X Japan’s Incredible Ride: Meet Rock’s Most Flamboyant Survivors
“We have too much drama…”
The genial, engaging voice of Yoshiki Hayashi, drummer-pianist-songwriter of Japanese rock icons X, softens and dissipates as if he’s pausing to shake his head on the other end of the phone line. We’ve been talking about this Saturday’s show at Madison Square Garden, only the second his band – now known worldwide as “X Japan” – have ever played in New York City. But then Yoshiki begins to revisit previous American incursions. Audible sighhh.
“It’s almost unbelievable,” he says, eventually. “It’s almost too sad to be true.”
Over the band’s 30-year history – Yoshiki and singer Toshi Deyama started the group as teenagers in the early 1980s – X Japan have sold more than 30 million albums and singles, packing the 55,000-seat Tokyo Dome 18 times. They are the avatars of Japan’s most epochal rock-inspired youth movement, “visual kei,” which reimagined Bowie, Iron Maiden, and the Sex Pistols as a fluorescent flowering of mascara sneers, severe frocks and skyscraper locks, all posing hard under the band’s howling tabloid slogan: “Psychedelic Violence Crime of Visual Shock.” Their first two thrash-metal singles were called “I’ll Kill You” and “Orgasm,” yet Yoshiki went on to compose and perform a piano concerto for the 10th anniversary of Japan’s Emperor Akihito.
Although there’s a comic book, Blood Red Dragon, which features a superhero based on Yoshiki (developed with Stan Lee); there’s a mournful, very human-size vulnerability to X Japan’s career and to music. From the moment of their greatest fame at the start of the 1990s, they have been beset by, yes, an almost-unbelievable, almost-too-sad-to-be true series of misfortunes and tragedies. They have collapsed and been revived, with varying lineups, countless times. In many ways, their unkillable spirit has been the source of their mythological reputation and power. They are rock’s most flamboyant survivors. They have a gripping, exultant 29-minute metallic opus entitled “Art of Life.” Of course they do. And pity the cynic who begrudges them a triumphantly forlorn filigree.
The wounded catharsis that drove the group’s definitive late-Eighties to early-Nineties lineup – Yoshiki and Toshi, lead guitarist Hideto “Hide” Matsumoto, bassist Taiji Sawada and second guitarist Tomoaki “Pata” Ishizuka – dates back to their founder’s childhood in the Tokyo Bay beach town of Tateyama, Chiba. A piano prodigy who studied classical music at kindergarten age, Yoshiki saw his world collapse when his father committed suicide. He was 10.
“That was the same year I found out about Kiss,” he says. “I asked my mother to take me to the Kiss concert in Japan [Alive! had just been released], so they were kind of the entrance point for me for hard rock music. I also started listening to Led Zeppelin, then Iron Maiden, and then from there, pretty much every single hard-rock or heavy-metal or anything super-heavy band I was into. I also started playing drums the same year.”