Lets vent about ayu?/why did your fandom decrease

[tasking]

^ Not to mention the PV version of Daybreak is amazing too.

[orangeakira]

Originally Posted by marty

And, on a side note because I can't help myself, Daybreak is an amazing PV. Kinda like Sweet Scar: nothing happens, yet they're brilliant. And so thoughtful, in a very delicate but powerful way.

I think it's a terribly boring video where nothing happens, and that's it. Nothing more to it. I really doubt there's any hidden meaning or intense beauty I'm missing.

[primavera♥]

I like Sweet Scar a lot more than Daybreak. It's prettier. I like the snow part too. Idk. Liking it is fine. I don't care. But if there are fans who want another pv like daybreak and don't like her current ones then I don't know what ayu should do. If they like all of them. Then whatever I guess.

[ayumisrael]

Originally Posted by marty

I don't think her rich lifestyle makes her write bad lyrics.

Yeah, it's not even logical to think so since she is probably very rich already since LOVEppears/concert tour 2000 era, just that with her continues success and her really slow decline she became richer and richer, and in years where things artists do worthed more money than today.
So yeah, if anyone thinks that her being rich=bad lyrics then it means that her lyrics since LOVEppears/Duty are mainly bad.

Her lyrics are more about things that change in her life and her sorroundings, topics she feels close to write about them and a direction she wants to take. It just happens that in recent years she got less lonely, she has friends and a lover now (after some lovers and failing relationships), we got it all in lyrics and albums, Love songs-FIVE-Party Queen-LOVE again even though the theme was repeated, but it's because that's how her love life have been on recent years.

Now that she supposedly finally, hopefully found her love so maybe she will experience different things or experience stories from different sorroundings and write about them. Hello new me isn't a love song but more of encouragement song, so maybe she will start to write at least a bit of different stuff. Maybe also stuff just like having fun.

[Minttulatte]

Well, when I was reading this thread though, I realized that since late 2012 I've lost more and more interest in J-Pop as a whole. Only artists that I actually REALLY care about are Kuu and Namie. Others just makes me go meh. And sometimes even these two makes me feel very uninterested too, which is a pretty unexpected because they're my all time favorite J-Pop artists. I have started to take more and more interest in K-Pop since 2010 because I love the music style so much.

One thing that made my fandom decline as well is that she isn't that active anymore. I understand that, but it still sucks because I'm one of those people who still remembers Ayu as someone who released singles often, doing TV performances and all that stuff. It just feels weird (yes, even after 4 years) that it doesn't happen so often anymore. She also tends to recycle stuff in her concerts way too much for my liking. I love it when artists bring new to the performances instead of using old stuff over and over. I love her older concerts because I feel they were all so different compared to each other.

Don't get me wrong, I still respect Ayu as an artist and especially as a lyricist. i think her songs are beautifully written lyrically even of the music itself may be dull (sometimes her lyrics has made me love musically shitty song in my opinion). I still prefer her older songs more though, because as a whole I find more relatable songs from her older releases. I also like her voice these days though I still think her best vocals were in 2002 (RAINBOW era). But I know she willl never get back there so it's OK.

[Delirium-Zer0]

I don't think anyone's really nailed the problem, although most of what you all are saying is contributing to it.

Think of it like this... Ayu and her career before were like... the wrapped-up gift under a Christmas tree, and we LOVED the shiny wrapping, which was folded and taped with care, clearly time was taken on it. We loved the sparkling, hand-tied bow on top. And clearly money was spent on the foil-embossed gift tag, which was carefully hand-selected after ages of browsing. Everything was so pretty and neat and exciting. She was the one in charge of that wrapping, hinting at the box's contents with the type of wrapping she put around it (like wrapping an Elsa doll up in snowflake wrapping paper). And we liked guessing! What's inside? It's so pretty, I bet it's something amazing.

