It's official. The second Japanese invasion of America is in full swing. As anime continues to boom, other aspects of Japanese culture has started slipping into everyday American society. The latest is Japanese music. You may have heard someone reference J-Pop, that's Japanese Pop music. There's also J-Rock. Guess what this is. So far, the naming convention is just to put a "J" in front of the genre of the music to let you know that it's Japanese.

Now there's a new name floating around for a different genre. It's Visual-kei (VK or Visual for short). When I first started reading about it, the bands sounded pretty cool and it sounded like a different style of music. So, I downloaded some. Well, it is good, but it should just be called J-Alternative. It's like listening to Saliva or Drowning Pool only with Japanese lyrics. So, it is good, I just don't see why it gets the cool name "Visual-kei" and everything else just gets the dumb "J" in front of it.

Some of the "mainstream" artists you should look to download are Dir en grey, Luna Sea, MUCC, cali gari and Plastic Tree. Others which are harder to find include D'espairsRay, Dummy Children and Deadman.

The song played on this page is Garnet by D'espairsRay, who also goes by +D'espairsRay+ for reasons unknown to us. If you click here, you can download the song. It's not the best example out there, but it's the only one we could make downloadable for you.




staff out...

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