 Everything begins in the early '80s in Japan. All we know is that, while japanese people start to feel the weight of japanese economy, and so the weight of the responsability to belong to a sistem, while Japan is "bombed" from media of american/western rock (e.g. KISS, Metallica and all the '80s rock/hard school, various Glam artists, ecc...), everyone bringer of a culture that seems to attack the japanese economic empire's sacred values with the "sex, drug and rock 'n roll" minace, a culture so-different from the rigid japanese mentality, 5 men who call themself "X" create a new musical genre. However they was fated to be known with the name X-Japan, not X, since they changed it after some year (their story is long and surely interesting, but that's not the place and the context to talk ONLY about X). The genre is called "visual shock" and inspires itself from all the estremest western rock and from a tipical japanese charm for everything that someway results androgine or, at least, ambiguous. Already centuries ago (and continues in our days) Japan had got Kabuki and Takarazuka teathres where the actors was respectively (all) men and (all) women. That's why we cannot say japanese visual shock is simply a pale imitation of the western brothers... These are the theorical bases that bringed to explode one of the more undervalued rock phenomena in the rock 'n roll history, important at least to understand more on what rock philosophy really means and what it represented (and represent today) for people with different social/cultural origins from ours. |
 Toshi (V), Taiji (before Heath replaced him)(B) and Pata (G). |
 Luna Sea. The band in the 92-93 period. Luna sea are maybe the 2nd visual band for importance after X/X-Japan.  Pinocchio. A rare pic from the Pinocchio period. Can be seen Sugizo and Shinya. |
 X's indies concerts are unique and "shock" the right-thinking majority of a country that's late to wake up: they're weared like beggars with dyed hair and their faces made up with various colors ; they play a rock with strong metal influences, breakin' instruments like in the classic rock tradition and it's not difficult for 'em to catch-up the always more confused japanese teen-agers' hearts. X's charsimatic leader is Yoshiki, drummer, pianist, composer of almost all the hardest X's songs and X's ballades as well as Extasy Records founder and producer, label still today always searching for rock talents in the japanese and not-japanese music market . To him we owe the creation of the term "visual shock" itself . To him and to Hide too. First X's guitarist, second composer after Yoshiki and talentuous visual artist, like if, someway, the visual art was inside him from his birth. A real "visual shock God", like a lot of people want to remember him (Hide was found (suicide?) dead in 1998 after X-Japan was dissolved as group. World's lost one of the most creative, divine and "Shock" personality of ever). First X-Japan's successors (scouted by Hide) for fame and duration are Luna Sea, visual group born about in '89 from the fusion of two groups: Pinocchio and Lunacy. |
 Luna Sea's style it's a kind of "dark pop/melodic rock/hard", without or almost without metal influences. Luna Sea dissolve them up in the 2000, after an 11 years musical career, following their own solist projects. We've already said that, we won't talk too much about every group (see Links page for that), but we have to remind that, if X are going to be remembered for the visual shock itself, Luna Sea will to be the first group, scouted then by a major, to bring a more dark meaning to VS, especialliy in the first period of their career and we can say that, until a great change about in in 1994-95 with Malice Mizer, real revolutionaries, all the other visual bands, will rebound between these two bands' model, Luna Sea and X-Japan... indeed, every group has got the classic cross-dresser (Yoshiki/Dir~en~Grey's Shinya/ Mana...), the androgine handsome boy (Inoran/Toshiya/Jiro...), the yankee rocker influenced from the western "way to rock" (Pata/J...) and so on... these are stereotyped models still used in the modern commercial "visual shock" bands too (see next paragraph), however.... we have so two main features in all the visual rock story: (1) the "veneration" of the models of above (so the yankee, the cross dresser, the dark one, ecc...); important feature of the Visual Bands is that every single member represents someone, or at least follows a stereotype; (2) the gradual lost of the visuality of the members, maybe to feel more comfortable, maybe to have a more natural and "fresh" look, maybe to gain some new market spaces (I guess that's a more cinical motivation, but this doesn't mean isn't more reliable than others). Maybe just the three of them. It's normal, having seen the 90% of the Visual Bands evolving like that, to say that now or sooner a Visual Band WILL lost its Visuality. Exception are maybe bands like Malice Mizer or minor bands. |
 by the western "way to rock". |
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 This second aspect is very important. 90% of visual artist lose their visuality, but however a great band is always a great band like first of all, Luna Sea, X-Japan, Glay, L'arc en Ciel or Dir en Grey; but what does happen when a rock band is said to be a visual band only because all members looks cool and makes themself up just a little, copying so only veterans' tendence, but not their talent, their story, the real shock? You got the more commercial aspect of visual shock, just a little more than a normal rock band that nothing can offer to stand against western rock bands, that can "simply" offer good (or bad, it doesn't matter in this context) music and nothing more similar to the original visual shock, becoming so generic Jrock. So that's finally the complete description of the visual shock Phenomena: to the left we have "real" visual bands, with a lot of enphasis on make-up, on the extreme wearing style and (in a country like Japan is someway obvious) on the more theatrical and artistic side (the extremest bands, are, as said, band like Malice Mizer or Psycho le cemu), like all fanzines and girls want; to the right we have new, cool, trendy bands, that feel a new concept of the visual shock with a little bit of make-up and the best makes of clothes, so just a product of marketing inserted in the stream of the Japanese Music market. Of course in the middle we have all the shades between this left and this right. But we'd better not to misunderstand: there's not a "shock monopoly", we don't have only band like this nowadays, but also a lot of new and less new shock talents, scouted from who created the visual shock itself, Yoshiki at first, with his best discovery, Dir en Grey, one of the most important visual band of today with a lot of dark/industrial music made by talentuous musicians recently losing their visuality, with the multi-relapsed Malice Mizer and their successors Eve of Destiny and Moi Dix Mois, and the already "dead" Raphael ,Lareine, Kagerou, or again Dué Le Quartz and really a lot of others. |
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We're not a real Visual Band. We probably think "Visual" is not Visual if moved from the country that originated it and it will be impossible to reproduce here the same phenomena, but we think it's possible to create it here again and not to copy the original, adapting it to our social context, forming so a new genre, inspired to the original. A genre that should have a strong visual impact first of all, that calls itself, once again, Visual Shock. |
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