saiko

Kyo's technical abilities are really amazing, if you are actually a pro musician it is easy to recognize that he does some things that not really anyone else can in the scene. 
 
You have mostly people who do not really try to learn technique and those few who actually make the effort, same with most positions. 
 
Kagrra's Ishi was someone I know who actively studied theory, Jui from vidoll also. 
Ryuichi from Luna Sea really studied hard, hide once made a comment about how he was amazed how much he progressed. Hide also made a big effort with the same Vocal trainer Toshi used. Toshi still trains with international and japan based vocal teachers. 

Japanese vocal talent is not subpar, but there does seem to be a preference for artists who don't really have outstanding characteristics. For example, DAOKO's popularity when all she does is cry on the microphone, etc. (I still listen to her sometimes)
 
Does technique matter within visual kei? I wouldn't think so. The focus is style and charisma in some cases. There are a lot of unmemorable or subpar vocalist that get carried by the band. 
 
For every other j-music movement/genre I'd say it's different, apart from idol groups. Anyone who can make noises gets accepted even if they can't sing to save their lives.
 
The reason Kyo and Ruki get brought up is because Kyo, especially nowadays, does a lot of vocal acrobatics that others fail to replicate. Try his band sukekiyo. As for Ruki, he was one of the most memorable vk vocalist level-ups. There was one point in Gazette's career where everyone just went 'Yup, Ruki is spending good coin on singing lessons'. You can clearly divide gazette's discography as pre-vocal-coaching Ruki and post-vocal-coaching Ruki.
 
Don't forget to check out DIMLIM for another memorable vocalist
 
 
 
 
I would also recommend 9GOATS BLACK OUT. 

Punk is in visual kei's DNA and that's why the vocals in vk are often if not always at least in part stylised and the emphasis isn't on technical ability but in the performance. The genre itself is long and storied at this point with fads coming and going, so sometimes when it takes influence from different genres it adapt to its new needs in the way its performed, so some dudes sing "better" like the people trying to do X power ballads or anthemic metalcore choruses, and some sing "worse" like idk the most obvious hardcore punk influenced examples like Piass and ANTI FEMINISM or something. They're trying to do different things. 
 
The reason why guys like Ruki and Kyo* sound, or sounded in Ruki's case, rough and stylised is because they're from a different era when the emphasis on technical ability wasn't what it is and was in metal in the west around that time, while guys from newer metalcore bands from a completely different era like Jiluka, Dexcore, Nokubura that are influenced by different bands are at the very least on par if not better than many of their American colleagues from the bands very successful in their style like BMTH, Of Mice and Men, Chealsea Grin etc. because the emphasis is now on the vocalist's technical ability like it is in the rest of the genre in the west. Basically tl;dr vk does what it wants to do and it performs at the level of an American Idol finalist, Kpop schlager belter or some other circus bear on an unicycle trying to woo the masses to consume more product by jumping through fiery hoops at the crack of the corporate whip when it wants to, but more often than not it doesn't because it's main objective as music isn't to do that. 
 
Then of course there's legions and legions of music from all genres in Japan with exceptionally skilled people involved, but the people still using the Jrock tag pretty much ignore everything that isn't vk and ONE OK ROCK. Even if you go searching for vk as a newbie you'll be encountered by a pretty significant bias for newer bands and especially a bias for the more vaguely metal sounding bands from western vk boom years in favor of bands that are really new like the ones I mentioned prior or the older classics. In the early vk scene more than a few bands have very skilled vocalists like La'Cryma Christi, Luna Sea and even L'arc. 
 
* Personally I'll never forget the time when they were trying to make it in the west and all the paid mainstream reviewers started ooing and aaing about the Japanese Mike Patton. Kyo sounds and always sounded, vk as fuck. 

