like it was recorded on the vocalist’s bootleg Chinese Yak-Bak, I still listen to new school stuff, occasionally even bands that I think could be ghost written. It's cute and danceable, and it's usually written competently so it's not technically bad. Besides, sometimes I just need a break from the concept pieces and experimental songs from angura bands I love, ya know? Nothing wrong with that.
 
5) Every genre and scene deals with ghostwriting, even ones where literally all you write are the lyrics (big lol @ rap ghostwriting considering that in this day and age you can just read the writing on the wi-fi router and slap a trap beat over it to make a hit), I think VK won’t be negatively impacted by this by too much. Besides, it's not like these sickeningly saccharine sweet boy groups claim to be high art or some shit. There’s so much more that could seriously shoot VK in the foot, like continuing cute but ancient industry practices until the whole damn industry collapses.
 
6) I listen to lots more than just Visual Kei, but it’s still my #1 ever since I discovered it a few years ago. I wrote a long-ass paragraph on this in another thread but here’s a TL;DR:
- Jrock chords, baby, I want that shit injected into my bloodstream. They are actually really different from the Western pop chords. I’m no music major so I’ll spare you the half-assed music theory lesson and simply compare them in layman’s terms. Jrock chords are like a “question and answer” type of progression that resolves itself in an intrinsically… pleasant manner? It provides the question to the answer, simply. Western pop is like a “whole statement” type of progression, it’s meant to add more statements on to it.
- I love the looks a lot, they make the PVs so much more fun to watch! VK to me is more than looking pretty, it’s about expressing the meaning of the music through the use of visuals, using it as a compliment to the lyrics or even just with the actual song structure.
- I like how the lyrics are so much more subtle than in English. I know that it's a by-product of how Japanese is as a language when compared to English, but even still, I'm gonna argue this one because I have translated songs (mostly in my head these days) before and their subtle meanings don't get completely lost in translation, the thought process still stays intact in English. It’s actually kind of ruined English songs for me in all honesty because now many sound like “Hurr-Durr, I have to actually tell you how to feel about what I just said instead of letting you interpret it or understand the implications”. I could go on a rant about this shit. But let’s just say an English artist would say “I killed myself then everyone was sad” and a Japanese artist would say “[I was] erased from this earth, a fact that your tears tried to blur out”. I understand that being vague is upsetting to some but I feel like spelling it out so bluntly like so many western artists do is insulting to the listener’s intelligence. Or at least my intelligence…

1) Not like there's proof in VK, but the speed at which some bands pump out releases and the repetition/overuse of riffs and other elements can be a sign of ghostwriting. Also, when you see kids in the scene who aren't that good playing on stage yet are credited for what they play makes me wonder if they really did write it.
 
2) I think the whole scene is idol kei now. The way bands are put together, managed and marketed is very idol-ish. I'd say VK bands that are less "idol" would be those who put out releases less often, don't focus their sales on cheki and spend more time touring than doing fan-meet events.
 
3) When was the first instore? Not sure when VK evolved into what it is today, but I'm sure it was a while ago.
 
4) What is good music? I think there is good music and bad music in VK, just like in any other genre. And personal enjoyment does not atone for quality. I may not enjoy Morrie, Sukekiyo or Kiyoharu's works, but it is undeniably good music. Whereas I may like a lot of indie artists I consider to be musically mediocre. All in all, if I didn't enjoy VK I wouldn't be here.
 
5) VK does not rely that heavily on the music genre to survive. As long as there's scantly dressed pretty men wooing teen fans into spending their yen, the "well-being" of the scene is preserved. As overseas fans, we focus mainly on the music, because it is really all we can focus on, out of all VK has to offer as a scene. In Japan it is slightly different. You could enjoy the social experience, the fan events, the fashionable aspect, idk.
 
6) Because I have shitty music taste? LOL. I can't remember how I even got so hooked on this scene. It gives me versatility in a way many western rock artists don't. Bands don't always stick to a genre and blend a lot of styles to find their own. I don't know much about music theory but I know Japan uses a distinct... scale? for writing their music and I find it pleasant to my ears. I also tend to focus  a lot on bass and vocals. For the first, I've found more interesting bass-lines in Japan than overseas, where it tends to be a filler instrument. And for the latter... Have you seen those "sounds just like Ruki" comments on various YouTube videos? Well, they do, because Japanese men tend to have a similar vocal range that just happens to tickle my fancy. There's also the thing that with Japanese I can easily ignore corny lyrics because I simply do not fully understand them. I don't look them up either, I can live without knowing if I'm being insulted.
I come from the pop/rock scene, never really went through a western punk/metal phase in my teens year. I grew on 80's rock and 90's pop and I got used to catchy sounds accompanied by guitars, and it's what I look for in VK; poppy choruses with clean vocals and harsh instrumentals + lyrics I don't have to feel embarrassed about. Something that western metal and pop often fail to give me. The visuals aren't really that important to me, since I never watch PVs, but the androgynous beauty pleases me a lot when I do want to watch it tbh. As a big plus, I greatly enjoy the whole VK culture in Japan. I gotta say I love going to a small gig without being pushed around by huge dudes or drowning in the stench of weed and going to instore events and such.

lossless is preferred as i will never have to look for a higher lossy rip anymore.

