AH~ Even if I could get to LA, I wouldn’t e able to attend. curse age. ; ~;

Are you familiar with Tokyo and Osaka metal bands?

Not a whole lot. Unless you aggressively pursue it, it is overlooked in the US as is the majority of World Music. Since you posted the 凛 (Rin/Lin) PV as your video of the day, I have been delving more into it and working on an article about them. I plan on following up on more band in this vein

What do you think of Dangerous Nude’s burlesque circus girl fashion?

It is nice to see that some of the less popular Fashion as an Art Form designers and clothiers still have a healthy following. I think they have definitely captured and reproduced the beauty and risqué of Burlesque with-out seeming as pale imitation or a parody.

After reading your article on the Japanese “metal” scene on cnngo.com, I went looking for a place to comment on it and subsequently found this blog entry.

As someone who has followed Japanese music for well over a decade, I’m deeply disappointed in how little research seems to have gone into the article. You conflate the Japanese hard rock and heavy metal scene with the visual kei scene– true, many visual kei bands play what could be described as metal, and true, there are a handful of crossover bands, but generally speaking the Japanese metal and visual kei subcultures are near opposites.

Japanese hard rock and heavy metal– often called “Japameta” in Japan, or “J-metal” as an previous commentor mentioned– includes major-label bands such as Loudness, Bow Wow, and Anthem. It began in the late ’70s and especially early ’80s, inspired primarily by the ’70s British hard rock bands who were “big in Japan” when most of the first Japameta generation were teenagers. A number of Japameta bands were already releasing albums and touring overseas before most overseas visual kei fans were born.

Japameta never had a thing to do with punk, dresses, goth, or vampires. Still doesn’t, in fact. Ethnicity aside, Japanese hard rock and heavy metal musicians look indistinguishable from their Western counterparts: they wear jeans. They wear tshirts. They look like masculine, ordinary guys. These are not toned-down visual kei bands, a la Dir en grey or Kuroyume. These are bands who were never visual kei in the first place. Musically as well, like most hard rock scenes the world over, Japameta is more about tradition than innovation; hardly the “eclectic sounds” of the article title.

I realize that the real-life Japameta scene (as opposed to the far more flamboyant visual kei genre) isn’t what most of your readers would be interested in reading about, and that perhaps a Japan where masculine middle-aged men play standard-issue, testosterone-fuled metal is not the Japan that many of today’s pop culture enthusiasts would prefer to imagine. Do some visual kei artists cite Japameta bands as influences? Sure. Is visual kei an interesting and contrary spin-off of Japanese metal proper? Absolutely. But to confuse or equate the two would be at best poor research, and at worst a purposeful distortion of facts to better align them to a fantasy.