zaa_zaa

http://www.oricon.co.jp/prof/308996/rank/album/ - mucc 
http://www.oricon.co.jp/prof/263818/rank/album/ - miyavi
 
fart bird sold worse than galyuu on psc back in 2003;
mucc might be doing a little better touring wise now that they're on a major label, 
I have no idea if there's a quick and easy way to check their recent attendance and shit.
 
myv did that angelina movie thing though, it probably paid him more than his entire songing career to date, including the random rakuten CM composing credits.

Penicillin is the biggest one that comes to mind, since they were god-tier in 1999 and now hit 5~10k sales at best. Don't get me wrong, that's still better than like 95% of the scene, but comparatively it's a stark contrast.

Regarding them being unknown - according to vkdb they've been around since 1999.
 
The first PV that I noticed is from 2009.

So yeah, U = unpopular. Kinda sad, tho.

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.

& a national tour for June/July including a bunch of prefectures they haven't been to before (or at least haven't been going to in recent memory). interesting. probably have some costs to recoup after those free shows + their two months off. none of the venue sizes are really a downgrade for them except maybe? Fukuoka and Sapporo?? so it'll be interesting to see how the venues fill out post-AK.

idt a normie officejerb sarariman will hold his position for much longer in the unfortunate event of getting caught with meth or weed.
 
~antisocial behavior~ consequences probably have more to do w. major label's loss of face in media (jinkaku radio got cancelled swiftly after a relatively innocent snide comment on some aidoru hussie)
lynch. potentially would get away with akn's antics if they were signed to kenzi's independent label for example or even firewall div., but they'll get way less money from having a permanent indie career.
 
 
they downshifted from universal (that didn't help shit with their sales anyway) to firewall div/free-will first tho, and had two (?) more full albums before going on a break.

I love how the source HTML shows that they're still using a folder called "lynch2013" to store images four years later.

It's nothing but so proud to find this x) Just hacking  (Or just change the link of the countdown background image 2 days forward :p)




 

It'll be some random ex. vk bandmen with a pre-established obsessive fan girl following. 

I find glaring examples of this whenever it comes to kpop/krap. Honestly, many kpop fans will swear up and down that Western music is trash when so many of the groups and music producers say they are directly influenced from Western artists.... I also do not think the phonetic discussion has much validity in kpop either especially when so many of the verses and lyrics are English...
 
Like some mentioned earlier, it could just be some people just glorifying anything these countries produce...so general koreaboo/weeabooness and close-mindedness ensues.
 
But hey, to each their own.
 
Definitely loving this discussion. Personally, I guess I have a linguistic bias to J-music now, and my taste in Western bands has fallen off some. However, I don't think a language will bar me from enjoying a band fully. I am always open to recommendations from everywhere. I don't like limiting myself when it comes to music...I'm always looking for a new song that I'll get hooked to.
 
Cheers <3

Nyasagi - that's the reason why I wrote "hypocricy" with quotation marks and asked a question without claiming that my opinion is correct, and without insulting anyone.
 
We all can enjoy whatever we want, but the point I was making is that certain listeners of any genre sometimes tend to glorify what they listen to, when, objectively speaking, even from a technical side their favourites are mediocre. It's like me arguing that what I listen to is "good" music, whereas what you listen to is "bad" music.
 
And yes, I did hear some interesting perspectives here that I haven't thought about, such as a look at music from a perspective of pronounciation.
 
Regarding japanese bands having a specific sound - yes, I agree with you, but I assume one can make such a claim about almost any country's music, be it Russian, Portugese or whatever, since one has to look at traditional music and scales that were dominant in that country.

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...
 
 

Nyasagi - that's the reason why I wrote "hypocricy" with quotation marks and asked a question without claiming that my opinion is correct, and without insulting anyone.
 
We all can enjoy whatever we want, but the point I was making is that certain listeners of any genre sometimes tend to glorify what they listen to, when, objectively speaking, even from a technical side their favourites are mediocre. It's like me arguing that what I listen to is "good" music, whereas what you listen to is "bad" music.
 
And yes, I did hear some interesting perspectives here that I haven't thought about, such as a look at music from a perspective of pronounciation.
 
Regarding japanese bands having a specific sound - yes, I agree with you, but I assume one can make such a claim about almost any country's music, be it Russian, Portugese or whatever, since one has to look at traditional music and scales that were dominant in that country.

Few minutes ago zoisite posted to their twitter 2 previously unreleased photos of deadman! They also mentioned that they hadn't forgotten about the new photobook. The work is going so slow because of the huge number of photos. Moreover, they are going to add not only live photos to the book.

Let me start off with saying that I have listened to j-rock since 2009, and listen to plenty of other genres.
 
What I still can't kind of get my head around is actually with the introduction of more or less extreme sounding bands (for j-rock), such as Deviloof and Nocturnal Bloodlust, one might see plenty of examples of rejection of other bands from different countries, playing such type of music with more quality, or glorifying j-rock bands (I'm getting tired of seeing how genius Deviloof are, while they are, at best, mediocre at their focus genre, but with some good ideas).
 
I understand that there's some sort of confirmation bias at place, and willful ignorance, but I wonder if anyone noticed the same pattern.
 
Cheers.

This af.

I'm not denying the OP's observations about a certain bias some fans may have, but at the same time, I think a lot of people downplay the uniqueness of different languages themselves. When it comes down to it, it's extremely difficult to find bands singing in different languages that actually manage to "sound" like each other. Even if a German-language band existed that sounded, musically, exactly like THE NOVEMBERS or something, I highly doubt I'd ever enjoy listening to them as much as Japanese NOVEMBERS, just from a phonetic standpoint. And this is coming from someone who studies/teaches/otherwise loves German.

But there's all kinds of biases. There's fans that never go beyond English-language or Anglo/European music. There's Japanese music fans that don't dare touch VK, because it would ruin their cred. There's VK fans who put the blinders on to any other scene or country's music.

anyone a bit familiar with the stereotype of jrock listeners already know the answer: pure and simple obsession with anything that comes from Japan. Most of japanese vocalists sucks balls compared to their western genre equivalent (rap, vkei/rock, pop, indie...), and people care? no they don't. Several VK bands rehashes riffs/song structures from more sucessful western acts. people care? no, they still do not care. They just need a nippon tag and any problem suddenly doesn't matter.
 
and it is what it is, you are looking for common sense in a pool of unreasonable, fanatic people. better save your breath.
 
ps: Deviloof is terrible, jeeeesus
 
also, cheers!

Nokubura are fun! But I also like shitty emo/screamo, metalcore and nu-metal that totally kills my hipster-indie cred.
 
But yeah, I think it's a mixture of not having listened to enough music in general and some sort of superiority/inferiority (depends on how you look at it) complex with your own culture. Coming from a non English-speaking country, I had the same approach towards western music as a kid, thinking everything in my native language sucked and American/British bands were superior even though they did exactly the same genres as the bands I was refusing to listen to.

Is it possible to like both ... ? I love me some Deviloof and Nokubura, but also have been listening to far better deathcore/metalcore for over a decade now. 

i cant believe we finally got to the point where we can openly roast deviloof without being arrested by the shill police

hope you're prepared for the usual stale arguments of
i don't understand the language which means its better because western lyrics are usually bad!! glorious nihonjin make ongaku better than white devils something about not being mainstream  
 
also cheers