http://img11.hostingpics.net/pics/948422Untitled2.jpg

It's written "Kurea" in the mag, they probably heard her say Cre but thought i was Crea

In spanish, verb create is crear, and crea is a conjugation, imperative or present for she/he/it :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nF548XgeQCQ

I happened to chance upon this hilarious segment on Youtube about a Japanese fan who likes Ayumi to the extent that it's affecting her household chores. It's really quite funny!

I actually used to not care about WE WISH until I realised all the layers, and I came to love it then. I especially adore the guitar chords before the chorus.

That melody in the verses though (the one that you say repeats itself three times), it has always reminded me of some other song, but I can't remember which one exactly.

The name came from the Honda scooter Ayu advertised in 1999, just before she got Crea 1 (the first dog). The scooter is called Giorno Crea, which would lead me to believe it's probably short for creare, which is italian for create or creation... The scooter was made with a 4-stroke engine in order to be more eco-friendly, so it would make sense if that's a reference to creation in the earthy sense.

^I read about that theory, i was saying some meaning about the word CREA, but i think that you are correct

Does anyone remember AyumiHell?

I was watching the videos again after a few years and it's still freaking hilarious.

"The voice of an angle"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyiQNPh1Jv0

This is an excellent point and I'm very glad you said it. I looked at a tally of the songs on LOVE again and A ONE, and it's like... they're both about half ballads, and yet we think of LOVE again as very ballad-heavy but A ONE not so, because with A ONE we already got three of its six ballads on a preceding single; with LOVE again nearly all its fast stuff was already on LOVE or again. We evaluate the album's contents entirely based on what's new, not the album as a whole.

That is one of the many, many things that went "wrong" with it.

When you become a fan is a very big factor in how you see ayu, since whatever made you a fan is going to be present at the time. The way Ayu has gone with her music since "Voyage" is very, very different from everything that came before it. Most ayu fans are people who became fans after that point so it's hard for them to really understand how her music suddenly started to seem a bit... soulless. There was still feeling behind it but it seemed like Ayu suddenly didn't knwo how to express those feelings properly anymore. And it seemed like she was trying too hard to have international appeal after her visits to HK for uraayu and Singapore for the MTV Asia Awards and stuff like that. She went overseas, saw she was having an effect, and suddenly felt the need to fit in to a global market. The result is stuff like the addition of English lyrics on RAINBOW, and its far more watered-down, basic, somewhat westernized sound. If you became any ayu fan ANY time before "Voyage," and you knew that she said in an interview that she couldn't express herself in any language but Japanese, and if you knew she preferred to listen to rock music like Deep Purple and Smashing Pumpkins, and you knew that she was a perfectionist about expressing herself... RAINBOW was not just a disappointment, it was very nearly a betrayal.

And this is a very, very understandable attitude for Ayu fans who became fans later and know her more for her slicker and more polished work. Up until RAINBOW, her work was a huge mix of genres, the only common thread between all of it being this sort of darkness. When "I am..." was released, honestly, we couldn't imagine her doing a song like "BLUE BIRD" or "Greatful days" or "Sunrise ~LOVE is ALL~" - the very idea would have been completely ridiculous. "I am..." had a very rough-around-the-edges sound for the most part, which seemed at the time like a very natural development. She seemed like a dance-rock artist who happened to do the occasional ballad.... since about 2003, though, she's become more of a general dance/pop ballad artist who happens to do the occasional rock song, you know? The tracks on "Duty" were harder to remix, and ayu-mi-x III was definitely less solid than ayu-mi-x II had been, because it was getting more raw and more unconventional. When "I am..." was even MORE so, it was no shock, it was expected, and it was the next step that we all wanted because it started to narrow her sound down and get to its essential aspects of honesty and expression. "RAINBOW" seemed to go against that entirely. The English lyrics were off-putting in a way that was kind of inexplicable at the time - the novelty of her singing in English seemed cool at first, but after awhile the whole album started to feel a bit "cold" compared to her past work.

The album absolutely has some gems like "Free & Easy," "HANABI," and "Heartplace".... but the first two were singles, and "Heartplace" was on a CM beforehand so we knew this epic rock ballad was coming (as was "everywhere nowhere," which was a reasonably solid but in retrospect unremarkable dance-rock style track that could have fit on "I am..." without issue). When the album came out we were evaluating it based on songs like "Dolls," "Over," "Close to you," and "+" it seemed worse than it was. Well, okay... the latter two are, in my opinion, honest-to-goodness bad songs ("Close to you" is insufferably dull and a terrible attempt at sounding christmasy and "+" sounds like she and her staff members are having drunken karaoke - I enjoy the song live very much but on the CD it's an assault on my ears and I'm ticked off she ruined independent by sticking it onto it); but the only offense committed by the first two is that they made the album feel very very ballad heavy to those of us who'd heard the singles already.

