What is Visual Kei? Visual Kei was an underground music genre that sprung to life in the late 80s/early 90s around several Japanese urban centers, most important being Tokyo. The term visual, used in Japanese as an English loanword, refers to the visual appearance of the artists. Kei is Japanese for "style." Really, there is no difference between the make-up dramatics of visual kei and earlier artists of the "gothic 80s" in Europe. It is honestly a poor description of the music, but the one that has stuck. Visual kei loosely combined several genres together: the atmosphere, minor-key phrasings, and theatrics of gothic music; the lead guitar and (sometimes) guitar tone of heavy metal, as well as use of riff as melodic phrase; and the energetic drumming of punk. Visual kei bands drew from many other fractured influences, but the above features are almost always present. Structurally the music follows basic conventions of pop and rock composition, meaning songs are limited to verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structures and insignificant variations thereof. There are some exceptional exceptions to this, but visual kei, though an underground genre because of its aesthetics, was truly just an offshoot of rock/pop. Lyrically visual kei was scattered and unfocused, with bands most often singing about dark but vague concepts. For those who can read Japanese, the amateur, dark-dark-dictionary feeling of most visual kei lyrics is undeniable, but often looked over because of said lyrics' resonance with visual kei's angsty, largely teenage fanbase. Good lyricists did exist, but they were the exception and not the rule. The final, true statement about what visual kei is could be stated simply: a group of innovating bands, sharing some similar influences, who fused gothic/metal/punk into a slightly different form of rock. -Adapted From Kurai's Translations- So you guys know what's Visual Kei rite? ^^