Ayu's music: when did it start to go downhill for you?

[Delirium-Zer0]

I absolutely think she changed in a way I found unfavorable, but she came back up from it in some ways.

"RAINBOW" was a maaaaaajjjooorr disappointment for me personally. One of the things I loved Ayu for back in the day was not using English in her songs the way most jpop artists did. It almost never happened, and I loved that she was expressing herself honestly and sticking with what made her comfortable. Ayu was personal - she wrote for herself, and about herself and her friends. After her trip to HK for uraayu, she realized she had listeners who spoke english and suddenly felt the need to cater to them. This, in my opinion, was a bad move - she was suddenly writing for us, but for most of us, that's not what we wanted. It cheapened her influence on us, it made her seem less genuine. If I have fun watching a bear do his thing at the zoo, I don't want him to start posing when he notices me. It's cheesy. And that's what Ayu started to do, which was disappointing.

Her other problem since then has been her insistence on sticking with alot of the same people over time. Many people who she's worked with have been dismissed over time, and good thing too - not that they were bad, just that their time was over. But she should have switched graphic design companies ages ago. She should really replace Peco as a backup vocalist since, whether you like her or not, she's not a good choice to back AYU. Her voice is just too different.

In any case, she needs to surround herself with people of different backgrounds and mindsets. Co-workers aren't supposed to be friends, they're supposed to be co-WORKers. But she keeps them around as her family, and creative energy gets stale. When she shifted people out more often, her sound changed more often.

She's trying way too hard to please other people - her staff "family", fans, etc, and as a result she only takes creative risks occasionally.

RnRC was a gigantic step forward for her. "Sexy little things" is one of the best songs she's ever done - it is just WEIRD in places. "Don't look back" is her first time relying on being understated and honest since "JEWEL," but she adds a real world music twist on it for the first time since "Duty." Fans are really divisive about alot of the tracks on the album like Last Links and meaning of Love and that is what I like to see. If fans aren't arguing passionately over whether a song is good or not, it's probably not great. And Ayu used to be great. Now she's just good.

That said, if you listen to as much j-music as I do, you can still hear that Ayu's stuff is still WAY above average compared to almost everything else. She still feels so much more epic than most other music, and even her newer stuff attracts new fans quite efficiently (as I have learned firsthand recently!). So I'd argue that she's gone downhill, but only compared to herself. She's still amazingly honest, puts on incredible shows, and has brilliant videos. Her ratio of crap-to-awesome hasn't really changed that much, it's still pretty low.