But then she unwrapped the present in an effort to get closer to her fans. We'd earned the right to see her with the wrapping off, but under the paper... It was just a cardboard box. Not a bad one - it's in good shape, not many dents, not dirty, not flimsy. But... it's so NORMAL. So easily torn, so blah brown colored, taped up in a few places to keep it in decent shape. Just like any other box, but clearly well taken care of. The present was simply not that interesting anymore. And maybe there's more shinyness inside that cardboard box, sure... but Ayu is self-conscious for one thing, and has things inside that she doesn't want to think about. So she'll never just dump the contents out. She'll bring them out a little at a time, but whenever she does (see "Party Queen") no one likes it. So she just keeps the cardboard clean, shows us all HOW she keeps the cardboard clean, and goes on with her life. But fans want the wrapping back.

I think the key issue is "distance." There's a certain specific amount of distance that I think is ideal for a popular figure to hold onto - one where little solid, specific personal information is revealed, but where we THINK we can probably figure it out through lyrics and videos and interviews. This gives us just enough information that we think we have a good idea of what a person is like, but not so much that we can't project our own ideals onto her. That exact mixture of honesty & secrecy is what makes a public figure like Ayu relateable.

We saw one room of where Ayu lived in that 2000 NTV documentary and that was AWESOME. But even at the time, while she did live in an apartment, it was a ridiculously huge fancy new york type of apartment that's totally inaccessible to any normal Tokyo resident. She was unattainably rich even then, but she still seemed like a "normal girl" and her lyrics were still personal and relateable. So no, it's not the money making her distant. It's how much she's chosen to tell us.

Once she'd hit a turning point of trying too hard to get close to us, and her sales hit that permanent slump, she then catered to mainly the Gyaru community and her built-in fanbase rather than the general public. She no longer had the allure of relateability that made her popular with teenagers. Sales were no longer based on the quality of the product she was selling - she just needed to hang on to fans & the gyarus. So she had to go safe.

While other artists like Namie have taken a slump of this nature and used it as an opportunity, Ayu hasn't. It feels as though Ayu is desperately trying to remain "safe" because when she isn't, people react with such vitriol, and she's a rather sensitive and self-conscious person. When she tries new things, the reactions range from "Oh hey, not bad" to "WTF IS THIS!?!? WHERE IS MY AYU FROM THE PAST!!" Whenever that happens, she tries to recapture what she did in the past by using older songwriters and such, and even on this new album she's going back to doing dancey music since that was such a HUGE part of her image & brand back before "I am..." All these attempts to recapture the past are failing, however, because she's missing the specific level of distance from her fans that made her charming.

Now she does seem to be aware that fans have lost a feeling of "connection" with Ayu, and she's trying to fix that, but things like "ayu LIFE STYLE BOOK" and the upcoming TA q&a sessions and twitter are all overcompensation. She SHOULD be putting wrapping paper around herself again. She should be using deliberate & methodical symbolism and imagery in her album & single shoots, wearing fashions that create a brand for each new release, being "vaguely specific" in her lyrics again... give us HINTS about what you're saying so we think we can figure you out. Don't show us your actual bed - sing about how you feel when you're in it alone, & then put a photo of you on the cover where you're the only black & white person in a colored crowd, or where you're sitting alone in a sparsely furnished cell of some kind. Let us assign the specifics - our own bed sheets and ourselves and our rooms, our own missing lover, our own sad faces. That way the song can be about us too.

[Chris85]

The amount of lip syncing during her recent CDL made me sad.
Countdown Live 2013-2014 lip synced songs include:
1) Feel the love
2) Free & Easy
3) Because of You (except final refrain which is weird)
4) CAROLS
5) Momentum
6) is this LOVE?
A BEST LIVE tour had 3 songs she lip synced - poker face, Fly high and HONEY.
Now when I think of her new concerts I can't help wondering how much of the show is actually going to be LIVE. Of course I still like Ayu very much but realizing that your favourite artist is heavily relying on lip syncing isn't a pleasant thing.

[emi♡]

^I think I'd actually be okay with her lip syncing Feel the Love. I don't want to even know wth that sounds like live. Leave it at home Ayu.


And Deli up there, telling hard truths~ +1

[Andrenekoi]

Originally Posted by Chris85

The amount of lip syncing during her recent CDL made me sad.
Countdown Live 2013-2014 lip synced songs include:
1) Feel the love
2) Free & Easy
3) Because of You (except final refrain which is weird)
4) CAROLS
5) Momentum
6) is this LOVE?
A BEST LIVE tour had 3 songs she lip synced - poker face, Fly high and HONEY.
Now when I think of her new concerts I can't help wondering how much of the show is actually going to be LIVE. Of course I still like Ayu very much but realizing that your favourite artist is heavily relying on lip syncing isn't a pleasant thing.

