[Andrenekoi]

@orbitalaspect

Just to get this out of the way: I wasn't saying your post was contradictory about Ayu, I was saying it was contraditory on the concepts you used. When you try to please the consumer more to have better sales you are being more of a product than you are when you are doing whatever you want. I'm not saying being a product is worse than being an artist or whatever, just that the concepts are different. Actually, art is always more of a risk of being polarized than products, as art isn't trying as hard to please.

In that sense, Ayu is acting more as an artist now than she was while trying to please during her peak. And she herself said she was trying to please at the time, it's not just an idea I had.

I like to see Love Songs~Party Queen~LOVE again as a trilogy were Ayu discuss her views and understanding of love.

Love Songs: She is singing about her idealized views of love as someone who sacrificed herself to reach her dream, but doesn't have much of a personal life. It's about her projections on how romantic love is. As it reflects her personal views on the subjects, it's a personal project.

Party Queen: This one is about her divorce, how she tries to drink and party her suffering away. On how her divorced hurted her and how her relationship with her parents affected her views on love. I don't really know how people don't see this as her most personal record to that, considering it's the only one where she openly discusses her issues. Letter, Return Road, Tell me why, the next LOVE and E.S.M. are all painfully open about stuff that happened to her.

LOVE again: This one expresses her conclusions about love after her idealistic views of love felt apart and she divorced. It pretty much describes the whole process of falling in love, having your heart broken, healing and fall in love again. Even so, the album starts with a song that makes it clear the relationship would fail (Wake me up) and it ends with her entering on another relationship that will fail again (You & Me). It's her album with the less hopeful ending, as she ever tries to end all of them on a lighter note. In between you have songs like SAKURA, Ivy, Sweet Scar, Wake me up, Untitled for her 2, etc that are again all very personal.

She was doing the same thing she ever done: Putting her personal issues on the spotlight. You don't think that love life, divorce, her biased views on romantic love and how wrong they were, the relationship examples she had at home, how the public views on her changed due to her love life are interesting themes? That's ok, you don't have to. Still, at the moment they were important to her and still were highly personal.

Colours and A ONE weren't very personal and I myself said that on that post. You have 2 or 3 more personal songs on each album, but in general it was mostly damage control after the huge backlash she got.

M(A)DE IN JAPAN: Again she gets more personal on this one. I remember reading she saying this album was about how japanese culture tryed to restrict her as an artist (what explains the cover and the way the A is stylized on the title). It's a very short album, but it expresses her views on the japanese society (Flower, Mad World, Survivor), the obligatory concert ending, summer song and love message to the fandom songs (Today, Summer Love, You are the only one), a song for her them husband that was axed from concerts once the relationship ended (Mr. Darling). How much of the album is personal depends on how sincere you believe she is when she is singing Today and You are the only one. :B

About the PVs, IMO they were always hit or miss anyway, I'm not very found of her videography. Still, her videos got more experiemental after 10th anniversary. Do I think yhe experiements are always succesful? Nope. But this is just the nature or experiementing, it has a higher chance of failure. Still don't get the indiference/hatred for how beautiful you are, progress, Melody, the Love Again trilogy, Sweet Scar, WARNING, Sayonara, Step by step, FLOWER and Mad World as they are IMO either beautiful, deep or really creative.

I also don't get the disdain for AT12, AT15 and AT16. They all use theater as a media for her to discuss her views on love, her career and her relationship with the japanese society. I don't even get the complaints about the concerts being visually alike. I also love how AT12 and AT16 actually loosely tell a whole story from beginning to the end, something that actually needs a lot more creative effort than she is credited to put on her stuff lately. I do agree jtb isn't that good, but her celebratory concerts IMO tend to be her worst anyway, but AT12, AT15 and AT16 are probably her tours with the most depth to date.

I'm thinking about opening threads to discuss the concepts from her post Love Again releases, like the ones I once did for her albums until LOVE again.