So yeah there were quite a few unfair points against it; I honestly think newer Ayu fans have done a good job of making me like this album more & more over the years because they can see it for what it is far better than I could at the time. "Over" has a melody that just freaking haunts me, and "Dolls" is this amazing sad, sweet, ethereal lullaby that I find very well-crafted.

^ It's always better to become a fan late because you can have an "objective" point of view of her past work, the second you become a fan you lose this ability and you start to become really passionate whenever she's releasing something, with high expectations and so on. You just can't rely on a fan's opinion if you're looking for something objective :)

To me Rainbow is so-so, i like all of her songs and albums, but i listen to the mid 00's Ayu more than "old" Ayu.

^^ That was a very interesting read!
I'm actually interested in your opinion of MY STORY. Would you care to share it?

Whoa whoa there, I think you're exaggerating a bit. :P I loved RAINBOW and the style she was going in. To each their own.

LOL... For the fandom overall, yeah that's a bit of an exaggeration... but that IS the way some of my friends at the time looked at it! Even for those of us who kinda "forgave" the album, it did feel a bit bait-and-switchy to some of us.

As far as MY STORY goes.... it's kind of an interesting case. It was clearly a turning point as far as fan preferences, but I couldn't tell you what happened exactly.

First off, we got a bunch of previews & sound clips, and the album leaked in low quality pretty gradually... so it's hard for me to recall the real consensus at the time. People's opinions of the songs changed over and over, first based on the titles, the cover art, the sound clips, the previews, the PVs for the album songs, low-quality versions of the songs, and then finally the full CD versions.

When it was finally out and everyone heard it, the few complaints it got were that Ayu looked kinda trashy on the cover with her nightgown & bright pink lipstick & heavy blush, and that the vocals in HONEY were too cutesy. In general, though, everyone liked most of the album. I think we all had one or two tracks we weren't wild about for one reason or another, but there was no real agreement on where the album's weak points were.

However, it seemed like some old fans - the ones who weren't nuts about RAINBOW but forgave it - started to lose interest around that point. MY STORY was a return to form in many ways, but while it was artistically EXTREMELY competent, it didn't take any artistic risks really. It built on what we considered to be Ayu's foundation of lyrical honesty, but it didn't break any new ground. Each album up to MY STORY sorta each had its own major shift in style from the previous one, but MY STORY didn't. It felt like a summary or reader's digest condensed version of Ayu's style in a very general sense. While it had a ton of genre variety, many genres were repeated thanks to how long the album is, and as a result the album felt a bit watered down. Its mix was also generally rougher than the last couple of releases. Even to those of us who felt it was the first proper follow-up to I am..., it seemed to sort of fall flat of really reaching its potential. While there weren't many major complaints, there wasn't really widespread satisfaction with the album either.

So without much fanfare, some folks just kinda... faded away from the fandom. When I caught up with some of them later it was just "Ah, yeah, I don't really listen to her so much anymore." There was a pretty major, albeit quiet, cultural shift in Ayu fandom as a result of that change. The fans who loved the album stuck around, talking about how they were glad it didn't have too many rock songs. I have to admit it kinda stung to start seeing people say things like that. But the ballad-lovers, between RAINBOW and MY STORY, kinda... won? I guess? At least for awhile.

Hmm I never knew that, thanks!
What do you mean by the ballad-lovers winning?

It's very interesting to see how each album from rainbow onward has affected the fandom to various degrees.

Delirium-Zer0, would you say LOVE again was the most...(recent) polarizing album for the fandom?

Having been around for most albums since Memorial address...

I will say that around (miss)understood, reactions have been the same-ish for almost every big album release aside from maybe Love songs.

It's funny that you see it that way, because for me personally MY STORY feels like a sort of final culmination of everything Ayu's career and artistry had been building up to till then. Like it's not artistically risky because she finally polished the sound she had been crafting from the beginning and for the first time got everything just how she wanted and was satisfied. And so (miss)understood and everything after it has just felt like business as usual lol.

Reading this while (by chance) thinking of theories surrounding A ONE made me think that A ONE is the end of businessasusualmi hamasaki and she'll be reborn or something.

Well, to be fair, they don't all really feel like business as usual lol. Just that she kind of stopped evolving her sound until she decided pimping out TK would be a good idea.

I really love Colours covers. She looks so fresh faced. I wish they were textless.
I like them as images. I don't know if they're necessarily good album covers, but good pictures haha.

She should definitely have a textless album cover again!

She should just have textless covers from now on.