Visual Kei : commercial androgyny from Japan

Visual Kei is a particular kind of Japanese rock where the physical appearance of the band’s members is as important as their music.

X-Japan, Luna Sea, Malice Mizer and Penicilin were the forerunners of the genre and appeared in 1980’s. Influenced by the gothic and punk design movement, and by the American glam-rock (e.g. David Bowie), their music is a blend of metal-rock sometimes very hard with melodies often symphonic and voluptuous. Topics are often the expression of torment and ambiguous feelings about love, difficulties of life and relationships between humans. There’re plenty of metaphors and references to French and English language, and the lyrics often mix English with Japanese.

Concerning the look, artists love costumes from the French Renaissance time, but also gothic with a lot a colours hints. Band’s members, always men, make up and cultivate a lot their part of feminity, in taking advantages of the natural and typical Asians’ androgyny. All is stylized, from the platform-heels shoes to spiked and colored haircuts, by way of guitars and attitudes.

Concerning the music, some bands create a blend of different kinds of music, like Nightmare, The GazettE or Merry which don’t hesitate to mix pop, rock, blues/jazz and neo-metal. Their look follows these changes and we could classify them into two distinct groups : the Angura and the Mainstream. Angura’s artists like Plastic Tree, Pierrot or MUCC are more similar with our pop-rock music westerners’ bands, and are less adorned and eccentrics, even if the full appearance always remained worked on. On the contrary, the Mainstream classified are a lot more faithful to the origins of Visual Kei, but the appearance is generally slanted to a preference : The GazettE and 12012 reinforce their dark style whereas Vidoll or Alice Nine pronounced as much as they can the eccentricity and the pop style. In general, the contrast between the supposed fragility of the characters and the singer’s deep voice or the powerful sound of the music is striking. Video clips are also very peculiars : some groups don’t hesitate to show extreme violence and macabre scenes. However, we mustn’t limit their music to instrumental power : there’s also beautiful songs with wonderful melodies for the general public.

Nevertheless, people seems to lose interested in Visual Kei for a few years. It follows that bands choose to evolve and propose to their public a new sound more standard and their physical appearance is evaluated to its strictly necessary. It’s the choice of Dir en Grey who has decided to abandon their extravagant and masochistic clothes for simple suits.

At last, the diffusion of this kind of music is not yet limited to the Japanese archipelago : the phenomenon reaches for a few years the United States and Europe. Japanese bands organizes evenly world tours. In France, a lot of bands has came to tread upon Parisian’s concert halls. Two years ago, Dir en Grey could play on the mythical hall of Olympia and the show was played to a full house.

Here is a magnificent romantic song made in The Gazette, called "Reira" :

(502 words)