Arkady

Just what the hell is momma goth doing? She just made a killer comeback with Malice Mizer last year, and now opens a Youtube account to upload this... don't know how to name it.
 
Now I have less doubts over if it was the right decision for Közi and Yuuki to leave her alone...
 
Also, Seth is a really talented singer, what the hell is he doing joining this madness!!!

At this point idgaf about Dimlim as a band or Retsu, I’m in it for the telenovela realness. 

Also make sure your band name is easy to Google. Don’t make it one letter or a super common word like “Sugar”

Nazis.

ayabie line-ups from the 2nd one and onwards
 
heteronormativity
 
robe attire fad of 2019-2020

Yes those "Edgy face reveals"
I would say, just don't announce your new band until the day you gonna announce everything.
 
I also dislike like the "My age is secret", "It's secret in which previous bands I played"  kinda of crap shit.
 
 
 
But I don't mind the Engrish part.
Engrish is a known common thing in Japanese bands. not only visual bands are doing it.... no it's a daily thing in Japanese language anyway.  
Even if it's in the common language spoken in the Japanese way and written in Katakana, English is something which just flew in the language.
Only we Gaijins can often only hard get what that Japanese human is actually saying. 
Which remembers me of a Dragon ball song, which they sing "ANGEL ANGEL ANGEL" and I misunderstood it for ears as ENJEM ENJEM ENJEM 
So for me Engrish is simply amusing  Give me more of wrong English. Whenever they know what they are singing or not it's fun!
But I still must say, if a band decide to write a lyric in complete English; then please sit down with a English/Japanese speaker to form a bit of correct English sentences which you 100% understand the meaning off. But even so... It's fun to read such "not corrected google translated" lyrics. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

dressing up as girls x
 
in fact ban all forms of dressing up other than shironuri makeup & cool uniforms imo

No extra info except a 20 y.o. long certainty from within my pure heart and some small (or not so small) clues scattered in his projects (song lyrics etc.), plus bandomen members wishing him an happy birthday using a pretty unmistakable sequence of emoji.
I don't know, he doesn't really seems to care too much to hide it, even though he isn't out and proud to the public either. My (maybe limited) understanding is that he may be pretty much out with the people working in the field and prefer to withhold the information to the public for a cultural matter and because it's better for selling that romantic vampire boyfriend fantasy to japanese (and overseas) young ladies, but if the information would start to spread he wouldn't care very much.

Kaya's the only queer person in visual kei

I'm doing it. Not sue if question 4 is asking about my favorite artist or band tho. (I put both, just to be sure)

Hello everyone,
 
My name is Gamze, and I am a Master's degree student. I am writing my thesis on  Visual Kei (which I am also a fan of) and visual kei fans. I am currently carrying out an online questionnaire for my thesis about visual kei fandom and their SNS habits as well as fan event participation. The questionnaire is completely anonymous. I would really appreciate it if you participate in the questionnaire. You can access it here: https://forms.gle/BTFbwfn5b7Y8AfRv5
Thank you so much, and I am very sorry if I caused any disturbances. 

Dir en Grey have always been a point of contention for me. As a visual newbie, I was intimidated by their extreme aesthetics and sound, and it took me a while to come around to liking their early works since it’s basically an amalgamation of everything I already liked. This sort of distrust of their music has caused me to not really delve too much into their middle works. Sure, I’ve heard some of Arche, I sat through whatever their album from last year was called, and I dug Sukekiyo, but for whatever reason anything earlier than Marrow of a Bone hasn’t existed on digital platforms. Yesterday, this changed — three of their early ~ middle career releases were added to Spotify and now I have no excuses for ignoring them. As such, I was challenged to do a blind listening review by some veteran fans—partly for their amusement, partly because my musical opinions are highly sought after (citation needed). Here is my first listen review of the classic album Vulgar.
 
Let’s start with the album art. What am I looking at? Is it a bird? Are these disembodied arms in opera length gloves? Overcooked pork tenderloin? I’m really not sure. Sometimes art is like that — it makes you unsure, and that uncertainty makes you uncomfortable. Sometimes that discomfort makes you think, but then other times it makes you reject something and move on. I don’t want to give the band credit for being provocative. I’ve read a lot of Tumblr and have the arcane knowledge to confidently state that this artwork is actually from Disney’s Maleficent — it’s her horns after they got lopped off.
 
Audience KILLER LOOP: never a fan of when titles suddenly yell at me. It really makes me on edge, kind of like this song does. I’m really going into this blind and any departure from Gauze is going to be a real change for me. I guess this is alright, but maybe this style just needs to grow on me more. Let’s see how I hold up going further in…
 
 
THE IIID EMPIRE: not sure why they decided to make a Star Wars reference here, but to each their own. I suppose this is the hard-hitting style that people have grown to love from this band. The guitar riff slightly after the middle of the song is super cool — in spite of all of the shit I give this band, sometimes they really do have neat ideas.
 