I don't know if I agree with this statement. The "near-silent" breakdown has existed for a while and most recently dexcore. has done it in a couple songs, especially in their latest single, Dragout.

those signatures on the shirt look like cumstains

I already got our copies  I had a japanese address to send it to. 

Hi Monochromians~
 
I’ll be parting with quite a few items that need a new home asap
 
Distray - Fare Well: $5
Holyclock - Shinshokusareru tsuki kuro ni nijimu 218byoukan $7
Holyclock - Kuuhaku no Zankyou, 210-byoukan ga Tsumugu Kyogi no Hikari $5
Holyclock - Shinshou AQUARIUM-Shuuen no Wa ni Zanryuusuru Sunadokei- $12
Holyclock - Doukei to Renbin no Ryuuseigun $7

Kagrra, - Rin $10
Kagrra, - Omou $10
Kagrra, - Tsuki ni murakumo B $10
Kagrra, - Utakata A $12
Kagrra, - Utakata B $12
Shiki project album type B $40
 
SAVAGE - Kaibou FilmMini-album $15
SAVAGE - Mosaic $8
SAVAGE - Reiketsu na Komoriuta - Batsuban $10
SAVAGE - Reiketsu na Komoriuta - Tsumiban $10
SAVAGE - Watashi wa Kowareta Hi A $10
SAVAGE - Watashi wa Kowareta Hi B $10
SAVAGE - Tokumei san no Kubiwa $12
SAVAGE - Morphine $20
 
Do As Infinity - Do The Live CD: $12
Do As Infinity - Final live CD: $12 (the case is in bad condition but the 3 CDs are impeccable)
Do As Infinity - Need Your Love (w/DVD) $20
Do As Infinity - Eternal Flame (w/DVD) $20
Do As Infinity - Eight (w/DVD) $20
Do As Infinity - Do the A Side (w/DVD) $25
Do As Infinity - Infinity 1 $5
Do as Infinity - Alive/Iron Hornet $5
Do As Infinity - Dive At It 2014 DVD + bluray + live CD $30
 
JILUKA - Metamorphose type B $20
JILUKA - Brave Antagonistic Letters Under Segregation $18
JILULA - Xtopia B $27
 
MORRIGAN - Necro $18
MORRIGAN - Moshimo Kuroi Tsubasa ga Hanaetara A $8
MORRIGAN - Pandora $30
MORRIGAN - Corpse Reviver $25
MORRIGAN - Black Russian $20
MORRIGAN - The Dawn Deep Dope $40
MORRIGAN - XISS $35
 
D - New Blood ~second impact~ $15
D - Huang Di ~yami ni umareta mukui~ B $15
D - Vampire Chronicle A $25
D - Mayutsuki no Hitsugi A $12
D - Mayutsuki no Hitsugi B $12
D - Mayutsuki no Hitsugi C $12
D - Yume Narishi Kuchu Teien $12
D - Mahiru no Koe ~synchronicity~ A $12
D - Mahiru no Koe ~synchronicity~ B $10
D - Shiroi Yoru $15
D - Yami yori kurai dokoku no acapella to bara yori akai jounetsu no aria A $12
D - Taiyou no Okuru Hi A $12
D - Ultimate Lovers  first press $12
D - Dearest You A $12
D - Dearest You B $8
D - Ouka Saki Some ni Keri A $12
D - Ouka Saki Some ni Keri B $8
D - Schwarszchild A $12
D - Schwarszchild B $8
D - Birth B $7
D - Birth C $7
D - Yami no Kuni no Alice C $8
D - Tightrope A $12
D - Tightrope C $7
D - Day by Day A $12
D - Day by Day C $7
D - Akaki Hitsuji ni Yoru Bansankai A $12
D - Akaki Hitsuji ni Yoru Bansankai B $12
D - Akaki Hitsuji ni Yoru Bansankai C $7
D - In the name of Justice B $12
D - In the name of Justice C $7
D - Dying Message A $12
D - Dying Message B $12 
D - Dying Message C $7
D - Danzai no Gunner A $12
D - Danzai no Gunner C $7
D - Bon Voyage! $15
D - Rosenstrauss A $12
D - Rosenstrauss B $10
D - Dark Wings A $12
D - Dark Wings C $8
D - Dark Wings D $5
D - Tsuki no Sakazuki A $12
D - Tsuki no Sakazuki B $10
D - Tsuki no Sakazuki C $7
D - Tsuki no Sakazuki D $5
D - Happy Unbirthday C $7
D - Happy Unbirthday D $5
D - Dark Fairy Tale C $7
D - Dark Fairy Tale D $5
 
Ruiza - Amenity Gain $12
Ruiza - Abyss $12
Ruiza - One A $15
Ruiza - One B $12
Asagi - Seventh Sense A $12
Asagi - Seventh Sense D $8
Asagi - Live DVD $35
Dying Message Oddisey $20
Rosenstrauss Documentary $20
 
I also have a bunch of cheki for sale (D, JILUKA and MORRIGAN, mainly), I can send photos if anyone is interested.
I have several D photosets (very old ones) and merch like tote bags and accessories.