I don't mind VAMPS as much as you would think I would, mostly because they never pretended to be something they weren't. When I looked at them I knew what I was getting from the beginning--a lot of cover songs and a wanna-be monster theme. I went in expecting that, and I (half-heartedly) got what I figured I'd get. Plus, bands like VAMPS generally only play with the bare-based visuals and they play okay music (that isn't half as autotuned as I would expect.) When you go to a concert you know that the guys on stage know they aren't monsters and that they're playing David Bowie songs.
My problem with Vampires Everywhere is that they are exactly what I hate about the music industry right now-- they more than fed themselves in with a gimmick, they drowned themselves in it. They make awful music and pretend to be underworld gods. They know their music isn't possibly marketable to most people, so they'll feed it to the only people willing to listen--which are generally generic wanna-be goths.
It's not about the music, it's about the marketing. If they market themselves to be demi-gods and vampires and they get a cult following that then markets into a 'mainstream-unstream', it doesn't matter if they know anything about music or how to play their instrument. I've seen it happen more times than I can count on both hands--I've got family in the industry. It's about stealing the market, playing to what they want rather than playing what you love and the quality is the last thing on that list. They want to fit in with everything else.
Which is why I'm angry at X--what are they playing at? They're turning toward an audience that honestly cares less about quality and more about what's popular. They're playing toward what the 'mainstream-unstream' wants. These are the guys who shop at Hot Topic and think that they're awesome and their music is awesome, without realizing that they're just like the pop-music market in their consumption of anything that pops up on those walls.
By attempting to get their shit into the mainstream, I fear that X will happily sacrifice their dignity to get on Hot Topic's wall. Will their be less quality music? Will they even care?
Is Toshi going to start talking about slitting his wrists and drinking newborn baby blood and doing it all with a scratch auto-tuned scream?
That gives me nightmares.
