Nyasagi

"Is anyone else getting tired of VK? I've been listening to it for the past six months and two days, so I've been into the scene for awhile, and all these bands just sound the same now. Thoughts?" 

hope they leave half their menu's ingredients unavailable due to sanctions for authenticity

I just needed the sextape, not this...

I don't listen to their bands and I'm not interested in anime, but if I were, I would pirate everything even more, lmao.

Asagi foretold this prophecy which is why D started flopping hard enough to get dropped from Avex. Wonderland has truly been saved!

I don't think visual kei is dead. People have been saying that rock music is dead for decades... but there are still people, who like it. It just changes, evolves... the negativity of this tread irritates me, because I think that the foreign audience has completely no influence on this scene. We're only responsible for keeping the interest abroad, which these bands are completely not interested in. Their only aim is the Japanese market. For us it's a niche interest. I've been a fan for 11 years and I saw changes, all I think is that people who really love it will never stop loving it. As for the bands, they evolve... maybe some people won't like them, but the trends will change and it's always good to keep an eye on them. Many bands small in Japan were just treated as music gods abroad, so... it all depends on where the fans are from.

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.
 

I agree with everything that has been said about the language of the music, but I also think that the image of the band plays a huge role. If band A and band B both play similar music in style in quality, but band B has an amateur-ish look/a terrible band logo/lame cover artworks, whereas band A has a great look/great artworks/seems professional (which is all subjective of course), a lot of people would say band A is better. I don't know why some people have a problem admitting it, but for me the whole image of a band plays a large role and influences the way in which I enjoy or don't enjoy their music - this applies to VK as well as pretty much any other genre or style imaginable. Aesthetics are just something a lot of people look for when it comes to any form of art. Even scenes  like the metal scene who often claim they don't are about appearances suddenly care a lot if a metal band doesn't fit the visuals a band in this genre is supposed to have.

Or maybe, just maybe, they just happen to prefer how it sounds? Of course I'm only speaking for myself here, but I'm really big on vocals... not only in the quality/talent but the general "sound". If you gave me the same song with an English-speaking native singing in English and a Japanese-speaking native singing in Japanese, I'd almost always choose the latter. I find that Japanese just sounds more pleasing and flows better to me (likely due to the consonant-to-vowel ratio) than the harsher sounds of a Germanic language, for example.
 
Cheers m8

not that familiar with OOR, but aren't they big enough to actually do something about the same fans hogging the front row? most vk bands ban shikiri once they start doing lives at the bigger venues anyway, so i'm surprised OOR still has this problem.
 
as for "crazy fans" in general: i draw the line at the point where a fan's display of affection for the band and/or its members intrudes upon other fans' ability to do the same. until that point, i wholeheartedly support fans who are comfortable with being as crazy as they want. yes i may have no idea what blackdoll is going on about 90% of the time, but it's her prerogative to say what she wants about Lycaon. if you love something/someone, just show it? tbh it bores the hell out of me to associate with people who are constantly hedging and checking themselves to make sure that they don't lapse into their 'fangirl' mode because that's somehow inappropriate.
 
but really, for vk at least, many people can't seem to accept that music is only one part of the lived experience of a bangya, especially so if you happen to live in japan. i'm still astonished every time someone claims that only when you're level-headed enough to extricate yourself from the 'craziness' of the scene and be able to discuss the band's cadences and progressions (not even lyrics, mind you) in the same way a bunch of paleontologists examine fossil records with measured excitement can you finally be crowned a card-carrying Mature Fan. clearly the irony isn't lost on people who quite fearlessly denigrate other sections of the fanbase for their supposed 'elitism'.
 

People here really think's it's ok to dislike people for their sexual orientation and do homophobic comments?
No, it's not.
It's not ok to make racist comments.
It's not ok to make fun of a person because of his body.
NOT OK.
 
NOT OK  
 
Jeez, this is worst than i thought. 
I'm pretty much disappointed 

i'm a bisexual male who thinks yaoi/fanservice are not interesting at all don't think everyone's like you bb 

go back to the 15th century where you belong 

One thing is saying "OUR BAND IS THE SAVIOUR OF THE VISUAL KEI", being homophobic, sexist, pedo and stuff like "i hate fat people" to his fans.
It's completly different. So yeah, we are suddenly burning the witch cuz he suddenly said that stuff?
 
