(Definitely not a 100% paper, but I tried my best. ^^; )
There are many musicians around the world, but none of them are quite like Gackt Camui. Gackt’s musical and theatrical abilities have been realized through his past and present experiences. Through these experiences Gackt has become very successful in Japanese entertainment.
Whether Gackt liked it or not, he was surrounded by music during his childhood.His parents influenced him greatly during this time. His father
played the trumpet and classical music made up most of his musical repertoire. At the tender age of three, Gackt began taking piano lessons. He enjoyed playing and says that it could have been because he liked his lesson teacher, but his love for the piano turned sour around the beginning of elementary school (Tarrant).
Gackt moved quite a bit during his elementary school years and so his piano lesson teachers changed. This was a main reason for him to begin hating the piano. At the age of eleven, his strict parents finally let him quit the piano (Tarrant).
He went through three years without the percussion instrument and he did not miss it, but at the age of fourteen he found the need to play it. His sempai (an upperclassman) played the piano and was quite good at it. Seeing that he wasn’t so good, Gackt began practicing wildly. He doesn’t like to lose (Tarrant). In fact, he began playing many other instruments just so he could become better at them than anyone else. When it came to brass instruments, he realized that many brass instruments are played with the same fingering except for a few. Now he can play virtually all brass instruments (Tarrant).
An instrument he came to really love was the drums. He loved the brutality of them. It was a sound he never really heard from his classical music. He was getting lessons from a high school student so he could be better at them than a friend of his who could also play them (Tarrant).
Even though he spent his childhood listening to classical music, you’d think he’d tire of it. It turns out classical music is one of his biggest influences in his own music today. In his autobiography, Gackt describes Japanese music. “All the melodies are sad.” The classical music and later as he found it to be so, foreign music, had a wide range of emotion (Tarrant). Perhaps one of the main reasons he became a music professional was to shed a new light on Japanese music.
Gackt’s first two bands gave him enough experience to become a successful solo artist and he has continued to succeed through his solo career. In his autobiography, Gackt states that he was not allowed to watch television and his parents played and therefore he didn’t really know what a band was. Sure, he knew that bands played music, but he didn’t understand the concept of playing in a band. But later in his high school life, he learned more about them and he decided to give it a try and he loved it. He had been on stage before, but the experience he had while playing in a band gave him a rush he never felt before (Tarrant).
His first band was Cain’s Feel. He played the drums for this very small, unknown band. The vocalist of the band was very confident in becoming a professional and the band broke up in a very small amount of time (Tarrant). Gackt wasn’t happy without a band to play for, so a friend of his introduced him to a man by the name of Mana. He was a member and founder of a visual kei (Visual spirit. A very flashy type of band with over the top costumes and performances) band called Malice Mizer. They had recently lost their vocalist and were looking for a new one. Previously, a friend by the name of You had told Gackt to try singing. He did so and began taking voice lessons. He had a good voice, but his range was very narrow. Most professional vocalists during the “band boom” had a very wide, high range. He met the rest of the band and sang to them as he played the piano. They thought he was perfect for the part and he became the new vocalist of Malice Mizer in 1995(Tarrant).
Gackt had never really sung in front of anyone before, and as he did so, he came to the conclusion that the vocalist is responsible for communicating the band’s thoughts to the listeners. This he felt would be hard for him to do because of his Japanese dialect. Gackt was born in Okinawa, a small island off the coast of Japan. Okinawans have a very heavy accent called Kansai and it is known for being spoken in a rough way. Gackt is not proud of this dialect, so he only speaks it if he’s angry and loses focus. He decided to sing his songs in the natural Japanese way because he didn’t want his lyrics to sound “dirty.” He knew his band did not want to be portrayed that way (Tarrant).
He became very successful during this time in his life. Malice Mizer was very competitive and so Gackt became competitive. He doesn’t like to lose. The band had already made two cds, Voyage and Memoire (Dugal). Over time, he began taking over jobs hat had originally been split up between the members. The final straw was with “Le Ciel”, a song that he composed and wrote himself. The band members became very jealous of this and in the fall of 1998, Gackt left Malice Mizer (Tarrant).
Most of their fans left Malice Mizer and followed once Gackt went solo. He was very talented and once he left, Malice Mizer just wasn’t the same. After the band’s drummer died suddenly from a medical condition and they found another vocalist, they put out only one more cd and decided it would be best to split up (Tarrant).
Finally Gackt could start his own band. He had many members, including his friend You, and he released his first cd, Miserable, in 1999. He has been releasing new albums steadily and the current names of his albums along with Miserable are Mars, Rebirth, Moon, Crescent, Love Letter, and Diablos. He also has two compilations called the Sixth Day and Seventh Night ~unplugged~ (Dugal).
Even though he’s no longer a part of Malice Mizer, you can still see his Mizer roots within his concerts. They are always complete with lasers and costumes as well as special movies shown in the beginning and the middle of the spectacular shows. The biggest audience he ever had was the sold out night at the Tokyo Dome on Christmas Eve in 2005. It was recorded as the most expensive concert in Japan’s history, not to mention it was also the longest concert Gackt had ever held. Two years of preparations and sixth months of practice was what took for the concert to be successful, but it was well worth it (Biography for Gackt).
Gackt’s latest single is Returner-Yami no Shuen, a song he wrote for Furin Kazan, a television drama on June 25th, 2007 (Returner Yami no Shuen). After nine years being solo, this single topped Oricon’s chart just after its release. The Oricon charts are much like the American Billboards. This is the first single of his that made number one. Hopefully Gackt will continue to top those charts in the near future.
As Gackt became more and more successful in the music industry he decided to experiment with other kinds of entertainment. Gackt was a co-writer of a movie called Moon Child. It’s about two orphan brothers, Sho and Shinji, who meet a vampire named Kei during their childhood. It follows Sho’s and Kei’s friendship throughout Sho’s mortal life. Sho just so happens to be played by Gackt, (Buchanan) and him and HYDE, the singer/actor who played Kei, co-wrote Orenji no Taiyou. This song was sung by both of them and was played during the movie and at the end of the movie. Gackt has also played in a short called Hero’s Hero. He played a 600+ year old librarian and taught a confused little girl about three of his heroes. Apparently it was made to inspire children. At the end, Gackt asks the audience, “Do you have a hero?” (Hero’s Hero).
Gackt has been seen on a number of commercials, but a new role has Gackt on television longer than a few seconds. He plays Uesugi Kenshin on the Japanese drama Furin Kazan (Gackt Plays Medieval). Uesugi Kenshin is a very well known warlord from the 16th century who was a devout Buddhist, for his name was changed once he pledged himself to follow Buddha’s teachings. His original name was Nagao Kagetora (Uesugi Kenshin). Furin Kazan is a small series that is a part of a larger series called the Taiga Drama series (Gackt Plays Medieval).
He has also written many other short stories that have yet to be released as well as a successful autobiography that was published on September 30th, 2003 (Tarrant). Perhaps Gackt will also become an accomplished novelist, too.
Gackt may pull people to him or push them away depending on their preferences and tastes, but on thing is certain; Gackt is talented. His successful career has not been easy to get through, but he continues to chase his dreams. He does not like to lose and nothing will stop him from going that next step to prove his musical greatness.
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