By now, everyone has heard about We Are X, the documentary film about one of Japan’s most legendary rock bands, X Japan. The film already won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Best Editing by the Sundance Institute, and extra buzz picked up speed when it was announced that the movie would be screened at this year’s SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas last week. SXSW describes the movie as “the arc of X – from phenomenal origins through tumultuous super-stardom and premature dissolution up to present day, as the band prepares to reunite for a show at the legendary Madison Square Garden while struggling to reconcile a past haunted by suicide, injury and cultish extremism with the insatiable thirst for perfection.” It’s the stuff of high drama and theatrics, just the kind band leader, drummer, and pianist Yoshiki lives for.
Here’s what I knew about X Japan by the time I purchased their first CD over a decade ago: hide was the most interesting, Yoshiki was the most tortured, and almost none of it mattered because the band had already broken up. hide was dead. Toshi was in a religious cult. And Heath and Pata were scrambling to cobble together new projects.
The band cited few reasons for breaking up, but it was obvious that even before the release of their last studio album, DAHLIA, most of the members were unhappy. hide achieved the most success in his solo project, combining a different, less serious and more blithe aspect into his work, which incorporated more and more progressive and industrial sounds into the mix (he was a big fan of Garbage); in fact, hide’s signature loud and fun colors and style were the only remaining “visuals” in X Japan as the years wore on — pink hair and neon green latex suits were hard to miss standing next to everyone else in black. Toshi had started to second guess his fame and fortune, struggling with his identity and place in the world. And Yoshiki was too busy controlling every aspect of every facet of every second of every piece of song that made the cut; “perfectionist” might be one way to describe him. Control-freak would be another. Domineering, also a good one. Hogging the spotlight wouldn’t be too far-fetched either.
Before long, the credits on the track lists stopped featuring all the members and only Yoshiki’s name appeared. The other members stopped getting solos. Their songs were cut or heavily edited. Yoshiki, a classically trained pianist, dropped the others’ songs out to make room for more of his signature ballads. The band’s last album, featured two songs written by hide, one written by Heath and Pata, and seven songs written by Yoshiki. It’s not hard to see where disagreements and artistic differences started to crop up.
Watching the trailer for We Are X is like seeing the evidence come to life all over again two decades later: I’m not sure what the movie actually features since I haven’t seen it yet, but the trailer is nothing short of the Memoirs of Yoshiki. His voice, or rather, his story and his point of view, narrates the entire time: like the last five minutes of all of his ballads, it is a creation of his mind, a rehearsed poem, with special attention paid to the darkest nights of his soul, and the highest peaks of success — which are now, naturally, even though they haven’t released an album of new material in almost 20 years (despite Yoshiki promising said album for nearly as long). “Why am I here? Why am I in this world?” he asks as the trailer starts, and we strap ourselves in to find out why Yoshiki’s existence alone matters in a movie about a band of five.
His ego knows no bounds: his talking head crops up countless times, while the other members don’t speak at all (the language barrier shouldn’t be a problem when other voices get subtitles). Understandably, X was a band Yoshiki started with his childhood friend, but to take all the credit is nearly sacrilegious. This is not a movie about one of the greatest rock bands of all time, this is a movie about Yoshiki: Yoshiki the musical genuis, Yoshiki the frail, injured victim who seeks the medical help of doctors for tragic plot development (as already frequently chronicled on his Instagram and Facebook — cue the far away, searching look in his eyes as he delicately cradles his arm and looks out the hospital’s window for his staged photo), and Yoshiki the actor, taking his role in the spotlight once again, playing the part he’s been rehearsing since the days of Vanishing Vision.
“After my father died, my mother bought me a drum set. Instead of breaking things, I started banging drums,” Yoshiki begins, and we’re immediately transported to one of his “Tears” sagas: a carefully practiced tale of sadness and woe. When the band segues into hide’s suicide, we get a shot of sad-Yoshiki, looking forlorn into a mirror while the facts are smeared to aid in the drama (hide was not a member of X Japan at the time of his suicide on May 2, 1998, as the band had already officially broken up in December of 1997). When we hear him say “X Japan’s era was over,” we get a cinematic shot of Yoshiki, walking alone down a crowded street. Pata who? That bassist guy, what was his name again? Even when Marilyn Manson chimes in with an informative soundbite, we see pictures of Yoshiki, pretty odd when hide was the known Manson fan. It’s not until about 1:50 in that we even see a single shot of any of the other surviving and current members.
There is no doubt in my mind that X Japan was one of the best and most influential Japanese rock bands of all time, and this movie is a long-overdue recognition of the talent, skill, hard work, luck, and perseverance that are all hallmarks of the greatest bands since the dawn of time. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons a comment like Gene Simmons rankles so much: “If those guys were born in America, they might be the biggest band in the world.” But they weren’t. They were born in Japan, into a very unique time in history where their style of music and dress were able to resonate: influenced by KISS, they started out as a speed metal band dressed in flamboyant hair and makeup, at a time when equivalent “hair metal” bands were already going out of style in America and the simplicity and dressed-down nature of grunge was gaining popularity. This creation of what would come to be called “visual-kei” would go on to influence countless number of Japanese bands from Dir en grey to Due le Quartz to Malice Mizer. America was already over it, trading in one type of cool for another. If they were born in America they wouldn’t be X. They wouldn’t be X Japan. And in the end, it’s a shame that particular pride is missing, when so much of the movie seems to concentrate on Yoshiki’s very personal emotional journey and comeback. In that sense, the movie seems like it’s going to be less factual documentary, than a curated collection of highlights that seek a predestined agenda and work off a script, one that clearly paints Yoshiki as the hero and savior of the band. One wonders why Yoshiki didn’t just drop the humble brags and false modesty, call the movie I Am X, and have done with it.
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You must be really fun at parties.
This text sums up everything I think about X Japan nowadays. Congrats for saying it out loud.