What does the name X Japan mean to you?

It probably means as many different things as there are different kinds of fans, but though X Japan's classification is as a metal band, the type of music they are most famous for is probably their ballads. Beautiful and haunting melodies like Tears, Endless Rain, Say Anything, and (probably the best known to Western fans because of the X anime) Forever Love revolutionized the music scene in Japan, bringing a sweeping wave of new types of music previously unknown to the jrock community.

However, what most fans don't realize is that X Japan's ballads barely scratch the surface of their talent. There is a reason that X Japan is called legendary, and it's more than for their trademark metal tunes, their ballads, or any of their songs that have become more popular since they've disbanded. X Japan had a depth of musical talent that has rarely been found in any other band, Japanese or otherwise, and there are certain songs that exceptionally showcase just how GOOD they really are. Art of Life is one of those songs.

Released as its own album in 1993, Art of Life is, at just under 30 minutes, the longest song X Japan ever wrote and probably one of the longest rock songs ever in the history of rock. There is no song in their repertoire that compares to this tour-de-force. Their song Rose of Pain from the 1989 album Blue Blood, can be seen as an earlier predecessor of some of the techniques and melodies that would later evolve into Art of Life, but even Rose of Pain is much shorter (11:46) and much simpler. For comparison, Art of Life can be seen as the jrock counterpart to the legendary rock ballad Stairway to Heaven (1971) by Led Zeppelin, but longer, more elaborate, and much more intense and sweeping.

Art of Life is not an "easy listening" song, and it defies so many well-entrenched traditions of standard rock music that even well-rehearsed jrock fans might want to put it off for later. First-time listeners new to the rock ballad genre will work much better thinking of it as several songs combined into one and coupled together with transitions in between, sort of like a long train with many cars strung together to form a single line. Every type of music that X Japan has ever played can be found in this song: rock, metal, ballad, piano, symphonic...and a listener should be ready to take all of this into account at once.

The song begins quite simply, with soft guitar and Yoshiki on piano, sounding much like a normal X Japan ballad. However, after the first few seconds, it could easily be mistaken for a classical composition, as the orchestra slides neatly under the guitars and overwhelms them, with the piano continuing on in force. Yoshiki is in fine form here. The classical mood is jarred abruptly with the entrance of Toshi at about the 1:18 mark with some of the most beautiful lyrics that Yoshiki has ever written: "Desert rose / Why do you live alone / If you are sad / I'll make you leave this life / Are you white, blue or bloody red / All I can see is drowning in cold grey sand." In this song, Toshi's voice is undergoing its final transformation into the clear, high tone heard in the album Dahlia, and while it's still ragged and wild around the edges, it is much smoother than it is in Rose of Pain. Some people might prefer Toshi's old "metal" voice, while some others might prefer the smoother ballad Dahlia style. Here in Art of Life, it is both and neither at the same time. As Toshi continues, the piano fades and Hide enters with soft plucked guitar. At the three minute mark, Toshi drops out and Hide, Pata, and Heath come in in full force, with Yoshiki back on drums in a sweeping, grandiose, parade-esque continuation of the melody. This is the Hide, Pata, Heath, and Yoshiki that we all know and love from ballad solos such as Endless Rain.

At 3 minutes and 30 seconds, the mood changes abruptly and the tempo flies. This is X Japan as the revolutionary speed metal band. One can almost imagine Yoshiki behind the drums, shirtless, pounding away at the set with hair flying. There are some impressive slides by Hide and Pata before the band settles back into their comfortable "metal mode." As Toshi enters, it is obvious that this metal part is also an evolution of earlier metal songs such as Blue Blood. X Japan has by now lost the raw, youthful sound of their early days. Hide and Pata are very much in control, playing along perfectly in sync with Yoshiki's wild drumming, Toshi's passionate yet melodic vocals, and the underlying orchestra accompaniment, all of which will become a trademark of X Japan's later "metal ballads" such as Dahlia or even Hide's Pink Spider. The solo here is standard X Japan metal, as far as guitarists as talented as Hide and Pata can be called "standard."

