saiko

Bring back lyric videos made in windows movie maker 2020
....also i miss ViViD 😭 https://youtu.be/BTHs6bRSJmE

Is this a sign

Lastier is pure perfection! You're in for a treat

You’re very welcome!!

Softkei is the best kei! Check out CHILD. My all time favs!
 
Softkei developed in the mid 90s as kind of like an antithesis to VK. Guys like SOPHIA and CASCADE kicked down the door to make it acceptable in the mainstream, while underground guys like 16,Piano, OZWORLD and Dias Ray were pioneering it in the underground. It was such a juggernaut by 1997 that already established bands like Glay, L’arc and Luna Sea started flirting with it.
 
Softkei reached its peak around 1999/2000 when guys like Janne Da Arc and e.mu started breaking the Oricon top 20 charts, while it took over the underground VK scene quite rapidly at around the same time with countless acts blossoming around then, some of the more noteworthy being JURASSIC, ~Akira~, Wyse and Waive, among dozens of others.
 
Unfortunately, softkei took a strong downward dip in popularity around 2003 when more traditional VK started to become more dominant, after rivaling softkei for several years. The mainstream appeal for softkei practically vanished around this time following the split of former leading major bands like e.mu and CASCADE. The only flagship bands that were still active at this point where Janne Da Arc and SOPHIA, whose popularity was eons past the visual kei lump-in. Tie in the fact that oshare kei became a major player in the visual underground at this time as well, and softkei was all but extinct by 2005.
 
Softkei will always be my favorite subgenre of VK. I guess I’m just a sucker for a nice hook, blonde bands and a sky blue aesthetic lol.

There must be something in the air cuz in the past few months I've been listening to more '90s / early '00s soft vk too.  I don't know enough on the subject, but I would be happy to read something informative if someone decides to write it!

I've recently also started to listen more to melodic and softer VK. I am usually more the punk and post-punk person, when it comes to oldschool stuff. We already had a thread about Oshare and the Nu Metal trend, so one about softvi kei would be a good addition. 
Rob seems to know the most about those bands, maybe try to ask him if he wants to write up something? 

I agree with you as well! Also, I wish I was making the Yellow Fried Chickenz statement up. The Chad GACKT actually formed a band to stop men from simping.

Anyway, I agree on your thoughts on him. The whole Merveilles concert should be enough proof of his capacities as a musician and showman. And recently I've thinking that his decadence as an artist should tell us something about the decadence of the potentials of VK as an art scene.
 
Fortunately we can rewatch Merveilles whenever we want, helping to forget the cringy child he became soon after... He could have been world's next Bowie. Pure wasted potential.

Did he ctually said he wanted to make men less effeminate??? Lmao sis, please watch your sissy ass in the mirror before!

He's a very egoistic man who does and says lots of super cringe things. Stuff we've talked about on this forum include: His penis training regimen, when GACKT wrote himself as an OC into FF, YELLOW FRIED CHICKENZ (the whole thing was a mistake. It's also a prime specimen of his strange beliefs that he has the power and responsibility to make men "less effeminate" and "manly"), when he also made himself into a PUBG character, his general attitude as being one of the best things in Japanese music period (I mean yeah he's good but he's dropped off a bit imo), his fanatical unironic fanbase who just stroke his ego even harder which makes him do more stupid things... Don't take my words as fire or malice or anything like that. I love ragging on old legends who act silly like Yoshiki and GACKT but deep down I'm more sympathetic to them as artists than some other people are, even on this forum. You'd notice that I don't actually talk trash about his talent or his music, because they are solid and I respect that about him.

This is an absolute madness but after my comment Machi wrote me and now we're talking all day on insta 😳 
What... Haha... why... 

Emiru liked ALL comments except mine... (I think he didn't like that I have Chanton L'Amour maxi single uploaded there) 🥶🥶🥶

Lareine Machi?
 
Because if it you are speaking about him, your post could heve been written by me.
 
 

now more than ever....

blue lives still matter no matter what the sayjewways told u!!!!

Kneuklid Romance - Kumo Onna no Kisu (1993)

I've been under the impression that this whole new-gen laziness to explore beyond like the two or three bands people decide to hyper-fixate on + the whiteknighting thing might stem from the fact that a lot of the newer fans just have no idea of how easy things used to be back during The Golden Days(tm)  and thus don't really know what they're missing out on either.
 
I think that losing out on something like last.fm may have played a part in the loss of the whole 'i just decided to try out this random band bc their bassist's dressed like an egg' thing for sure, though i feel like it's also kind of becoming a streaming generation thing in general to simply not bother digging deeper beyond whatever the Spotify/Youtube algorithm feeds you, isn't it? I guess RYM kind of allows for the whole 'peeping what your friends are listening to' experience as well but I feel like it's somehow still not quite the same

I personally believe it would already help out a lot if some new batch of dedicated 'curators' would spring up again. People who are deeply into particular niches of the scene w/ the knowledge, access to interesting stuff and  willingness to share for preservation's sake.. A lot of the titans from back in the day seem to have kinda 'retired' and i'm pretty sure that's had an impact as well 
 

There's also a weird resurgence of fans that think downloading is morally objectionable and as such only like the 10 or so bands that got any sort of Western circulation, never diving any deeper than that.
 
I was under the impression this was just laziness / whiteknighting, but it could very well be there just aren't many resources for them to do so anymore. 12 years ago there TONS of blogs dedicated to sharing music for vkei and it was ofter regarded as "one of the easiest kinds of music to find" by people who didn't have the money to buy everything from iTunes. Now, it seems to be the opposite post direct download crack downs, although more groups are starting to embrace digital distribution.
 
I wonder how much losing lastfm played into this as well. There's next to no emphasis on trying out random small bands to appear worldly or because saw you someone else listening to it and liked their picture. It's just not cool anymore, I guess?
 
That's why I tend to upload random stuff I get from rarezcrates or stumble upon in my hard drive. No one asked, but more often than not it's just not online anymore since all of those upload blogs just reposted the same links rather than upping it themselves. 

@saiko I am sure as time goes on even "the stuff that matters" will become rare. For some reason japanese bands aren't really good with archiving or conservation of their stuff, already there are so many old releases from the 80s and 90s that don't have any reprints, won't ever get one and thus are likely to become rare. I actually wonder what happens with many of the masters, do japanese labels withhold them from bands and the public,  like some western ones did? (like Universal Studio, until the place where they stored all the stuff burned to te ground and a lot of media is now forever lost)
 
I generally have this feeling that a lot of the media that we consume nowadays is fleeting and ephemeral and will not last as long as some other art from previous eras.
 
Edit: also I know you meant the download links and not so much physical releases, but even dl links will be gone. I can't see mediafire still existing in 2080… 

Make evil-en-lucifer.blogspot.com great again 

They dissapeared because of natural selection. The downloadable stuff that survived is the stuff that matters.

there are three genders: mana, full, uyuni

now all we can do is pray some faithful salaryman housewife opens up her old box of cd's and makes .flac rips to share on gaijin websites

Mana's bandmates are dying from time to time, I think that's enough