INCREASE BLUE: Again with the yelling of the song titles. Reminds me of the graphic design class I needed to take, with my teacher looming over me. My composition was too warmly colored, so she yelled to me from across the classroom “increase blue.” I took her advice and then she docked me points for it anyway. “Too much blue.” Fuck me.
 
 
Shokubeni: Apparently this means “red food coloring.” I bet the lyrics have something to do with bloody food or chopping up someone’s girlfriend. This band seems big on that and it’s kind of off-putting. I’d give some deep analysis on the meaning, but I can’t speak Japanese well.
 
Sajou no Uta: Kinda boring. This isn’t really my thing.
 
RED…[em]: a bit too rough for my liking. I get that this is when their hurgleblurgle kind of approach to art really started, but doesn’t mean I need to be fully here for it. A part of this almost saved me from disliking it, but it wasn’t enough.
 
 
Sfisdfeijaoifjsoefijse: too long for what it was, skipped
 
MARMALADE CHAINSAW: sticky sweet and incredibly wasteful. Started a trend of bands naming things with “chainsaw” in their names, which makes me wonder if the Japanese really know what a chainsaw is? Surely you don’t need one for spreading jam but I’m not Julia Child.
 
Kasumi: Fun fact—this was the name of “Misty” in the Japanese version of Pokemon. Further fun fact, there is a Pokemon card called “Misty’s Determination,” which I assume is written like “Kasumi no Jiketsu.” “”Jiketsu” means “self-determination” but is also a euphemism for “suicide,” so whenever I see that card I read it as “Misty’s Suicide” in my head. Seems like a tangent, but this is honestly a very Dir en Grey kind of story.
 
R THE CORE: filler intro 
 
DRAIN AWAY: I actually kind of like this. The guitar atmosphere is really enticing and they’ve definitely upped their skill since Macabre (the last album I blind listened to). I know I’m very firmly into the “Gauze and then the band died” camp, but I am glad I am getting something positive out of this album.
 
NEW AGE CULTURE: Wow. Woooooow. Y’all went OFF on Kisaki for “stealing Kyo’s girlfriend” or whatever and then they go and literally steal the title from a famous Matina omnibus series? I cannot believe the low-life attempt at being petty, but here we are. Unfathomable. 
 
OBSCURE: huh…pretty sure Grieva used this. I mean, I knew they seemed like they were fans of Dir En Grey, but I didn’t think they’d flat-out STEAL from them. Well, song is kind of bouncy and hypnotic, so I can see why they’d want to base on of their own songs on it. Still kind of shocked that this is borderline plagiarism.
 
CHILD PREY: One of the best songs on this album. Love the meaning behind it and how the lyrics fit together from the parts I could understand. I don’t mean to gush, but this definitely has that “it” factor that draws people into this band. Amazing. Pray / Prey for your butter
 
Amber: This band likes to have female names as titles. Amber, Kasumi, Audrey, Yurikago….it makes me wonder what their take on feminism is. They’ve already displayed a rather ham-fisted pro-life stance a few albums ago, but maybe their time within the inner machinations of the visual scene caused them to change their stance, especially having interacted with so many female fans and the changes fame brought to them. I wonder if this song’s direct is a reflection of that as well — it’s hard to get into an artist’s head and really understand how they see the world.
 
 
Overall: 5.5 / 10 for me
 
I know this is a classic album, but that’s how I felt on my first attempt at going through this. I still need to listen to Kisou, so I am open to doing a blind listen review for that as well. If you’d like to try out this album for yourself, or provide your own take on the music, feel free to check it out on Spotify. Sometimes I need to listen to things multiple times to form a true opinion. Funny enough, I still need to actually listen to this album for the first time, as I wrote this review solely based on the song titles and album art.

yeeees but nooooo. yeeees.... NOOOOOoooo adsadsadgd

Send Ru Paul Drag Race back in time, when rock music and Japan were the cool kids, and make Kaya win it. Profit. 😎

Send Ru Paul Drag Race back in time, when rock music and Japan were the cool kids, and make Kaya win it. Profit. 😎

💕💕
 
How someone can be so right and yet creating Art with a simple sentence? The only thing I'm not sure is if the mangaka dropping it were the cause or instead also an effect of a big cultural switch.

One of the thing I love about it is how you don't know what kind of chunni you will find. Kamijo's Castrato lore is cringe as hell but at the same time I LOVE seeing someone do the shit he loves to do without fear of judgement. I know people who can't handle seeing other people doing "embarassing" things, but I just feel at home when I see a frontman doing edgy poses thinking he is cool as hell and that he has some kind of special power lmao

**mangay
 
Kaori Yuki and CLAMP era manga stans and hormonal l'arc en ciel yaoi larp-girls overlapped a good decade (if not two tbh) ahead of the widespread gazette shipping
 
which was also p much v-keis peak in Japan as well, the moment manga artists dropped the moaning BL angel aesthetics it all went south for the music scene too

💕💕
 
How someone can be so right and yet creating Art with a simple sentence? The only thing I'm not sure is if the mangaka dropping it were the cause or instead also an effect of a big cultural switch.

