ART OF LIFE
X Japan
Analysis and review by Gerald Tarrant
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.
Again, this is not easy listening. Don't listen to Art of Life unless
you're ready to immerse yourself entirely in the story of this song,
but you won't be disappointed if you evaluate it as a genre all to
itself. Art of Life is probably the greatest legacy that X Japan has
left to us.
[/b]
X Japan
Analysis and review by Gerald Tarrant
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.
Again, this is not easy listening. Don't listen to Art of Life unless
you're ready to immerse yourself entirely in the story of this song,
but you won't be disappointed if you evaluate it as a genre all to
itself. Art of Life is probably the greatest legacy that X Japan has
left to us.
[/b]
