Ten Times Thirteen

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Well, folks, this is the moment you can feel officially old.

Or a ridiculously new immigrant to the Anarchic Republic of Buck-Tickistan, as the case may be.

Why? Because that bloody melancholic frilly vampire smorgasbord of succulence, 十三階は月光, is ten years old today. Hard to believe than an album which, last time I checked, had only come out five minutes ago, is now a dark wine red thread in the flag of Buck-Tickistan's history.

And speaking of history, for those of you who hadn't already figured it out, a tidbit - Anarchy wasn't the first Buck-Tick work to be influenced by Russian art.  In fact, the plot for the 13kai wa Gekkou stage play was based loosely on the famous Russian ballet Petrushka, with music by Igor Stravinsky. Petrushka tells the story of three puppets, Petrushka the Clown, the Ballerina, and the Moor, who are brought to life by a puppeteer (the Magician) at the Shrovetide Fair in St. Petersburg - a carnival analogous to Mardi Gras, preceding the religious fasting season of Lent. The Magician wows the crowd by bringing the three puppets to life, and the audience watches the development of a tragic love triangle: awkward, shy Petrushka loves the Ballerina, but the Ballerina is only interested in the macho, handsome Moor. When Petrushka interrupts a love scene between the Moor and the Ballerina, the Moor chases Petrushka down and kills him with one stroke of his scimitar. The audience is horrified and summon the police, but the Magician shakes his head and reminds them all that Petrushka is, after all, only a puppet. But! When night falls and the carnival is over, Petrushka's ghost is seen rising above the Magician's theater. When the Magician sees the taunting ghost, he is overcome with fear and runs away. So...who's real, and who's the puppet? When you die, are you really dead, or is it only a play?

If you're curious about Petrushka, you can watch the whole thing here.

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Buck-Tick's music may have little in common with Stravinsky, but Sakurai dealt with similar themes on 13kai, especially in songs like "Doukeshi A" and "Alive." In fact, the whole album is full of scenes that call to mind scenes in the ballet - "Goblin" could easily be a dance from a debauched carnival, while the grave, bombastic solemnity of "Passion" is reminiscent of the original iconic Alexandre Benois set design for Petrushka's room - a cold night sky filled with glittering stars over a jagged mountain range of icebergs. "Muma" certainly fits with the theme of the tortured spirit, flying over the snowy wastes of Siberia.

According to interviews, Sakurai took charge of most of the action and stage direction for the accompanying 13th Floor with Diana tour, but his re-imagining of the story is clearly a bit different from the original Petrushka ballet. In Buck-Tick's version of the story, there's no Moor in sight (probably a good thing, given the unpleasant racial implications of the character in this day and age). Rather, the Magician and the Clown become two alter-egos for Sakurai - as a performer, part of him is the storyteller, the one in control, while part of him is a puppet, a pawn, used and cast aside by the story itself, enslaved to his audience in that while he's onstage, he lives for the crowd, not for himself, doomed to subvert his own needs to do anything within his power to get the audience to laugh (or cry, as the case may be).  Over the years, this theme has cropped up again and again in Sakurai's work, in songs like "Taiyou ni Korosareta," "Kirameki no Naka de," and "Itoshi no Rock Star," but it returns powerfully in "Doukeshi A." After all, what does the "A" stand for, anyway? Methinks it's someone's initial.

"Doukeshi A" is the philosophical heart of the album, but Sakurai returns to this idea of doubles again and again in later songs. "Cabaret" may ostensibly be a dialogue between a male and female voice, but it comes across more like a fight between the angel on your right shoulder and the devil on your left - purity or corruption? Honestly or madness? Chastity or debauchery? I can't help but hear a lady-protests-too-much tone in the female voice, as if she's trying to deny her own desires even to herself, but can't help what she truly wants...and it's dark and sexual as hell.

"Ijin no Yoru" underscores a different kind of ambivalence, a fear of not knowing one's purpose, not knowing where to go, of being left behind. The song wallows in a kind of aesthetic amnesia in a sequence of dreamlike images of silence and emptiness, summer dying and everyone leaving, before ending with its two simple but resonant questions: "Who are you, say, who? Who am I, say, who?" There's no answer here.

