I'd recommend looking up early written interviews/TV appearances of bands such as X Japan, Buck-Tick, D'erlanger, and the others that kind of kicked it off for what was available in public (and surprisingly quite a lot was, especially in the days before the scene solidified and codified and tried for more public acceptance, and when Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll was more celebrated and scandals were sought rather than avoided, though for obvious reasons a lot of those bands will NOT be so open now and may even deny stuff they said back then or try to get it scrubbed) Also, look up stuff (what you can find, anyway) about bosozoku and yankii in the 80s - early 90s as the communities overlapped. If you have the great luck to find someone who was active in v-kei at the time (and there are some bandguys especially with smaller bands - not the members of say X or Buck-Tick but look up smaller bands, even on Facebook and the like, and they might even be more open to you than they would to a journalist IF you make it clear the story is original fiction, so there's no risk of scandal or legal complications, and they won't be named as a source) that's a good place too. For a general overview, there's a book called "Speed Tribes" that you might also want to start with. 2Ch Tanuki, if you can read Japanese, also has a wealth of information about visual kei both past and present, though it's also a shitstorm of rumors, haters, and bullshit with some nuggets of truth so it's better taken with a grain of salt. I want to help you more, but the problem (and why this wouldn't work as a wikipedia page) is much of the info has a way of vanishing (the Data Vampires are not kind, especially with how Youtube deletes news interviews and info, how Geocities hosted a lot of older info and it went down with it, how people who post various things leave the scene and don't update...) so people who've been in visual either as fans or especially as the people in it know, but it's hard as hell to thoroughly cite for a variety of reasons.
Edited by RevolutionStone
So I have no idea why including Gold Digger as a trope related to the scene is somehow misogynist. Yes, the trope has those Unfortunate Implications, but the scene has people who are the trope including a codified, gender-inverted (which makes it misandrist if anything) version in mitsu, and some groupies and people who've married visual or ex-visual rockers are like this (if you want an example that combines Financial Abuse and a real life Scam Religion, go look up Toshi's case - his wife led him into a religious cult, moved away with the cult leader, and she and the cult leader took every bit of money he had and then started committing identity theft to get more, all the while forcing him to produce music and recruit for the cult. It's a pretty extreme case, and a rare one, mitsu is far, far more common than female gold diggers.)
Point being that mitsu (the gender-inverted version) should stay as the trope, even if we can't mention the much less frequent "man gets taken for all he has." Not seeking edit war or to promote misogyny, just wanting to clarify that the trope wasn't listed for woman hating reasons.
ninja'd: Plus, both varieties (mitsu and played straight) have been referred to in songs by various bands. Nor is it an NRLEP violation as it doesn't name anyone specific. It would be an NRLEP violation had it said "Hairs'Prayers is an example of this, they do mitsu to survive as a band" or mentioned the Kaori/Toshi case, but it didn't...
Edited by 75.3.201.58 Hide / Show Replies
There are an awful lot of things wrong in this article. I hope no one minds some serious editing... I'll try to keep track of the major changes I make and explain them here as I do them.
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I am completely removing Gravitation from the list of series that reference visual kei. It absolutely does not, and anyone who does not know what Gravitation was referencing should probably not be writing about it at all. I know the Gravitation article also has similar errors, but that's a different project for a different day.
Even though people don't have to list sources on here, I would really really benefit from knowing where the information in the first section of the Useful Notes page came from, if anyone knows. I'm working on a story involving early visual kei (aka. visual rock, before the band boom and the catering to yaoi fans really began) and I am at a loss for where to find helpful sources of information. (Google and Quora are really letting me down in this respect.) I guess it would be nice if there were a few more embedded links in the page that linked to any further information.
Edited by featureEnvy Hide / Show Replies