"Life is Beautiful" is the third track on Sixx: A.M.'s debut album "The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack," a soundtrack to Nikki Sixx's autobiography "The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star," a 432 page collection of diary entries written by Nikki Sixx between Christmas 1986 to Christmas 1987.
Lyrics (From www.sing365.com):
You can't quit until you try
You can't live until you die
You can't learn to tell the truth
Until you learn to lie
You can't breathe until you choke
You gotta laugh when you're the joke
There's nothing like a funeral to make you feel alive
Just open your eyes
Just open your eyes
And see that life is beautiful.
Will you swear on your life,
That no one will cry at my funeral?
I know some things that you don't
I've done things that you won't
There's nothing like a trail of blood to find your way back home
I was waiting for my hearse
What came next was so much worse
It took a funeral to make me feel alive
Just open your eyes
Just open your eyes
And see that life is beautiful.
Will you swear on your life,
That no one will cry at my funeral?
Alive...
Just open your eyes
Just open your eyes
And see that life is beautiful.
Will you swear on your life,
That no one will cry at my funeral?
Just open your eyes
Just open your eyes
And see that life is beautiful.
Will you swear on your life,
That no one will cry at my funeral?
Analysis:
The first two stanzas are basically a list of actions that seem to be contradictions,
"You can't quit until you try
You can't live until you die
You can't learn to tell the truth
Until you learn to lie
You can't breath until you choke
You gotta laugh when you're the joke
There's nothing like a funeral to make you feel alive"
This is to set up the premise of the song as stated in the chorus,
"Just open your eyes,
Just open your eyes
And see that life is beautiful."
The narrator is telling the listener that in order to appreciate or even just to realize that life is beautiful you have to open your eyes first, which by the first two stanzas can be assumed to mean that you have to experience both the good and the bad of what life has to offer, "quit/try, life/die, truth/lie, breathe/choke, laugh/when you're the joke, funeral/feel alive." He repeats "Just open your eyes" in order to reinforce the necessity of opening your eyes.
"Will you swear on your life
That no one will cry at my funeral?"
These two lines serve to simply reiterate the importance of appreciating both the good and the bad of being alive. Yes, the death of a loved one is a painful experience, but that does not make it a purely negative aspect of life. How could you truly appreciate being alive if you lived indefinitely? By asking the listener to swear that no one will cry at his funeral, the narrator doesn't mean that no one should physically keep themselves from crying, but that instead of mourning his death, they should look at it as another beautiful aspect of life.
The next stanza, I believe, is a more personal message from the writer,
"I know some things that you don't,
I've done things that you won't.
There's nothing like a trail of blood to find your way back home."
The fact is that Nikki Sixx has done a lot of things that people probably shouldn't be doing (ex. hard drugs), so he's telling the listener about his somewhat unique experiences, explaining that he has a somewhat unique perspective, "I know somethings that you don't," due to these experiences, "I've done things that you won't." In the third line, Sixx uses "trail of blood" as a metaphor for harmful experiences one might endure and "home" as that place of serenity and peace in order to share his opinion, possibly sarcastically, that in order to reach that place of serenity and peace, you have to first endure some hardship.
The final stanza before the singer repeats the chorus,
"I was waiting for my hearse,
What came next was so much worse.
It took a funeral to make me feel alive."
describes, what I assume to be, Sixx's experience of almost dying from a drug overdose, but instead surviving it to the horror of someone close to him dying instead of him. "I was waiting for my hearse," means that he was expecting to die. "What came next was so much worse." means his realization that someone else had died. "It took a funeral to make me feel alive." means that it took the death of someone close to him for him to "feel alive," recalling the final contradiction he makes in the second stanza, "There's nothing like a funeral to make you feel alive."
In general this song can be seen has having three parts. The first is the introduction, Nikki Sixx's working up to the idea that you need to experience the bad in order to appreciate the good in life. The second is a personal story of how he came to realize this personal truth. The third is the truth itself, that you have to open your eyes to see the beauty in life and that even death is a beautiful part of life.
Note: This was written on September of 2008. It is NOT based on my own experiences, mainly on what I've heard (from experts and those who've experienced) and have deduced. I wrote it because I wanted to experiment with physical word placement and its effect on the poem and the reader.
