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November 30, 2006
Visual kei artists from Japan invade Germany and set sights on America
GRAMMY.com
Bryan Reesman
For 15 years Deville Schober has run Brainzone Promotions, a Munich, Germany-based promotions, marketing and artist development company that has worked with heavyweight bands like Metallica, Tool and Deftones. He thought he knew about all things rock until he caught a sold-out show by wildy dressed Japanese rockers Dir En Grey. With minimal promotion and no music industry insiders present, the band rocked a packed house of 3,800 youngsters at the Columbiahalle in Berlin.
Intrigued and amazed, Schober soon spoke to Matthias Müssig, the show's promoter and owner of Neo Tokyo, a Japanese anime and manga store in Munich, and learned about J-Rock; more specifically, its offshoot visual kei. Here was a genre that his countrymen were oblivious to and which was on the verge of exploding.
By the beginning of 2006, Schober and Müssig teamed up to form Gan-Shin Records, went to Japan to sign bands like Dir En Grey, Moi Dix Mois, D'espairs Ray, MUCC and Nightmare, then gained German distribution through Universal. They joined forces with Antje Lange, managing director of booking company Twisted Talent Concerts, who was equally stunned at witnessing a non-promoted, sold out D'espairs Ray show in Munich that drew fans from across Western and Central Europe.
Gan-Shin soon reissued many back catalog titles by the aforementioned artists. One-off shows continued to sell out, sales started to climb, Dir En Grey hit the singles charts, and the mass media jumped on board, everything from metal, goth, and teen mags to a four-hour German MTV special and 25 other television interviews and specials.
Lange notes that part of the appeal to German youngsters to a genre that pulls in elements of goth, glam and cyberpunk comes from the fact that modern parents, despite being more tolerant of rock shows, do not know about the visual kei subculture. Kids find out about it online and unite there.
"[Parents] don't go to these Japanese things because they simply don't know about them, and they don't get it," remarks Lange. "They don't get the codes, because you're just allowed to wear special colors. The colors have to be cold. You can easily wear a red or a blue but it has to be a cold red or a cold blue."
Josephine Yun, author of the book Jrock, Ink., explains that visual kei originated in the late 1970s and early 1980s as Japan's rock scene began cultivating its own identity. "It was rock 'n roll, punk rock, glam and metal with a twist — a twist just as angry and rebellious as what came before it — but a poetic one, artistic, with painstaking attention to detail," Yun explains.
She points out that "visual kei" literally translates as "visual style" and spans a wide range of musical genres. "If you wear heavy makeup and costume or cross-dress elaborately, and you play in a jazz band, that's visual kei, too," says Yun. Japan has a history of dressing outlandishly and cross-dressing since ancient times, and a man in touch with his feminine side is viewed as a healthy, balanced individual. Visual kei "has evolved from being somewhat of an anomaly to a more widely accepted genre. Its Japanese background has also become more visible with the use of traditional Japanese dress and instruments."
Visual kei certainly is a mish-mash of styles and looks and draws on Kabuki dress as well. "Musically, it can be anything: American rock, British punk, glam, metal, Euro pop, techno, new wave, electronica," explains Yun. "Visually, the influences are diverse as well: traditional Japanese dress, S&M outfits, costumes made of vinyl, leather, lace, plastic...you name it."
"They view what they're doing as complete art — the CD covers, the designs of the bands' clothes, the hairstyles," notes Schober, now president of Gan-Shin Records. "If Kiss were from Japan, it would be a visual kei band."
The music of Gan-Shin is quite diverse. Dir En Grey create a blistering, guitar-driven combination of rock, metal, glam and industrial. D'espairs Ray offer a frenzied amalgam of metal, industrial, atmospheric and tribal sounds. Moi Dix Mois, lead by former Malice Mizer guitarist Mana, are more synth-heavy and espouse a gothic rock meets neo-classical, industrial, and metal style. Despite their ominous name, Nightmare play a spirited fusion of hard rock and pop, with touches of alternative, metal and funk. MUCC have an affinity for brutish modern metal tempered with melody, dynamics and blues-based rock. The vocals in these bands range from pleasant singing to harsh growling, and the musicianship is exemplary.
"We try to put our band concept as people's 'anger' and 'agony' into lyrics, music, music clips and other forms of expression," explains Dir En Grey guitarist Kaoru. "That's why there are several images [that are] aggressive, sensitive and beautiful. We try to express the dark parts in people's hearts by all works. To sum [it] up, we are affected by all things in life."
These colorfully dressed bands strongly tap into the anime and manga world. Schober says that the Financial Times in Germany deemed them "living manga" characters. Linguistically many of these groups use French names and sing in a mixture of Japanese and English, and occasionally German and French as well. This European slant, not to mention their exotic Eastern appeal, can help explain their mass appeal to European audiences.
Their appeal in Japan seems staggering. Schober claims that MUCC put tickets on sale less than 24 hours before a show and sold 16,000 tickets in three hours. Solo artist Gackt, an early member of Malice Mizer, reportedly played a show in Tokyo to 56,000 people. Schober adds that when Dir En Grey released their first three singles on the same day in 1997, they all hit the Top 10 in Japan, and their shows have all sold out since then. According to Dir En Grey themselves, 16,000 tickets each for two summer shows this year at Nippon Budokan sold out in less than 45 minutes.
The future looks bright for visual kei bands outside of Japan. D'espairs Ray have a 25-date European tour planned for November. Gan-Shin and Twisted Talent want to do complete European tours with Dir En Grey, MUCC, Moi Dix Mois, D'espairs Ray and Nightmare starting in the new year. Gan-Shin now has distribution deals all over Europe — England, France, Scandinavia, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Austria — and plan to release simultaneously albums with Japan and embark on massive touring throughout Europe. And the States will be next.
Dir En Grey sold out individual showcases in New York and Los Angeles this past March, and that landed them an opening slot on this past summer's Family Values tour. The cross-country trek allowed them to reach a whole new audience, and they hope to tour the States again next year after their next album comes out.
"They can definitely break big here," believes Christa Titus, managing editor of Blistering.com and a Billboard and Metal Edge contributor, of Dir En Grey. "With all the metal out there where you can't understand what the hell they’re screaming about anyway, the language barrier is less of an issue. Also, Dir En Grey fans have posted their interpretations of lyrics online, so these kids are interested enough in the band to take the time to figure out what the songs mean. They are already dedicated to the group and are likely to stick with them for a long time."
If the same thing happens to Moi Dix Mois, D'espairs Ray and other visual kei bands heading towards these shores, it could mean that this new glam/goth hybrid genre may become the next hot subgenre.
(Bryan Reesman is a New York-based freelance writer.)
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