¿Qué es el Visual Kei?

I've been listening to VK bands also since more or less 10 years, and in the end I just think the term refers to a scene, you can make any music you want, dress anyway you want, if you decide to be part of the scene (i.e, play with other bands considered VK, be f reatured in VK magazines, and such) then you are visual kei.... people will then catogirze what you do... which never refers to the actual music played but only on the way they look ("black suit kei", "medical kei", "cosplay kei", you name it).
As for music, VK never really created a sound of it's own... you could say bands like Luna Sea and Kuroyume were moving toward something similar to a "vk sound", but never accomplished it fully. Then with so many different "visual" bands doing different things musically, it completely lost the chance of becoming a musical genre.
About the subculture thing, Visual kei has no ideology, so we can disregard that quickly. "Mixing visual elements to express arts along with music" is not an ideology and also early Genesis would be visual kei too, along with countless other bands way older than Visual Kei.

What I enjoy about Visual kei is that it's a completely free playground. Anything is accepted, more or less. The only inconvenience being that 99% of it's consumers are teenager japanese girls, thus being fairly unappealing for someone with more than 17 years old, but at the same time I found many great musicians and artists who would have a hard time fitting in any other scene because of being just plain weird, in that sense, bands like da'vid shito:aL were able to exist thanks to that. Some really good bands also seem kind of doomed because of being part of the scene, take Oto-oni as an example... I think they could have been far more succesful if they played with regular rock bands instead of being part of a visual kei label (under code, of all labels). No wonder they got little attention.

So yeah, for me, visual kei = a scene, a scene only musicians can be part of, a visual kei fan can't be "visual kei"... you've got lolis, gyarus, regular girls, punks, etc, being fans of visual kei, but AFAIK, noone calls themselves "a visual kei", unless you're in aband, then, you're a bandomen.

Sei-chan escribió:Las voces, los bajos...