 
He's just making fun o the people who felt bad for that. He said "I have some apology words" and then an image written "NO I DON'T"
 
 
I know right! Thank you!
 
WTF? What's your problem dude?
F**k if it's his opinion. He's a fuck'n opinion former, HE SHOULD KEEP IT TO HIMSELF.
Cause yeah, these words kill people. Saying homophobic stuff makes people thinks its ok to hate them and that's why there's lots of LGBT dying over the world.
NOW IT'S OK BEING NEONAZIST, BECAUSE IT'S JUST THEIR OPINION THEY'RE NOT LITERALLY KILLING ANYONE RIGHT?
Duuuuuuuuh
 
 
Thank you for existing. I'm surprised about how people are ignorant over here.
 
 
I'm sorry for you babe. I would never feel okay using my money to support some human trash like this.
 

After my experience I can say relationships are more effort than it's really worth (but my experience was a really bad one, in the end and I don't want to talk about it publicly). Not being in one makes me feel lonely, though... and I'm scared I'll never find someone with similar interests again. This is important for me, somehow I don't get along with too different people, because I don't understand them.

I might be alone in feeling this way but I feel that the fourth and fifth waves of visual kei are kind of unappreciated. People don't really consider 2007 to be "old-school" but in fact that's already 10 years ago now. It's kind of a shame that we've allowed many of these bands to fall through the cracks. I've noticed fans putting a lot more effort into preserving and sharing 90s visual kei. There are a lot of great bands around this time and I feel like we as fans should begin to slowly digitize and immortalize these bands as well. 

I've been following this thread for quite a while and many things came up in my head while reading through it. Many people already mentioned things I wanted to say or made valid points, but I'd still like to share a few things from my own point of view and experiences. (and sorry if i repeat some things already stated because i read kinda fast and have a short memory...)

To me, LJ played a huge role in the VK international fanbase and was what really made it feel alive (especially for people who lived too far to attend lives and such and could only rely on the net for the experience). It was very interactive and people shared the shit out of things. Jrock scans was one of the best LJ communities ever and I must've spent hours browsing through their directory just trying to save scans of all my favorite bands. I still have them in my hard drive today and my only regret is that I didn't spend more time on it because all the links from there are dead now (lol). I was one of those people who made a shit ton of graphics and icons so scans were pretty important for me yeah...For a movement that's all about the visuals though the idea of making pretty graphics felt interconnected and made the fandom more fun as a whole. Now that it's practically not a thing anymore the whole appeal of the visuals feels more boring? Another thing I liked about LJ was that you could read your friends' journal entries and learn about their favorite bands, other than the ones you already share. People wrote about their favorite bands all their time, posted PVs and pics, and shared live reports, which I found very fun to read because they were very casual. Around the time LJ died out was around the time everybody's favorite bands started disbanding and a lot of people just left. With the transition to tumblr, like most people mentioned already, it's only reblogs and it feels a lot less interactive, making it hard to find/talk to new friends. (thankfully there's still MH though :>)

Seeing that all my vk friends were leaving even I was feeling the pull of leaving vk forever. I even left my fav band Plastic Tree for a while (probably sometime after their ammonite album released). How dare I, I know. But in between those times I was out of vk I still found myself checking back in the scene once in a while out of curiosity, and found interest in a few newer bands. I just wasn't as crazy active as I was during LJ times. It wasn't until I went to Japan when I attended my very first vk live, which was AvelCain, that I regained all that vk-ness back in me. After seeing such an amazing and fun performance I realized how much I still loved vk, and that was pretty much how I woke up (and here I am now). It's probably different for everyone, but I feel like those who say that it was a fad might just a need a little something to make it all come back again, as it did for me.

Also, I feel like the attitudes of fans might also play a role in the decline. You see a lot of people complaining about the low quality of music these days and that vk is not the same anymore, which I KNOW is very true in many cases and I do this too, but at the same time it puts too much negativity into the fandom and makes everything seem less attractive, and so people leave. The sharing aspect also feels increasingly dead--music sharing wise the reasons are pretty obvious, but even just the talk and spread of vk feels increasingly dead. Again, this can probably lead back to how tumblr is all about the reblogs, not much interaction or discussion. That's why I'm very glad that MH still does what it does today (the monthly recommended tracks, reviews, and great threads like these and the awesome recent oshare and nu-metal kei threads, etc. where we can really discuss and share about vk), because maaaan the vk fandom feels so dead everywhere else.

