saiko

as we know, he is not a man of much words
 

Of course Mana will always think on him as a potential... Moi-même-Moitié model.

And talking about cages, why isn't he in one yet

The title lends itself to a few jokes

It's kind of a sinister feeling one gets while watching the ridiculous scenario of a pack of "users" actively giving a stuff you know it's ridiculous, nonsensical, inconsistent, etc. a lot of attention all of a sudden... feels like one's gone crazy or something...
 
But buying social media 'credits' (likes, views, subscriptions, downloads, etc.) these days is SO much common than what oneself could ever imagine.  And I don't think it would stop any day, considering we are moving forward a virtual society more and more each day.

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
 
 

A kind soul uploaded a bootleg audio recording of the band's gig at Shinjuku Jam on 1985/12/04. Not only was this one of the very earliest shows under the BUCK-TICK name, but it was the debut live of Atsushi as the vocalist and Toll as the drummer (and the lineup remains unchanged ever since )!
 
 
Obviously the recording quality is what it is, but for a random 35-year-old bootleg cassette recording from a small venue it's very nice.

Also just found out that the "corona disinfectant" my mom sprays on our clothes, groceries, and packages that come into the house is literally just holy water with essential oils so feel free to nominate our family for the Darwin Awards 😤

Everybody: vk isn't a genre, it doesn't have a "sound"
every riff in Image: *exists*

Painful.

Yeah, incredible even to today's standards. No wonder why they became and immediate success back in time.

Painful.

My favorite thing is that the first comment I read when I opened the Instagram post was a laconic "mentiroso".
And suddenly we were all in a south american telenovelas.

Was he waiting for a pandemic to release it? Truly a mindblowing year, this is

Shit, now I’m thinking he was waiting for VK to get to the lowest point it ever could (bands disbanding in droves, live houses in shambles, the rich and powerful getting more exposure to the Yoshiki business model) before releasing it since nothing else would come out for weeks and promotion would be easy.
 
Probably thinks he will save VK with it 😂. If he does, wow.....and now that I think of it, I expect donations to Japan’s most affected musical areas to be his targets, but for a musician to care about the places that made them big is rare.

Basically all of Dir en Grey tbh even their band name is an amalgam of "cool sounding white people words"
The romance squad (Gackt era Malice Mizer, LAREINE, Kamijo solo, etc.) weren't exactly fluent in French, nor did actual French people proof-read their stuff. It's strangely endearing? I mean, they're doing their ganbare best, I can't fault them for trying.  
ju te veux, the French monologue in Mayonaka, some LAREINE songs like this one... I'm strangely touched.
 

About 95% of The Revenant Choir by Versailles
 
Also "I miss rusty false" from DIAURA's Master, that one never fails to perplex me

I was searching for GOATBED lyrics but suddenly found Shuji's interview (as la' royque de zavy "member")...

If I could hang out with anyone, it’d be whichever core member of the MM gang who’d take me (no vocalists, also I would play a Tennis match or go to Mainatron Craze Space with Kami if he was still here with us). With Mana-sama, I’d want to eat his fabled curry while watching whatever weird European Art film he wants to show me in VHS collection. With Közi, I’d sit down with him in a cafe in Paris, just talking about life and art while we drink too much coffee and overeat croissants. Or maybe we’d go fishing together, except I haven’t fished since I was seven so I’ll be absolute crap at it. I don’t think he’d mind though. And with Yu~ki, I’d want him to do Japanese calligraphy with me or just watch him draw or make jewelry while we chat.

would love to get absolutely trashed  with everybody from rands where we all mope about art and take ourselves entirely too seriously. 

I don't think this may be the case of a direct source of inspiration. I think this is more a kind of arrangement that became a typical industrial feature (among others), thus (ab)used by every artist of any genre who wants to add a little industrial vibe to their craft.

Apparently in 1999 there was a sports game for Playstation released in Japan titled R [アール], also known as Rock'n Riders. It featured characters named and modeled after actual J-rock/VK musicians! According to the game's story in the "distant future of 20XX" a Japanese rock band called R go to Los Angeles for a gig, but for some reason rock music is outlawed so the authorities chase them through the US while the characters race each other on...snowboards?? Yeah.
 
The members of the band:
- vocals: Ellemo
- guitar: Kyoji Yamamoto (BOWWOW)
- guitar: Kiyoshi (media youth, hide with Spread Beaver, Lucy, machine)
- guitar: Chisato (PENICILLIN)
- bass: YASUMICHA'N (Sleep My Dear)
- drums: O-JIRO (PENICILLIN)
 
It also looks like these guys actually went ahead and recorded an album under this band name.  Anyway, various tracks composed by the members also appear as background music in the game itself (here's a YT link to the full soundtrack). The 2CD limited version of the game also had a photo gallery of the real-life musicians dressed as their game characters it seems.
 
A bunch of in-game footage can be found in this YT playlist.
An assortment of screenshots and other info here.
 
By the way a totally random tweet sparked this post, bless the abyss of the internet!
 
 

Graphic design is my passion!!!!1

That auto-translate!