It's not an X Japan song without voiceovers, except that here they're done not by Yoshiki, but a female speaker. The female voiceover segues into a nice, rhythmic, pulsing harpsichord-sounding keyboard solo, with the orchestra backing. "Turning away from the wall / Nothing I can see / The scream deep inside / Reflecting another person in my heart." The tension builds as the guitars and drums enter, and then the time signature changes to half-time as Toshi comes in briefly. A long instrumental chorus follows. Strong bass underlines this entire section, with the guitars dueling furiously with the drums. The time signature alternates between 3/4 and 4/4, speeding along towards Hide's guitar solo at the ten minute mark. Heath has some nice bass in this solo as well. As Pata enters back in at 10:35, the piece becomes increasingly more frantic, seeming to gather momentum though the tempo remains the same, hurtling along, falling and building and falling and building again till the guitars wail at a high F. The orchestra and synthesizers become steadily more prominent and it reaches a feverish pitch where the guitars are not only dueling with the bass and drums but with the strings as well. The guitars drop to a lower energy level around the 11 minute mark and the orchestra takes over their part, weaving their eighth-note runs through the wild dance of Yoshiki's drumming. This section of the song has definite influences from classical symphonic composition.

Toshi comes in again for a few bars at 12:40: "Dry my tears / Wipe my bloody face / I wanna feel me living my life / Outside my walls" and the song tames down, the orchestra sweeping behind him and the drums and guitar to once more recreate the epic ballad style. At thirteen minutes, all this suddenly fades completely, whispering away into the stillness as a lone viola (it might be a violin but it sounds too low...correct me if I'm wrong.) enters in what is certainly one of, if not the, most beautiful instrumental solos that Yoshiki has ever written. More strings enter as the viola sings in the foreground, and just as the emotional pull is reaching a height, the female voice over from the earlier part of the song reenters. "You can't draw a picture of yesterday, so / You're painting your heart with your blood..." This sudden speaking voice might be a bit jarring for some people, and Yoshiki probably meant it to be disconcerting, as the previous mood set by the viola changes with the background orchestra's shift to falling arpeggios, building tension. The voice becomes two, then four, then seem to be whispering from the air all around while everyone enters in the sweeping slow rock balladic melody from before.

Toshi's voice fades away at fifteen minutes, more dramatically this time with a only single violin remaining out of the powerful orchestration that had just pounded out an unforgettable six minutes of almost total instrumental rock melody. The violin sustains a soft, yet piercing, high A and then Yoshiki enters on piano.

Yoshiki's piano solo in Art of Life has to be at once one of the most controversial and brilliant compositions in rock history. Rarely has anyone come close to Yoshiki's dextrous use of this instrument in rock composition, and no rock musician that I know of can match his raw power and talent in playing. The piano solo in Art of Life is about seven minutes long with no extra accompaniment, and starts out simply enough with syncopated eighth-note chords in the right hand and single notes in the left, gaining strength and body as the left hand gradually enters with both chords and running notes, changing from eighth-notes to sixteenth-notes and then suddenly a few seconds before seventeen minutes, repeats itself all over again. Just as it is starting to become repetitive, you'll notice a little discordance in the notes. At first, that might be attributed to an overactive imagination from sitting through the same song for almost twenty minutes, or even a slip of the hand on Yoshiki's part (I'm sure that's happened before, even to him), but as the piece draws on, the discordance becomes more and more apparent, and by eighteen minutes it's very obvious that Yoshiki is consciously missing notes. The running melody is still there, but it is slowly pushed back by the seemingly random notes that intrude in upon what was a beautiful, simple line. By the nineteen minute mark, it has degenerated into the fine art of pounding.