With the changes in mainstream culture, and Kpop still a thing, I don't see how the newer generation will grow into vk. The only way they'll ever get into it is probably by the influence of a friend. So with that said, keep spreading the vk love people, as cheesy as it sounds lol.

>>>>truth is, the scene has never been big except for a few bands<<<<<<<

lmao visual kei is far from dead in japan. if someone manages to believe so then you are definitely looking for shit bands on purpose in a haystack of bands. or like, don't attend gigs at places like shinjuku urga on purpose just to find bands with 10 fans. truth is, the scene has never been big except for a few bands. ikebukuro cyber is a small shit hole that shouldn't cap more than 50 ppl, yet madeth gray'll and bands who we in the west consider ~*legendary*~ giged there a lot.

I still think people worry to much.  There are still lots of great blogs with Vkei news, the best are still around.  forums did die, but I think after all everyone went to MH which is simply  THE platform forum to get your news etc, so why to start a new one?

Well there are enough bands to get into if a "favo" band disband.  If a band disband I like, I live on and try out other bands. Also to love a band too deeply only will hurt your feelings anyway.

^ I agree. Honestly my opinion is when people say "visual kei is dead" they're really saying that their fave bands have disbanded and they don't like anything in the current scene. There's nothing wrong with that. Interests come and go. 

I already have added 140 new releases for 2017
https://vkeishuuryu.wordpress.com/
So how the fack can visual kei be death? if it was death there would be never 140 releases at January 8th already. and we just freaking did start this year....
And I 'still NEED to add lot's of NEW releases of 2017.
 
of course there are bands in japan who only got a handful fans. But there are still many who have enough fans. Also some bands still give oneman gigs. even if only 200people come, whatever, it's not death its not ever.
 
I really don't get why people keep up saying, it's death it's death...
Well nobody cares about some artiest anymore like KAMIJO, those who cared about the guy are grown up's now. And younger people why the fuck should you as 18 years old girl support a guy over 40?... 
 
Ya know, old bands should just disband and make space for the new bands with the young guys. You cannot be a visual kei artist forever. once it's over.

And  this year... new cool bands have or will form:
https://vkeikonkon.wordpress.com/category/新しい/
kinda 26 bands already (if I count 2 who formed at the last day of 2016)  and also at the end of 2016 some great new bands have formed.

And that's only the beginning of 2017
 
 
And because of this stupid stupid saying of visual kei is death I actually created those 2 websites.  Let's see if we really can say at the end of 2017 that VKEI is DEATH.
I don't think so.
 
As already said for  myself,  I don't really check up vkei anymore. I follow a few bands, but they aren't really visual kei, well a few. but a bunch are just more dark and alternative.
 
 
So yeah, let's talk again at the end of 2017
 
VKEI won't be death and never will be death!

I don't think visual kei is dead. People have been saying that rock music is dead for decades... but there are still people, who like it. It just changes, evolves... the negativity of this tread irritates me, because I think that the foreign audience has completely no influence on this scene. We're only responsible for keeping the interest abroad, which these bands are completely not interested in. Their only aim is the Japanese market. For us it's a niche interest. I've been a fan for 11 years and I saw changes, all I think is that people who really love it will never stop loving it. As for the bands, they evolve... maybe some people won't like them, but the trends will change and it's always good to keep an eye on them. Many bands small in Japan were just treated as music gods abroad, so... it all depends on where the fans are from.

Got into vkei in 2006, so bands around that time and later. It got dead when the autotune was popular, but lately I've been getting my interest back, because many old musicians came back and also got in touch with the community again. I voted for 2005-2010, but I like the last one, too.

Got into vkei in 2006, so bands around that time and later. It got dead when the autotune was popular, but lately I've been getting my interest back, because many old musicians came back and also got in touch with the community again. I voted for 2005-2010, but I like the last one, too.