This goes back to the Japanese style of fandom vs Western style of fandom. Which was one of the major barriers when bands started coming over here.
 
I read an interview at the end of 2007 with Warped/Taste of Chaos organizer Kevin Lyman, where he was explaining why he went with the Visual Kei bands for Taste of Chaos 2008. He explained that MUCC/D’espairsRay/The Underneath weren’t even his first choices, initially. He approached several other bands, and said that their management just didn’t understand why they would benefit from being invited on a 50 some stop North America tour with seven other bands.
 
To them, their fans are their fans. Not some other band’s fans. So they didn’t understand why people who wanted to see Avenged Sevenfold would ever consider listening to their band’s music, let alone paying for it. To them, playing a gig with seven other bands is what you do when no one on the bill can fill the venue by themselves.
 
So by brushing off the demographic of “people who could be interested in our music, but they aren’t devoted to us exclusively, so fuck them”, they didn’t exactly win any friends. Instead, they just made things harder for themselves by not connecting with either Western bands or even other Japanese bands. Dir en Grey seems to have been the exception, but even they’ve stopped touring with other bands for these last couple of tours.

That's the thing, though - I think that a lot of visual kei fandom is rooted in buying merch/etc. when that's just not how most music fans operate these days. The problem with visual kei's accessibility doesn't begin and end with their merch-selling capabilities - it starts with getting people on board in the first place and keeping them engaged. I think a lot of that is rooted in a strong internet presence.
 
As unfortunate as it is, we're not living in the era of CD sales and purchased merchandise any more - at least outside of live shows (and even then, arguable) - and while I understand the importance of those things (trust me, I spent 10 years of my life on the road as a down-on-my-luck-broke-as-a-joke DIY musician), I think we're expecting far too much of the average consumer to conflate fandom with opening one's wallet. (again, not arguing for rightness, just reality)
 
Past that, I still find that a lot of the lack of international interest in VK is that it is classically very difficult to enter and navigate as a fandom. Not only are fans classically elitist (visual kei is one of the only fandoms I've encountered where people have actively hoarded content from their faves with the explicit purpose of keeping it from others), the artists do not follow the same sort of cues that most other bands do and they don't engage their fans in the same way, either.
 
I mean really, this conversation can extend into the realm of photo-free gigs and cheki sales - things that I absolutely understand, but are likely doing more harm than good in the long-term nowadays (an easy buck to make from the aforementioned horny fan, but something that simultaneously makes these artists feel very distant and "unattainable," which just isn't sustainable in a world where the concept of the "rockstar" has basically been deconstructed entirely.) Add that to too-expensive albums and merchandise and no matter how interested one is, it requires a lot more cash and die-hard effort to support someone you enjoy. 
 
Again, most of this is being analyzed from a strictly Western point of view, but really just trying to answer the opening question. Japan clearly functions very differently from the rest of the world when it comes to music, but VK still feels even further removed. I highly doubt we'd ever see some major international renaissance focused on kote kei groups or something - stuff like that is and always will be incredibly niche - but there are a lot of bands in the game right now that have HUGE crossover potential and if paired up with the right artists would skyrocket in popularity on an international scale.

I know it's been brought up a lot already, but I think social media is probably going to be what sets the heavy-hitters apart from other bands in the scene from now on. I think it's part of the reason why gulu gulu has picked up so much steam so quickly (outside of just being really good) - they're VERY active on social media and also seem very interactive with fans. I've noticed a trend toward more activity (especially on Twitter/Insta) from a lot of smaller artists/bands, too, but it seems a bit further removed from their actual "craft" so to speak. I think there may be a bit more "hype" generated for these artists if they just get better at the social media part of the modern music "game."

Before people mentioned it here I had totally forgotten that not even that long ago they were using pretty much none of the social media platforms used in other countries. 
 
The Japanese are just not interested in investing time in figuring out how the market here works and then investing money in those foreign markets if it doesn’t work out practically by itself like when manga and anime did the heavy lifting for them, and that’s it. I doubt most of these labels have any business savvy other than the yakuza school of street entrepeneurship that was beaten into them. They’re about as clueless as to how things work here as most of us are about how it works there. You can’t really blame them for that when things are lucrative enough domestically, and everything else is a great unknown with big risk and mediocre reward at best.
 

Send Ru Paul Drag Race back in time, when rock music and Japan were the cool kids, and make Kaya win it. Profit. 😎