Japanese music and 'self-cover' frenzy

[Tokage 5930]

I'm gonna be honest here right from the start, this thread was prompted by the announcement that Dir en grey were gonna include yet ANOTHER re-recording as a b-side on their upcoming single. It kinda got me thinking about how there seem to be so many jrock bands (or, more specifically even, VK-aligned bands) that do this whole self-cover/re-recording old material thing a lot. There's the obvious example of Dir en grey, who've pretty much been doing it since somewhere around the time the Dozing Green single came out, you've got MUCC, who have pretty much straight-up remade like 4 of their older albums and a handful of other tracks, cali gari who've remade a good portion of their older material by now... Kinniku Shojo Tai have also been releasing quite a fair number of remakes of older material since their revival. Those are just the biggest examples I can think of at the moment, but there are other cases of bands revisiting/reworking older material as well (i.e. Plastic Tree releasing that remake of their 1st full-length as a bonus alongside one of their albums). 

 

The thing is, try as I might, but I just can't really come up with many Western / non-VK examples of similar behavior. What causes it? Is it a case of dissatisfaction with the older material? Lack of creativity? Bands wanting to show off their new lineup? I just can't figure it out. What do you guys think about this process?

[diryangrey 121]

honestly i feel like it's just got a good deal to do w/ vkei bands (at least all the ones you mentioned) tending to change up their style between albums a lot more than western bands usually do, so there's more capacity to do something different w/ an older song

before i got into vk black metal was my main scene, and there were a decent few artists (Ulver and Fleurety off the top of my head) who'd do that same thing, start out real typical of a style, get bored & fuck around w/ genres, have more money to spend, and have something interesting to do w/ a remake.
for bands who stay to one sound mainly, there's not really much reason to do those & i feel like that honestly describes the average western rock/metal/punk group more usually than the average vk band.

reflecting a new lineup's a good point tho, i'm kinda talking out of my ass here but i feel like vkei promotion/management takes a lot from the idol industry (that's where the whole one-colour-per-member thing some bands do came from, right?) & that's something that's done a good deal there - & i'm sure there's a sliding scale of cynicism to both, like yeah reusing tracks is faster, cheaper, & takes less writing but also it lets new members in on old shit so that's cool

all that being said, i can't honestly think of any examples from the vkei sphere where i actually liked the remake better.

[BrenGun 2261]

lolz, its simply just about money.

rerecording takes lesser time and energy than writing new songs.

 

↑

So I highly believe its the only reason why it happens so often.

[Himeaimichu 1535]

Wasn't Yuuga notorious for this with his project Gokiburi, where he just literally decided to remake various Devil Kitty and Kar'Maria songs?

 

I think some bands though are just willing to fill a B-Side. After all, you want the single to sell, and hence why you normally don't put all the B-sides on the album or else people will just wait to buy the album (unless you rerecord the singles on the album). But some bands are just too lazy to write new songs for a B-Side, so they just either rerecord an old one, have a "live version" of it, or remix it.

In fact, Dir en Grey, before they were doing self-covers, were having people do remixes. IDK if anyone ever actually pays attention to the remixes though, because I know I don't.

 

This whole thing though kind of reminds me of how Hip-Hop artists would go and make "remixes" of their songs.... AKA reuse the beat and the chorus, but change the verses. Sometimes, it'd actually end up really good, like Busta Rhymes' remix of "Woo-hah, got you all in check", featuring ODB, which btw is pure insanity, but 90% of the time, since this was really big in the mid to late 2000's when mc's figured out they didn't have to make good lyrics for people to eat crap up, it was usually shitty. But hey, you gotta sell something

[RipAChip 0]

i partly agree with BrenGun on this one. the other part of my opinion is lack of creativity

and may i add that i really enjoyed Dir en grey's remixes. the first to pop into my mind is KNY's Akuro no Oka remix, still one of my all-time favorite tracks (about filling dem B-sides)

[ChaoticEnding 2070]

Regardless of how they rewrite they have already shown on some shows that they can play both the original and the re-recorded versions for them. So I do not see a problem. By the way, the band for many years makes singles like that with only an unpublished track nothing different has happened now.

