Does VK do it for you anymore?

[Reiko 75]

Regardless if current shit sucks or not, I would never say its something to grow out of. Old school v kei is a such a crazy, interesting phenomenon in music that could have only happen in the time that it did and in the place that it did.

 

We haven't even seen the full effects of that wave. That scene is gonna go down in music history. the older it gets the more people will stumble upon entering the rabbit hole of v kei from a very disconnected standpoint. Most of us were born when these bands were still releasing music and have an idea about how fucking warped the scene has gotten.

 

Later people wont even have that frame of reference and will be able to look at the golden era as something totally different. Which it is. 

[yukidogzombie 101]

I love  vk when I was 13 & I love love it and I'm 24 now 

[DaveKei 122]

It's a huge difference looking at the 80's and early 90's  and the today visual kei. It still great, I enjoy few new vk bands, like Biosphia, Sex -Virgin Killer- and Jupiter, but I like the old one far more. Anything more perfect than Art of Life will never be made/performed, lol. 

[Komorebi 2193]

On 7/2/2016 at 5:48 AM, hiroki said:

I find it unnerving that if you're in a 90s vk band that happened to be making dreadful music you could still gloriously play this "sincerity" or "passion" card; but if you're doing well in today's vk scene suddenly it's all because you have great bells and whistles + good at being a shameless sellout because, alas, you've arrived 10 years late and the ethereal spirit of vk no longer permeates your soul.

 

You have put in words what I've felt for so long.

[Hakari 282]

Sure Vk sucks sometimes. Actually it sucks most the time. We search long and hard for a good band and we finally find one....then they break up. Once they break up we like 5 other bands with members from that one band hoping they will sound like that original good band. We eventually get fed up with the VK scene and start listening to other bands, but like an addition we come back and hope that VK will sustain us and we naively believe that it will be healthy.

[vanivani 558]

I know I already posted on here, but visual kei still does it for me personally.

I somehow manage to find new bands that I enjoy ( ^ ^ )

[ぺるしゃ猫 67]

NAH MAN visual kei is still A++++ I've been into VK since 2006, and I barely listened to new bands since 2010-2015 (because I mostly just listened to Moran/Fatima/bands I knew from before) And this year I started listening to a ton of new bands, and they are awesome.

It's different when you can actually go to lives in Japan and see bands often because that's what keeps you in the scene. Unfortunately most people living outside of Japan can't experience that and lose interest. Yeah, maybe some bands are not musically so great but who cares if their lives are fun right? That's a big chunk of visual kei, you know, the visual part and the live performance part?

Like others have mentioned before, VK is only interesting if you want to find new bands and make an effort. And I'm not the type of person that says "This is good and this is bad" because I love trash kei.

I pretty much went off topic but those are my thoughts. It's easy for people to say "visual kei sucks nowadays" when they aren't deep in the *current* scene

[blackdoll 907]

No, but from time to time i get a itch, but nothing new from vk

[chris 31]

i loved vk first around 2001, i loved those bands then even though most of their music and pvs sound and look like they were recorded using a potato.

i lost interest a bit for a few years around 2005-2008 maybe, i couldn't really get into new bands that were forming then, there wasn't much that i liked.

but now i'm completely into it again, i love my new bands as much as or more than bands i liked 15 years ago and i honestly think most aspects of vk are better now (although i agree with what i read someone saying about new bands just having almost exactly the same look as other bigger bands who are popular, that gets boring).

[echo 547]

Sometimes I feel like I'm too old for vk, but then I go to a gig and see grandpas and grandmas headbanging and jumping around with everyone so I figure I'm still good haha. I tend to fall out of the vk scene when I go back to the states and feel further from the bands I love, but when I come back to Japan the excitement is there again. It's like @ぺるしゃ猫said, it's a lot easier when you're living in Japan and can be a part of it all. It's also easier to find new bands since you can see like 5-8 bands in one night.

 

As far as shitty bands forming recently, I'd say that I agree, but I think shitty bands/artists are popping up in all genres of music. I figured that's just me getting older. Don't all generations think that their generation of music/tv/everything was better than newer generations?? lolol despite that, usually I can find something that interests me ^^

[Ro plz 1290]

Not as into it as i was before but its so nice 2 come across killer bands from time to time. 

 

Been bumping Awoi A LOT this summer.

[Seiji 156]

I have quite a few problems with the most recent VK bands. But I think they're persistent problems, which just have evolved in a way I personally don't like.
The "mainstream" of VK became too synth-y and too core-ish for me. Most bands sound like they wanna sound like dadaroma and the likes but fail miserably.
The mainstream of say 2008 was a lot to my liking though. The times when everything sounded kinda harsh was great.

Nowadays I mostly enjoy the bands you don't hear too much about in mainstream VK media, like KEEL or Emmurée.

 

Big bands I can still enjoy are Dir en grey and Plastic Tree.

[The Bread Wolf 231]

I'm not as into it as I used to be, but neither have I replaced it with anything else. I have my few favourites and I keep actively listening to their new stuff, admittedly usually a bit late though, but I don't search for new, listenable bands anymore. I'm utterly convinced that only this small circle of bands can make good music, and if they break up I just move on to their next projects. 

 

New bands are hard for me to listen to. Not because I think "everything new sucks" but because I simply have no affiliation to the new bands. I've always found new stuff to listen to by just following ex-members of something I have listened to previously, but now it seems that the endless flow of new bands has dried up in my case. Either I already listen to the new, active bands (in the case of BFN and Kameleo), or they suck (GOTHAROCKA) or they've disappeared or nearly disappeared (CO- from Futurism Boyz, the ex-members of Dali, Shun from Vidoll). 

 

Meh, I've still got Kiryu and Kameleo. *shrug*

[ぺるしゃ猫 67]

8 hours ago, The MAD Stallion said:

Not as into it as i was before but its so nice 2 come across killer bands from time to time. 

 

Been bumping Awoi A LOT this summer.

Awoi is life, they are amazing live. 

[NICKT 147]

My feeling with VK is that I've grown out of it in a sense that it doesn't fill my library to the extent it used to.

I used to be one of those kids who was sort of "visual-kei-emo", and that if it wasn't VK it was bad. From music to style to the point where I've now dug myself a hole in that my online persona is a single word stage name in a fanatical fashion.

 

My library is a lot more diverse now and I'm reminded of an "experiment" the mods or a group of people on this forum did a while back where they posted an upload with a picture of a VIsual Kei band, with a lot of people liking it before having it revealed that they were a normal band. Oh the backlash was immense and I think that's sort of the mentality I've grown from.

 

So ultimately, it's not so much that VK does it for me, I enjoy the styles, the music and the bands but ultimately it's not a rabid devotion it used to be, at least for me.