Karma’s Hat

Recently I've been wondering about the seemingly gigantic social media following of certain Swedish visual kei personalities, and how little traffic they actually do get despite of it. 
 
Case and point: The Weebkei King Yohimbe has been on a massive release and promotion campaign for his record label. Having previously been in the habit of starting something and abandoning it only moments later, he's now been on this kick for more than a few months, even putting out new stuff by DISREIGN, English DISREIGN, some gaijin chump who nobody listens to and sings with a really hokey put-on gravely voice called Mitsugi and then his solo stuff. He still hasn't gotten rid of all his old habits tho, since he has in the meantime stopped doing both his podcast and daily vlogs, and is extremely unproductive on Patreon for his astonishingly perseverant 21 patrons. All of this hasn't made him get any bigger numbers than before, and I think we all know that he has hit the ceiling with his flop career a long time ago. That's not what I'm trying to get at though.
 
When he puts out a PV it goes into 100k's of views in relatively short order, but when he puts out anything else it literally makes no numbers whatsoever. He put out a new song two days ago and it ended up auto-generated on Youtube under his channel name, and in two days it has gotten only 2.7k views. What about the tweet with the preview of the track? 374 likes. Somehow while my boy is more active than he has ever been, he only does huge numbers for a selected handful of songs with PVs just like he always has, his twitter numbers continue to trend downwards and the spike he got for his Youtube channel subscribers a long while back is highly suspicious to say the least. Even the attention that he appears to get for his PVs doesn't translate to anything else, because his label and projects that are in it are languishing in obscurity. How does that work? I know Nocturnal Serenade was promoted by the Youtube algorithm, but surely not all his PVs can be that lucky, unless he has come up with a way to really game the system. How does this shit work
 
 

Recently I've been wondering about the seemingly gigantic social media following of certain Swedish visual kei personalities, and how little traffic they actually do get despite of it. 
 
Case and point: The Weebkei King Yohimbe has been on a massive release and promotion campaign for his record label. Having previously been in the habit of starting something and abandoning it only moments later, he's now been on this kick for more than a few months, even putting out new stuff by DISREIGN, English DISREIGN, some gaijin chump who nobody listens to and sings with a really hokey put-on gravely voice called Mitsugi and then his solo stuff. He still hasn't gotten rid of all his old habits tho, since he has in the meantime stopped doing both his podcast and daily vlogs, and is extremely unproductive on Patreon for his astonishingly perseverant 21 patrons. All of this hasn't made him get any bigger numbers than before, and I think we all know that he has hit the ceiling with his flop career a long time ago. That's not what I'm trying to get at though.
 
When he puts out a PV it goes into 100k's of views in relatively short order, but when he puts out anything else it literally makes no numbers whatsoever. He put out a new song two days ago and it ended up auto-generated on Youtube under his channel name, and in two days it has gotten only 2.7k views. What about the tweet with the preview of the track? 374 likes. Somehow while my boy is more active than he has ever been, he only does huge numbers for a selected handful of songs with PVs just like he always has, his twitter numbers continue to trend downwards and the spike he got for his Youtube channel subscribers a long while back is highly suspicious to say the least. Even the attention that he appears to get for his PVs doesn't translate to anything else, because his label and projects that are in it are languishing in obscurity. How does that work? I know Nocturnal Serenade was promoted by the Youtube algorithm, but surely not all his PVs can be that lucky, unless he has come up with a way to really game the system. How does this shit work
 
 

The inventor of air-instore will debut his air-CD

Yeah obviously the best time would've been to finagle his flop festival lives in the west around the release of IV and then utilise all the good will they had from the Japanese press and their old global fanbase and put out that hunk of shit right after it, settle for whatever attention came out of the novelty of these old washed up Yoko-ono looking retirees being back and then commence on a world tour consisting of dozen dates in big venues. Lol nope tho, he'll wait forever because in his mind, they're just one big break away from being the "biggest band in the world" and he already has his managers and yakuza people calling in favors to get him to play piano for the animated corpse of Joe Biden in the white house once he's elected. He'll settle for nothing less. 

Yeah obviously the best time would've been to finagle his flop festival lives in the west around the release of IV and then utilise all the good will they had from the Japanese press and their old global fanbase and put out that hunk of shit right after it, settle for whatever attention came out of the novelty of these old washed up Yoko-ono looking retirees being back and then commence on a world tour consisting of dozen dates in big venues. Lol nope tho, he'll wait forever because in his mind, they're just one big break away from being the "biggest band in the world" and he already has his managers and yakuza people calling in favors to get him to play piano for the animated corpse of Joe Biden in the white house once he's elected. He'll settle for nothing less. 

Yeah obviously the best time would've been to finagle his flop festival lives in the west around the release of IV and then utilise all the good will they had from the Japanese press and their old global fanbase and put out that hunk of shit right after it, settle for whatever attention came out of the novelty of these old washed up Yoko-ono looking retirees being back and then commence on a world tour consisting of dozen dates in big venues. Lol nope tho, he'll wait forever because in his mind, they're just one big break away from being the "biggest band in the world" and he already has his managers and yakuza people calling in favors to get him to play piano for the animated corpse of Joe Biden in the white house once he's elected. He'll settle for nothing less. 