It's a very mixed bag. In my opinion, the only way to find out about the real ability of a vocalist is live. Often, some guys that are really great on record can't deliver live: often out of tune and/or don't have enough vocal tecnique to last throughout a whole live. Sometimes sound can also affect the performance, e.g: obviously bigger bands have better sound, so they're gonna sound better live. Sometimes with smaller bands I find if the instruments are not balanced in sound, they can barely hear themselves, leading to issues with their pitch etc. But I think there are some really great live vocalists, and those who are most definitely have had vocal lessons: I know Yuu, one of CLACK inc.'s guitarist, works as a  vocal coach with other vk singers as well, and obviously he's a very skilled singer with his own project Ultimate Sonic as well as the previous bands he's been singing in. Takeru, the vocalist of CLACK inc., has also great tecnique and he's been improving a lot live as well, so I assume he's been working with Yuu recently. This is just an example, I'm sure there's plenty vk vocalists that have singing tecnique and have underwent vocal training.

I've noticed early 2000's Diru, as somewhat kinda previously mentioned by @Himeaimichu, has a very kind of Y2K vibe to it, in fact Kisou and MACABRE share similar vibes.
 
 
 
 

10/10, definitely will look forward your next releases, and hope you save VK from its current misery state. 

Sweet baby jesus the new single is out now. 
Next month I will be a guest on Tokyo Borderless TV on 7/15 & 25 
Will reveal artist photos for band 
and new member as well. 
I hope you can enjoy it ﾔｯﾌ〜(*ˊᗜˋ*) ﾉ

【En'Cell♰Dis'Dein】
†NEW SINGLE COMING SOON†
精神異常者センチメンタル
Lyrics: 宗
Music: Kairu
 
Advanced preview for Monochrome Heaven:
 
 

These aesthetics are not the first thing that I would associate with Glay, but there you have them.
 
Btw, does this classic from Kuroyume count as Y2K?
 
 
Also, I think Pierrot had an interesting approach to Y2K, twisting it with magic and decadent, gothic tones (making their best era, imho):
 
 
 
Lastly, I dare to say that Y2K is one of the key aspects of softvi aesthetics.
 
 
 

 

Gackt's Vanilla PV borrowed part of the aesthetic, even though you can still see the 90's here and there.
 
 
 
I feel like Tonight PV by Luna Sea would have liked to use the aesthetic too (at least for the parts with the band playing inside the "futuristic" room) but the director/post production didn't received the memo (they didn't even put the omnipresent cold blue filter).
 
 
 
 
OT: For the ones that don't know whats Y2K aesthetic is, basically the 2 biggest cultural spreader (and large scale influencer?) were Matrix and Bjork "All is full of love video" video, if my memory doesn't fail me. Good to know it has a name now, at that time I liked to call it the "aseptic futurism"
 
 

Recently, I've been getting more interested in the Y2K aesthetic. For those who don't know, the Y2K aesthetic is a collective term for the sleek futurism of the late 90's and early 2000's that manifested itself in music videos, fashion, and technology.
As Aesthetic Wiki puts it, "Y2K is an aesthetic that was most prevalent from roughly 1998 to 2003. Y2K aesthetics are often characterized by a distinct aesthetic period, encapsulating fashion, hardware design, music and furnishings shiny with tech optimism – sometimes literally. According to the Y2K Institute, some of Y2K's aspects include, tight leather pants, silver eye-shadow, shiny clothing, Oakleys, gradients, and Blobjects and Blobitecture. Most of Y2K aesthetics rely on the use of technology and slick futuristic looks, signaling the optimism a new era as people approached the millennium".
 
This thread is to discuss the use of the Y2K aesthetic in Visual Kei.
One of my favourite examples is the iconic music video for Yokan by Dir en Grey. This pretty much speaks for itself
And while this is definitely past the era of Y2K, the music video for Mikansei to GUILT by Phantasmagoria is definitely influenced by Y2k futurism.
 

Toshi apparently deleted almost all Instagram posts related to X and even the ones mentioning hide so it seems the rift is pretty big between them now so I doubt the announcement will be the album. My buddy who asked Pata what was up at a tokyo yankees gig last year got a reply that made it seem like X was going on a break too so : / 

Time for the "rare video" of the week! This time it's SHADE performed at LUNATIC FEST 2015:
 
 
yeee boiii ♪

Fuuuck I have a story [similar to my Jrock=SP experience if you remember that post lol] from the other day:
 
I'm at work, there's no one at the tills and there's nothing left for us to clean so I decide to go make a silly sketch of Inugami Akira of Inugami Circus Dan. One of my coworkers notices that I'm enjoying myself so she sees my drawing. She asks if the writing I did above the drawing was an East Asian language and I said yes, it's Japanese and that's how you spell Akira's name in Japanese. I told her he's a musician and that he is in a band. Then another coworker walks behind and sees my drawing and says:
 
Wow, I don't know anything about that Kpop stuff. Is he from a Kpop group? My sister loves Kpop and says she wants to marry one of those guys lol
 
Akira looks [looked] like this:

What kinda fucking Kpop idol does he look like?! I just can't take this shit anymore. Guys I just can't 

I've placed my thoughts under a spoiler tag because my fingers got keyboard happy.
 
