Dir en Grey is probably the absolute most famous visual-kei band in existence. Funny enough, they're not even visual-kei anymore and it seems like they want absolutely nothing to do with the scene at all. There are a lot of bands that influence other groups in visual-kei: in fact, it's at the point where a lot of people don't even bother listening to that style of music because of how few bands have a good deal of creative integrity. These bands include proto-vk bands like X (often credited with creating the scene all together), Penicillin, Kuroyume, Baiser (to an extent), and many other band who've had a small influence in the late 90's. However, that pretty much holds true up until 2002 or so. Anyone with ears is able to tell that after that the style of visual-kei, both in terms of imagery and music, changed dramatically. Although Penicillin and Kuroyume were also influences, no other band has had a bigger impact on modern visual-kei than Dir en Grey.

Why am I writing this? To be honest, I'm not really a fan of them. I think Kyo's voice can be highly displeasing and I'm not a fan of Nu-metal or whatever they were from their later music videos, plus their fans are absolutely bat-shit crazy. Where as fans of Velvet Eden are the kind of people who would kill Dada and wear his skin to their birthday party, Dir en Grey fans are worse and they come in hoards of dozens at a time. I'm not saying all of their fans are bad people: just most of them. Horrible, horrible people at that. Because of their later music videos (when I tried them for the first time it was in 2007 or so) and their fans, I literally rejected everything about them save one song that a dear friend introduced to me. Their music videos grossed me out, their music wasn't all that great to me, and it was just something I did not want to be a part of at all costs.

Then I became active in the vk community, and all of my fears of this band were further amplified. Gradually I just started disliking them more for the sake of disliking them to not be proven wrong. I'm human: I do shallow things just like everyone else. In my defense, though, Dir en Grey does have a ton of zealous fans that are very akin to driving people away from taking this band seriously, so it's not 100% my ignorance.



What this post is boiling down to is an explanation of why I'm going to be trying Dir en Grey out. I don't hate all of their songs and I know they'll have more songs I'll love than just "I'll." So I guess you can say that I'm taking this journey to experience what they've done and how it's affected the rest of the scene. What started this? Someone on Monochrome Heaven made a thread asking when they stopped being visual-kei. Zesshoku replied with a beautiful argument with pictures of their older costumes. Let me tell you, some of them are pretty awesome, but others gave me the reaction of "Oh...they look like ~rambles off a list of 10 or so bands~." Then I thought, "maybe they really are more of a big deal than I've been playing down for all of these years." Here's some of the examples posted:

Love this. Lots of old-school goodness and androgony going on, just how I like it. Unfortunately, most of their modern fans forget that they did, at one point, look like this.

And then there was this. This is like all of modern VK at once. I think those influenced by here are fairly obvious.


So, I shall start listening through their discography and see what I think. I am predicting that I am only going to really enjoy up until 2002 or so since that's the style of music I prefer the most, but who knows. This far I have listened through La:Sadie's and their first mini album Missa and really enjoyed them. However, I'm not getting any "OHMYGOD MY LIFE IS FOREVER CHANGED" vibes from them. Maybe I'm expecting too much based on other's actions, but we'll see. I've also taken a look at some of their PVs and here's my preliminary thoughts:

I'll- prefect. Love the flow, the melody, the out of tune vocals, and just about everything about it. This song is the one a friend introduced to me and I've liked it ever since. However, as Herpes had pointed out to me, it sounds a lot like D≒SIRE due to the fact that their vocalist was Diru's producer.

Another old song: it was covered on a 90's v.a. cover album recently and a lot of people thought Merry did an alright job. To be honest, this song just sounds like Due Le Quartz's "卍搦め" to me.

A song introduced to me by Herpes before DSS was released. My first listen to this I liked it a lot, but listening to this again today it sounded kind of bland to me. Again, it sounds like an edgier version of D≒SIRE with a significantly worse vocalist.

脈 (Myaku) : a song introduced to me by Arithmetica. I kind of liked the song, but the video was pretty silly. The girl eats people and cuts her hair to look VK. Sounds pretty similar to like everything by every no name VK band, so I'm starting to see where the influence is coming from.

I still have like...all of their disco to listen through and, to be honest, I'm nervous about doing this. I don't want to be proven wrong is the thing, but it's better to experience something and then form  an opinion than to have an opinion based on just wanting to disagree with the masses.