But by the time "Doll" rolls around, Sakurai has gone from being the puppet to being the puppeteer, the Magician pulling the Ballerina's strings to make her dance. On the surface, "Doll" is a silly song, a comedic interlude between heavier numbers, and yet, the underlying theme is surprisingly dark. After all, the doll brought to life as the perfect woman has no soul of her own - she's merely a projection of the frustrated desires and fantasies of her creator. The living doll theme calls to mind another famous ballet, Coppelia, about a young man who foolishly falls in love with a life-sized dancing doll created by a mad inventor. You can watch some of Coppelia below.

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And as a side note on "Doll," I'd also like to mention that the five-note sequence repeated throughout the song, which I originally believed was a nod to Andrew Lloyd Weber's Phantom of the Opera (not my favorite piece of music ever), is in fact nothing of the sort. In fact, it's an overt reference to the fiendishly catchy riff from "Boule (Viens Ici)!" the 1984 cult hit by French New Wave pioneers Ptôse. How do I know this? Because Imai played more or less the entire Ptôse tribute album as background music for the Anarchy hall tour last year, and this song, in particular, stood out a mile (it's a cover of the original Ptôse version, from the tribute album.) Listen to it and see what I'm talking about!

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Anyway, this is all by way of saying that there's a lot more to 13kai wa Gekkou than may come across at first listen. I didn't honestly like the album much when it first came out - it was too much of a departure from the throbbing electronic acid-soaked psychedelic cyberpunk sounds of the decade between Six/Nine and Mona Lisa Overdrive, and uncomfortably close to Gothic Lolita, to an extent that, at the time, felt dangerously like cheap pandering to visual kei teenyboppers...and from Buck-Tick, I expected better.

However, listening to this album again and again over the years, the context for the release has fallen away a bit, and I've come to appreciate its true originality as a musical work - it manages to simultaneously traverse and touch on the whole history of goth music while copying none of it, gelling into a record packed with an impressively diverse array of songs and sounds that nonetheless fit together as elegantly as the acts of a ballet. Hell, even "Muma -the Nightmare-" works in context, though after hearing it OUT of context five hundred billion zillion times at every live show ever, I can't help it - I'd really like to run it through with a scimitar.

It's also worth noting that Buck-Tick gained a lot of new fans with the release of 13kai, particularly overseas. Though the band received scant attention on the overseas j-rock internet up until 2005, the release of Romance gained them a huge horde of fans among the overseas goth-loli crowd, many of whom were still pining for a good gothic fix after the breakup of Malice Mizer and were eager to attach themselves to a new gothically inclined band, especially a band fronted by such a delectable lacy, frilly vampire as Gothique Prince Acchan-chan. Judging by the complaints I heard from them upon the release of Tenshi no Revolver ("no balls," "not goth enough," "Buck-Tick should return to their original 13kai sound!") I suppose many of those one-time fans are long gone, and seeing as they clearly didn't really understand the band to begin with I suppose it's not much of a loss (just imagine, saying "no balls" to Mr. No Underwear)...but who knows, perhaps a few of them are still around.  If 13kai wa Gekkou was your introduction to Buck-Tick, please leave a comment below!

...and then, reach your hand over your shoulder and give yourself a pat on the back, for having been a Buck-Tick fan for ten whole years.

Ten fucking years!

If that doesn't make you feel old, it should!

So, what's a Buck-Tick fan to do?

Perhaps, you could ignore it, like Imai's doing...

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Or, like Toll, you could stare at it morosely without quite meeting its eyes.

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Then again, you could always take a different tactic, and peer lecherously up under its skirts, as Yutaka and #SexyBeastHide are doing at this moment...

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...but I think, if you want to be well and truly Buck-Tickistani, you need to sink your teeth into its juicy flesh, and drink to the last drop. Acchan-chan knows how to do goth, and how!

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So happy Triskadecamas, everyone! Put on your curly-toed shoes and your clown makeup, light the candles, and if you're feeling extra-specially excited, you can even accidentally-on-purpose spill some candle wax on yourself while dancing to the masochism tango! This holiday only ever comes once in a full lunar eclipse, so celebrate it with your friends, celebrate it with your pets, celebrate it with your doll! Pop her up on the piano and serenade that senorita with romance and passion, just like an old-fashioned cabaret! You know you want to.

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P.S. Speaking of Coppelia, some real goth-loli for y'all. Ali Project are the real and true pioneers of goth-loli, Kokushoku Sumire, eat your hearts out.

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