 
Anyways, a really great topic!

I think a lot of that feeling of people coming and going stems from the western boom years and like other people said, from the fact that it has somehow been hogtied into the same brain rot caravan with Kpop and therefore people tend to become aware of both simultaneously, allowing for lateral movement between the two. Then there's that other breed of us getting into our 30's finally coming to grips with mortality and that this is a very fruitless endeavor, so now there's also these existential crisis' going on with the older guard. This basically goes a long way to explain why everyone in this scene is so fucking stupid, you were either into a dumb fad when you got in or you were dumb enough to stay for too long. 
 
But like, about the psychology of people who come and go, being gya one day and rastafari the next — I never got that. I have, my entire life more or less, liked the same things and I never really dropped out of anything. There's some faux pas you'll find from the times when I was like exploring stuff like western metal when I was 16, but everyone goes through that one way or another when you build your frame of reference and refine your taste and ideas of what music should be about. The people who change every word in their bio on an yearly basis with only the words "I stan" remaining in place can't be counted on for anything. How do they even finish meals is beyond me let alone stick with something when everything they do is so dependent on if the weather is fair. They're the same people who'll abandon their folks into a home, but take a taxi from another city once the inheritance is on offer; just picking the carcass of cultural capital that other people worked for, that other people laboured to put out there. I'm in this shit for the long haul and this relationship will end only when one of us dies, either me or the scene. No matter how reprehensible I think the scene operates or what I think of the fucking people in it, it's still important to me. 

if you want a bit of perspective, people were getting bored of vk and moving onto kpop back when kpop was a niche scene (think 2007-ish), most of them never returned; newer fans came in.
 
when @sleepy coffee noted that kpop stans started a cross-over to our underdog glam cumhouse genré I couldn't kinda believe it but times change;
I was surprised that kamijo has new stans in their early 20s and they are men, so I guess VK does something right to bring in fresh blood.
 
I tried branching out in the western metal a few years ago and the potential effort in finding decent sounding bands with somewhat not braindead online fanbases for the most part wasn't worth it.

I've been into VK for more than 15 years now and what I find most common when it comes to people loosing their interest in the scene stems from what has drawn them to it in the first place. From my experience, people that started "listening" to vk bands mainly for the looks and - supposedly - to feel "unique" simply grew out of it, adding up to your regular "it was just a phase" stereotype. On the other hand, the ones that, instead of drooling over bandomen pics, actually did focus on the music itself, listen to visual bands to this day.
 
The other thing, that has already been mentioned, is that some people fix their taste on one particular type of music/scene, not willing to discover anything outside of this "bubble". This can often lead to getting fed up with it which later results in them trying to find an alternative stimulator... which they are most likely going to be tired of in a few years as well.
 
As for me, I see no reason why I would ever stop enjoying the music and visuals that I used to in the past. When something is good, it's just... good, it's not going to magically change over the years.

Tbh even tho they're really not vk anymore (although kyo's visuals are pretty much more impressive than 99% of anyone currently active in vk) I imagine I'll lose a huge chunk of interest in music in general especially japanese stuff whenever dir en grey/sukekiyo come to an end

This question has been bouncing around in my head lately. As a small and very dedicated fanbase in an inherently alternative counter-culture, it’s natural that people aren’t particularly drawn into VK as much as say Kpop or Alternative [Western] Rock. That being said, I’m curious about one thing that all fandoms experience: turnover rates. A while back, I stumbled on a Last.fm profile that said we were super compatible, but all their top artists in the last year were Kpop and [Western] Metal so I was really confused. That is until I went to all-time and noticed that our charts and top artists were so identical we might’ve been the same person. So then I wondered; when will that happen? That is, my turnover. When will I stop loving VK and go for the next best thing (whatever that may be to me)? 
 