Yeah obviously the best time would've been to finagle his flop festival lives in the west around the release of IV and then utilise all the good will they had from the Japanese press and their old global fanbase and put out that hunk of shit right after it, settle for whatever attention came out of the novelty of these old washed up Yoko-ono looking retirees being back and then commence on a world tour consisting of dozen dates in big venues. Lol nope tho, he'll wait forever because in his mind, they're just one big break away from being the "biggest band in the world" and he already has his managers and yakuza people calling in favors to get him to play piano for the animated corpse of Joe Biden in the white house once he's elected. He'll settle for nothing less. 

It's not going to come out. Why? He's still after all this time waiting for his break in the west, and the album rollout will commence only after that happens or he gives up in the market completely ( which is unlikely, he'll have to have terminal cancer and a desire to Blackstar himself for that to happen ) and not a moment before.

Inb4 drum machine

A fantastic live. The guitarist is a real talent and I doubt the band will recover from losing him, unfortunately. Him crying through the last song was heartbreaking to watch 

Fuck, there's too many to remember. Lately I've been playing early UCP singles like anything from Vidoll, Depression Sign by 12012, Hurts and then also Dolly peaked on their early singles as well. The above mentioned 麗しき仮面の招待状 is my favorite Gackt era MM song too. I'd love to get back to this with a few days to prepare

Yeah I also thought this was super mediocre, and my enjoyment of their two prior singles had a good helping of wishful thinking and good will. As much as I still do like the A-sides from those, I have to say there isn't really anything there that puts them over other recent stuff from the scene that I like for me. I just love Ai's voice and aesthetic enough to color inbetween the lines thinking all of this is just a prelude to a sick second act where they bring out the big guns. 
 
Real talk: what's here are middle of the road heavy riffs that Ai is able to elevate into something that's kind of cool. The two metalcore riffs are nothing that we don't see from all the other bands too. What I wanted from this band was Ai to go all in, abandon the uwa uwa Korn shit and sing that undead school boy haunting the country road from school when the moon is full and cicadas sing shit. Maybe some Grieva-esque old school riffs too, creepy stuff like what KtK was every once in a while. Sousaku Negai, Hesonoo, you know that stuff. So far this imo just a shittier and occasionally poppier KtK that also has metalcore riffs. 
 
fourth track 0.51- is also without a doubt from something else. the fucking la la la part too I reckon. 

Yeah I also thought this was super mediocre, and my enjoyment of their two prior singles had a good helping of wishful thinking and good will. As much as I still do like the A-sides from those, I have to say there isn't really anything there that puts them over other recent stuff from the scene that I like for me. I just love Ai's voice and aesthetic enough to color inbetween the lines thinking all of this is just a prelude to a sick second act where they bring out the big guns. 
 
Real talk: what's here are middle of the road heavy riffs that Ai is able to elevate into something that's kind of cool. The two metalcore riffs are nothing that we don't see from all the other bands too. What I wanted from this band was Ai to go all in, abandon the uwa uwa Korn shit and sing that undead school boy haunting the country road from school when the moon is full and cicadas sing shit. Maybe some Grieva-esque old school riffs too, creepy stuff like what KtK was every once in a while. Sousaku Negai, Hesonoo, you know that stuff. So far this imo just a shittier and occasionally poppier KtK that also has metalcore riffs. 
 
fourth track 0.51- is also without a doubt from something else. the fucking la la la part too I reckon. 

Yeah I also thought this was super mediocre, and my enjoyment of their two prior singles had a good helping of wishful thinking and good will. As much as I still do like the A-sides from those, I have to say there isn't really anything there that puts them over other recent stuff from the scene that I like for me. I just love Ai's voice and aesthetic enough to color inbetween the lines thinking all of this is just a prelude to a sick second act where they bring out the big guns. 
 
Real talk: what's here are middle of the road heavy riffs that Ai is able to elevate into something that's kind of cool. The two metalcore riffs are nothing that we don't see from all the other bands too. What I wanted from this band was Ai to go all in, abandon the uwa uwa Korn shit and sing that undead school boy haunting the country road from school when the moon is full and cicadas sing shit. Maybe some Grieva-esque old school riffs too, creepy stuff like what KtK was every once in a while. Sousaku Negai, Hesonoo, you know that stuff. So far this imo just a shittier and occasionally poppier KtK that also has metalcore riffs. 
 
fourth track 0.51- is also without a doubt from something else. the fucking la la la part too I reckon. 

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 wrote in a status update a few days ago, but the chorus in 「悪人」is lifted directly from abingdon boys school's Nephilim. Here (timestamped):
 
 

I honestly don't know what there is to gain by white knighting some high school dropouts rockstar dreams in the year 2020. The world is in lockdown, the polar caps are melting; I think if you're making art for profit in this age then you can fuck the right off and get a real job, even if it's visual kei where half of the appeal of this niche comes from the weird economy that sustains it. 
 
 

A bunch of McGeneric Nameron vanilla midgets overhyped by internet virgins having 20 minute technical workrate matches to ever-dwindling interest without drawing a buck is actually eerily similar to what's going on in vk

Is it just me who found this mini to be pretty mediocre. Their concept is nice, visuals amazin and Ai's singing is one of a kind, but the riff department is really lame. The nu metal riffs pale in comparison to KtK ( even if they were more than once lifted from other bands ) and they're just not as dark or weird as I wanted them to be. The last track is hands down the best one and still even that one has the same fucking dyny nyny public domain metalcore riff that everyone else has.