The discord has puzzled many an X Japan fan, but if you can get past the pounding and carefully listen to each note, it'll become quickly obvious that Yoshiki isn't throwing up his hands in despair and just playing the piano with his feet (though he might be doing some of that, who knows...it's Yoshiki, after all). There's a meticulous quality even in the most discordant of the notes in this solo. You might have to listen a few times to the solo, taking it as a whole rather than as two seperate parts, melodic and discordant, to effectively see the larger picture, but Yoshiki keeps the rhythm of the solo moving through the entire seven minutes, never stopping, never pausing, pushing the notes so that they seem to be dripping from the piano strings. This is piano playing - not just keyboarding or rock piano playing, but true piano playing at a high quality classical level. This is the level of professionalism that artists like Gackt aspire to but haven't reached. (Gackt's piano solo Blue, the c/w of Mirror, actually sounds like a more amateur version of Yoshiki's Art of Life piano solo, pounding and all.)

If you listen even more carefully, you'll notice that there are not two hands, but four in the later part of this piano solo. I don't know the recording facts about Art of Life, but obviously Yoshiki must have spent hours in the studio by himself just recording these seven minutes (I don't even want to know how long it took to record the whole song). The four piano lines clash with each other in a dance reminiscent of the earlier dueling of melody lines between the band members in the metal section. Yoshiki's piano work becomes even more complicated at this point, with a constant stream of running sixteenth and thirty-second-notes in all four hands, using the full length of the keyboard to its full advantage. Yoshiki holds nothing back. He pulls out all the stops, pouring into the piano rage, grief, hatred, anger, sorrow, loneliness, passion, hope, joy, and pure ecstasy all at once. The piano, like his drumming, effectively becomes an extension of his own body and his own mind here. The music sweeps across the listener, jarring and painful in its discord, frightingly searing, almost orgasmic in its pitch.

And then just as the pounding threatens to cause severe brain damage to all X Japan fans everywhere, Yoshiki lets up. The melody comes back, flowing softly through the discordant notes bit by bit as the orchestra enters once more. The random notes fade slowly as the former melodic line returns in a more refreshingly pompous state with the strings bolstering it, soaring to new heights. The piano gradually fades back into the background and then it is just strings, just as it was in the beginning. A swelling run up the keyboard (and maybe harp?) segues into a single-note rendition of the melody by the treble strings and a strong, solid bass line underneath. The orchestra slows and stalls at a fermata at 24 minutes, and then...

It's X Japan. The familiar metal is back. Gone is the experimental piano and orchestra as if they'd never been, and Yoshiki's drumming, Hide's and Pata's harmonies, Heath's bass, and Toshi's vocals are like old friends to our ears. A hint of the discordant piano remains, as does the orchestra, but only faintly and far between, to remind us of what we've just experienced, but as the melody rises and swells to a grand chorus, all that seems far away. The piano was the cry of the song, but this is the meat. This is X Japan at their peak.

The tempo changes to a majestic half-time at 27 minutes. The piano enters once more with full, deep chords, and the guitars swell in a final arc and Toshi sings the last verse of the song: "Art of life / An eternal bleeding heart / You never wanna breathe your last / Wanna live / Can't let my heart kill myself / Still I'm feeling for / A Rose is breathing love / in my life." As he sings "life," the background instrumentation suddenly drops away and the last note of the song is a sustained C against silence.

Art of Life is a song about life, about despair and surrender combating against eternal hope and light, about humans struggling to survive in a world which may seem like a desert at times. Yoshiki's piano solo emphasizes this to perfecting, with the battle of discordant notes against each other while the melody struggles to be heard. It can be even taken as a story of the journeys of the different members of the band to make it to where they stood then, at the pinnacle of their careers and probably the most legendary Asian band of all time. The song could even more appropriately be compared to a poem or a novel. To describe Art of Life in only one or a few words would be to detract from the myriad rainbow of elements that come together to make this song the masterpiece that it is, but if one word had to be chosen, it would probably be the word that is used most often to describe X Japan: "Legendary."

That is not to say that there are not weak points in this song. Some of the sections drag on just a little bit too long. There are parts which are jarring, parts which could have been toned down, parts which could have been fine-tuned to produce even a more vivid effect. But all that pales in comparison to the work of art that Art of Life really is. It is easy to say that Yoshiki outdid himself on this song, but really, it wasn't just Yoshiki, but also Toshi, Hide, Pata, Heath, and all the musicians in the backing string orchestra who put their hearts into making this epic.