Free & Easy's build up I think might be my favourite from Ayu's discography overall. The emotion! :heart

Hm... for me, how beautiful you are is a m a z e. I love the refrain especially.

YOU DON'T KNOW!?@?!

YOU DON'T KNOWWWWW-WW!?

hbya is almost certainly amongst my top 5 worst ayu tracks ever recorded. It's embarrassing to me.

Been listening to the old songs randomly, from poker face until stuffs like EnergizE, I'm surprised that it's still so much fun to listen to.

IMO she doesn't really have a list like that. how beautiful you are fills a niche she hadn't done yet. I just love that cheese!

that (breath) "you don't know, you don't know" was stuck in my head
and was very annoying because I didn't like this song at all after release.

but now I find it pretty nice. maybe after some lives

The lives are my favorite versions of how beautiful you are. It isn't really as good in the studio track IMO.

live versions are more emotional and I like much more
I don't have ear for music, so I can't pay attention to mistakes or something else that annoy other people

I think Party Queen is the "deepest" album in her career, but a lot of people refused to see the meaning behind it because of the trashy look. They want something aesthetically pleasing. Kinda shows human nature imo ^^

And some say it wasn't executed well, because it had to be spoon-fed to fans for them to understand it. But I personally think that this is because many people jumped to conslusion before receiving the final product. So maybe it's we that are a little shallow because we focus on the first impression and refuse to see the deeper meaning behind it, and we want to judge others by their looks and their clothes (or lack thereof) :)

So, basically, a lot of the fans need Ayu's albums to be aesthetically pleasing and to have a concept, which is obvious to see and you don't need to think too much about it to notice this concept, but imo it actually makes it "falsely" deep.

I'm not blaming anyone however, it's perfectly fine to prefer a good-looking product. We all listen to Ayu and music in general for different reasons.

I personally don't like Party Queen that much, I barely listen to it these days (apart from a couple of songs). The main reason is probably her vocals. So I'm not just praising Ayu blindly, but I still appreciate the album and see where she was coming from and what she was trying to convey.

I'm sorry for the long post, it probably doesn't even make any sense haha I need to get more sleep... But yeah, it was a follow-up to the discussion in the A BEST thread, I decided to post it here because it's off-topic.

I think Party Queen could have been executed way better. I could tell it was all "conceptual" but it went over a lot of people's heads.

I believe the amount of discussion it generates even today alone shows how well executed it was. It was made to be a lasting and polarizing experience, and this is exactly what it is.

As far as art goes, this is the closest Ayu ever got on a album... She does have songs that are pieces of art, but the albums are firmly on the pop area.

Exactly. Ayu isn't a painter. Of course she is a lyricist, but I've always placed composition and arrangement above lyrical content, because music in itself is a more powerful language than words. So, even if the visual is on point, even if the lyrics are the best anyone has ever written in the world, if the music itself doesn't sound complete, or is just not enjoyable when you remove the external elements, then I won't like it. It doesn't matter if the frosting on a cake is delicious and the presentation looks amazing when the cake itself works against the palette. Every song I enjoy by Ayu I would enjoy just as much if she didn't sing a single word and just belted out the melody with la las and lai lais.

Music and SOUND above all else. That's my basis for critique.

my favorite build up is in Mirrorcle/Mirror <3

Yup, it's in my Top 5 too! Along with Curtain Call. Although I'm not sure I could fill a Top 5 Worst Songs...

Couldn't agree more! I've always felt this way as I don't tend to pay attention to lyrics a lot of the time (which means I'm crap at singing along at concerts lol)

Oh my god, I just finished listening to this and I agree wholeheartedly!
Free & Easy is just so ....rich musically, for lack of a better explanation. I love it.

Forgiveness builds beautifully too.

Thank God that the HBYA hate train is here, I detest that song. AHS can have questionable taste, but this song is just so... inherently bad. It grates, it just does. Even the video... and by that I mean, if you had Ayu cut out of the video it'd be alot more powerful. The imagery about love without boundaries is broken when I see the Gyaru queen from hell making the extras run from her oversize lips .__.

I'll hop on the bandwagon -- HBYA is one of my least favorite Ayu songs. I have a few others that most people would not agree with probably, but that song is just...bad. The video is just...bad. It feels like a D-list version of Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful" done years too late.

I also LOVE Free & Easy and its build-up. That said, as a song it is structurally almost identical to M, which I love much more. It's really just the "No Amen" introduction that really differentiates the song, and does an amazing job at setting the tone.

I'm not a big fan of the Party Queen album as a whole, but HBYA is one of the few songs I can stomach. Interesting so many people hate it.

I think it came at a bit of a bad time and also rubbed a lot of people the wrong way with the video. It's also something that's pretty outside the usual Ayu sound IMO.

You could tell that she was probably going through some major internal crises at the time through the music and overall nature of what she was doing in her career, and I don't think anyone (even Ayu) realized it until quite some time after the fact.

Wow, I don't remember seeing so much hate for hbya during the PQ release... Like, sure some people thought it was bland and maybe a couple hated it, but I don't think it was so universally loathed

I actually don't remember it either. Unlike most albums like NEXT LEVEL, Party Queen seems to have gotten a bit of a strange evolution in public opinion, not going from "we don't like it" to "we kinda like it"/"I get what she was doing".

I wonder if it's linked to the fact that things were kind of uncomfortable in that era and for the most part, a very small handful of people "got" or tolerated what was going on.