So that leads me to wonder what you guys think the fan turnover rate is. If you want my two cents, it seems pretty high to me judging by the amount of Last.fm profiles that’ve moved on from VK to Goth, Metal, or Kpop. Something like 60%-70%. The time span, to me, is trickier to tell. I guess it depends on the person, though. I’ve seen some people (mostly on Instagram) go from being VK fans to Kpop Stans in real time, the process took about 6 months-ish? I’ve also seen some people who leave after 5-7 full years of dedication to different western alt genres.
 
Also, do you think there are any warning signs that your taste is changing/ways of knowing that you’re just not as interested into it as much as you used to be? They might be individual to each person, though. One of my biggest signs is when I don’t want to watch live performances or interviews anymore. I used to into funk/disco/hip-hop before VK and right before I fell out I stopped watching lives of my favourite groups because I had no interest in seeing something I’ve heard before but irl. Then I stumbled upon VK and the rest is history. I get the feeling like this is my endgame but I can’t say for certain that I’ll ride or die for life in regards to being a VK fan. I do know for certain that I’m good for now [next year or so]… One last question for those reading, if they wanna answer it: how about you, though?

I agree. Perhaps they tried to court everyone, but in the end failed to get them. Perhaps they withdrew behind Mana's artistic direction, and thus all MM less Gackt were dropped off Columbia; I can't imagine him, even Kozi or Yuuki playing pop, putting up 00s 64 bits softvi rockers aesthetics, surrounded by group of dancers, etc. They are artists, I think that's clear. Kozi, like Mana, even at the cost of losing their mainstream status (a thing that history has reserved to less than 10 bands in Japanese music history, even Dir or the Gazette never had the attention MM received from the media in the late 90s), decided to move on and run after a consistent artistic project within their own worldview. On the other hand, Gackt brought iconic moments to VK and J-rock (Mizerable, Vanilla, Redemption) but generally speaking he did the stuff that would attract masses.

In spanish we say, "qué tiene que ver el culo con pintar", which could be translated as "what [the fuck] has ass to do with painting".
 
 

I agree. Perhaps they tried to court everyone, but in the end failed to get them. Perhaps they withdrew behind Mana's artistic direction, and thus all MM less Gackt were dropped off Columbia; I can't imagine him, even Kozi or Yuuki playing pop, putting up 00s 64 bits softvi rockers aesthetics, surrounded by group of dancers, etc. They are artists, I think that's clear. Kozi, like Mana, even at the cost of losing their mainstream status (a thing that history has reserved to less than 10 bands in Japanese music history, even Dir or the Gazette never had the attention MM received from the media in the late 90s), decided to move on and run after a consistent artistic project within their own worldview. On the other hand, Gackt brought iconic moments to VK and J-rock (Mizerable, Vanilla, Redemption) but generally speaking he did the stuff that would attract masses.

"Let's play dress up and don't tell J"
 

The people who were calling that the next fad to replace the Metalcore trend in VK would be KPOP and soundcloud music were right. Guess that makes 8P-SB true pioneers, lol.
 
I know I am ranting and whining a lot about it that it's insufferable, but still… I am very bothered by the direction VK has taken in the last ten years. I know rock music has lost it's mainstream  popularity and kids these days aren't rebelling by listening to edgy guitar based music, but by jamming to Billie Eilish and Lil Peep and whoever they are. But I feel VK's identitiy is so strongly tied to rock, even the stuff that was quite electronic (like Schwarz Stein) reflected it through its songwriting and -structure. That kinda changed with the advent of first western Metalcore copycats (which imo deprived VK of its unique blend of sound of post-punk and Heavy Metal) and then the introduction of annoying dance and electronic beats and shitty "synths".
 
Now we reached the point where stuff like is so far removed from what VK was.  Can't say if it's good or bad, it's evolving after all and that can't be stopped… but I am worried that VK, which is already meaningless and super niche in japan, will just completely dissolve and assimilate into this big pot of "hip" pop and  microgenre stuff. Not sure if I make sense, it's a bit tricky to express what irks me.