One Of The Most Interesting Things About Looking At Buck-Tick Lyrics Is Not Just Atsushi (and Imai)'s

One of the most interesting things about looking at Buck-Tick lyrics is not just Atsushi (and Imai)'s evolution as a wordsmith but his evolution with topics, if that's even the right word for it. You literally get to watch him get hit by things we both do and don't know about that happen to him throughout his life, and then how over time he grew to deal with them- or sometimes just accept them as fucked- and what he thought about it. And of course not everything is auto-biographical- we know his love for creating characters to tell meaningful stories about- but you still have the well-known strains of how he deals with significant loss, how he comes to terms eventually with people from his past he can't change, his own fuck-ups, encouragement to fans, examinations of things he encountered either irl or in the news.

And then, whoever came up with the brilliant idea to record so many live performances literally from day one until the very, very end...because not only does he evolve with each layer of new songs but also with each fresh performance of even some of the band's oldest, iconic songs. We get to see for ourselves how his relationship to various subject matter changes from performance to performance, the best ones being with decades between them. Whether it's a raw, excruciating grappling, to a sort of sublime madness of acceptance, to finally elevating himself above the issue entirely-- 太陽に殺された/Murdered by the Sun is such an excellent example of this, and for those just wandering in is a song about questioning celebrity, whether it's worth being a player on the stage when the attention can be excruciating- and with the added subtext that the ones you love may die with you nowhere near them for the sake of success. Atsushi questioned his entire career with this song after his mother died from cancer while the band was on tour- "Murdered by the Sun" perhaps more than just a metaphor for being killed by the spotlight, but him as a son feeling extremely responsible for not being there. If you have the time to take out to watch all three play out, I encourage it:

The most famous, from 1992, where he even added an extra verse at the end that I don't think he ever sang again- an extremely raw and clawing performance where the lighting at the beginning hits his face perfectly to reveal a Noh mask-like countenance to pull us back to this idea of the oldest theatre, and also to the fact that he likely felt like he was currently hiding behind perhaps several masks at the time.

10 years later in 2003, now the lines of the song are drawn out, more floating, his lilting voice older and more seasoned than last time. It's been ten long years that probably shot by in a flash and he's experienced so much with still so much yet ahead of him. The madness of it all is settled in his bones now, you feel, and there is an acceptance about it even though he's learned to shoulder the strain that's still there.

10+ years again to 2015, now the song starts off as if he's telling a story about someone else entirely- he's risen so far above the issue because it is wholeheartedly his life now- but in the second half of the song you sort of see him reawaken and look back down at his past self as he asks his questions "Will I just die? Will I live?"- like looking back into the past and going "Well what will you choose, kid? Because here we are now." And in his final chorus he no longer is left beating himself up telling the sun to just kill him like he did the first time in the added verse- now he's blowing kisses to the sky in each direction as he thinks about those gone on- and this time, this time, at the end he does not die.

Honestly, that someone had the genius idea- even if it was just for marketing and to make money- of recording so so many lives which allows us to literally see it all in action with our own two eyes like the best sort of modern anthropology...I want to hug them. Because such a life...such an artist and their very vivid artistry is preserved forever now in a way that we can look at almost like pages in a book.

There is no conclusion to this post because ultimately there is no conclusion- at least not a satisfying one- to his story. Or perhaps, writing it out and thinking about it now, ironically there is. Atsushi, essentially, died on stage. Weirdly self-fulfilling that the 'sun' of the stage, in a sense, did catch up to him in the end when a song about dealing with problems in the moment was never meant to be a prophecy. And I don't think it was, genuinely. More of a curiosity at best. Something that makes his story all the more interesting, perhaps. And that's precisely why I think there's no ending to be had- every person who sinks their claws in deeply to the material will come away with some treasure that possibly no one has managed to see before. And that, right there, keeps adding pages to the book.

There is no ending because a sudden curtain fall does not constitute an ending, and there is no ending if all of us continue to add pages to his and the band's story. Not even the band is stopping their own page-adding- Imai claiming Atsushi was causing mischief in the studio while recording Subrosa is testament to that.

I don't know. This post started off as just a vehicle for me to rattle off the pressing thoughts I had about artistic and personal evolution and then turned into this whole thing so I don't have much of an ending here myself. Except to perhaps say don't stop listening, don't stop watching, don't stop posting and comparing and questioning and sharing your thoughts about things, because these are all pages to a book about a man whose artistry is very much alive and well- because of us. They say, too, sometimes, that when people are reincarnated they can still remember who they are, or they remember wisps of enough to recognize things from before. I'd like to think, perhaps in a rather fantastical way maybe, that when the wheel turns and he comes back again, that in his travels he may stumble across some old band called Buck-Tick and see not just the mountain of art he and his best friends created but also all of our little foothills piled around it containing our thoughts and translations and praises and grief and happiness all carefully built with love left behind for him and the guys. And that somehow, whether he understands it or not, he can smile at seeing us all again, even if it makes no sense to him at all.