[Peace Heavy mk II 7200]

2 hours ago, AimiGen7 said:

Wasn't Yuuga notorious for this with his project Gokiburi, where he just literally decided to remake various Devil Kitty and Kar'Maria songs?

 

hey hey hey hey that band was supposed to be a self-tribute-tongue-in-cheek-project (read: lazy) and Devil Kitty (2) is where he's gotten srs again (...by recording all of the gokiburi songs he didn't get to release before their bassist (allegedly) fucked them over, and performing setlists that are mostly gokiburi songs anyway).

 

He's been on the self-cover, and self REdisCOVER plan for years. His solo project had a whole rerecorded self-tribute album, and many of his bands just took songs he wrote previously and changed it up a bit with a new title.

 

I made a big master post of his tomfoolery here. 

 

 

 

 

Kamijo's been big on remakes throughout his career. Most recently, Versailles rerecorded a lot of their most popular songs (and actually most popular: not "we released this on warner therefore it has to be popular " songs). I actually really enjoyed that album since it corrected a lot of production woes they had in the original versions. He also released a big self-cover in 2014 as well where he remade songs from all of his previous bands. Since the material spanned a wide range of time, and the covers were usually reimagined  rather than straightforward updates, it feels less gimmicky. 

 

On a similar note, Lareine remade their shit all the time lol. There's at least 3 different versions of "Solitude," two remake collection albums, and even an album where all of the tracks on it are music box versions of regular songs. 

[platy 3018]

Release fodder. Bands rarely make something new with their re-recorded material so it's just blatantly a quick and cheap filler. When bands have leveled up enough and want to show off their new skills with old materials though, I have nothing against it. Maybe it's why I enjoyed that second gazette traces album, although I'll probably get crucified for saying that. 

[Cyber Lip 1]

I'd say it has to do with bands wanting to make $$ off old material as a previous record label may own the rights to the original recording

[Sparrow 83]

There are a couple of reasons why re-recordings sometimes make sense to me. For VK, the first few singles are usually made in extremely low quantities and are difficult to come by. I think in cases like this, bands feel weird releasing the exact same track again so they either re-record or remaster it.

 

For other artists who have had a very long career, their style will usually have shifted dramatically (possibly even a few times) so re-recording their old songs can be a way to show what that song would have sounded like, had they released it now. For example, Alice Cooper released an iTunes EP in 2010 called Alice Does Alice, where he covered five of his early singles from '71-'75. While I was ambivalent to most of the tracks, I actually love the new version of I'm Eighteen just as much as I do the original!

[ahnchc 309]

A band that's definitely guilty of this is ギャロ/THE GALLO (I mean, the entire LUCIFERO album was a bunch of remakes of songs from their self-titled GALLO album). In their case it was apparently because he couldn't bear some of the old lyrics/dissatisfaction with the way they had been written, composed and performed prior. At least, that's according to Jojo. I personally think the songs on the LUCIFERO album could be classified as different songs—albeit, with the same titles—for the most part, but they're still remakes nonetheless.

 

In other cases, I think it could definitely be a result of attempting to grab just a bit more cash like others have already said. I think the most prominent example of this is アルルカン/Arlequin's maxi single 価値観の違いは唯一の救いだった (Kachikan no Chigai wa Yuiitsu no Sukuidatta) which also had a cluster of re-recordings on it. It could just be me, but I definitely didn't see a reason for the re-recordings since most of the songs sound really damn similar if not almost exactly the same. Aki's vocals didn't develop more over time and sound almost exactly as they had and I think the same for the instrumentals. Unless there was a different reason behind it was explained which I haven't seen (which is surely possible!), I think it was just them trying to get extra money off of mediocre content.

 

The whole "remake trend" makes me cock and shake my head with both confusion and mild disbelief (for lack of a better word), but still doesn't exactly bother me. You gotta do what you gotta do ig.

Edited March 16, 2018 by ahnchc
typo lol