I really doubt from the preview that Feel the love was lip synced, it was way too edited for it.

People should notice there's a difference between lip-synching, using heavy backtrack, using backup singers, using backup singers AND backtrack and using voice filters live... All of them are used to make the singer sound better than they actually are, but the amount of effort the singer must put on each case is completly different.

Ayu (and almost everyone else in the business) use all of those techniques, but Ayu rarely lip-synchs more than 2 or 3 songs all the way... From both live reports and video releases (that aren't very trustable), she isn't lip-syching whole tracks since 2009 or so...

[ayumisrael]

I don't believe to all this lip sync stuff because most of the time when people on the board says a song is lip synced it doesn't even sound like that, and she will probably never lip sync more than 1-3 songs tops since the japanese will ban her for good. (Even though BoA did more some lip syncing to up beat songs too).
I know that songs like poker face and Fly high on A BEST LIVE and ANGEL'S SONG/HONEY in PCDL were like that but even from this digest vid, no way Feel the love is lip synced and sounds like that. CAROLS is NOT lip-synced. ayu lip-syncing got too overrated, like people just throw X performance lip synced in the air. People that were there usually state what performances were lip synced too, but did they say anything about the recent CDL? And what Andrenekoi said.

For what deli wrote, I think that ayu is in a big conflict, I don't know if she really thinks of foreign fans but it's like - Japanese fans want only the old ayu, foreign fans want a new ayu all the time. With no relation to fans she probably wants to try new things from time to time but she has hard time doing stuff with the Japanese audience.

Originally Posted by emi♡

^I think I'd actually be okay with her lip syncing Feel the Love. I don't want to even know wth that sounds like live. Leave it at home Ayu.


And Deli up there, telling hard truths~ +1

Feel the love is probably live, so you do hear how it is, regardless of live filters and editions.

[primavera♥]

I like what Deli said. So on point. As always.

Also about lip sync. I highly doubt she did that for all of those songs if any. If it ever seems like she does, it's always just a couple at most.

[channy]

Originally Posted by Andrenekoi

People should notice there's a difference between lip-synching, using heavy backtrack, using backup singers, using backup singers AND backtrack and using voice filters live... All of them are used to make the singer sound better than they actually are

You forgot the pre-recorded full-playbacks, which, based on my own perception, are also a very common gimmick for Ayu's concerts. Thus, it is somewhat hard to differ between live singing with realtime-sound/voice-enhancers and pre-recorded playbacks. However, that's why they use this technique after all and it probably takes place in most of Ayu's concerts.

[ayumisrael]

Originally Posted by channy

You forgot the pre-recorded full-playbacks, which, based on my own perception, are also a very common gimmick for Ayu's concerts. Thus, it is somewhat hard to differ between live singing with realtime-sound/voice-enhancers and pre-recorded playbacks. However, that's why they use this technique after all and it probably takes place in most of Ayu's concerts.

Pre-recorded pretty much means lip-syncing to it like was mentioned, but even if she does 1-3 songs, it's not very common in one concert to lip sync more than 2 songs on average, and these are usually really high pitched up beat songs, that get short versions (in medleys for example).

I'm also sure that if all the songs above were lip-synced (had full pre-recordings) the tabloids would probably eat her up for this since it's kind of a big deal in Japan. They ate her for much less and if not the media then the fans. Even 2ch never mention lip-syncing in their trollings (probably because she doesn't do that much and if she does it's 1-2 songs in a concert usually so it's not worth trolling).

What's more I don't know how Feel the love and CAROLS were lip-synced to be honest since even from the digest video they don't sound/look lip-synced.
I don't think she would lip-sync first song in a concert either, otherwise she would just change to a song she could sing live from the first place.

I don't know about the other 3 but they don't seem like songs she would lip-sync. She would lipsync cuter songs/really high pitched ones maybe that are not ballads.

[RylanJames]

I need a November on this album or I'm going to freak out and bulldoze my Ayu disograpghy.

[marty]

@ Delirium-Zer0:
Honestly, I can't really feel you on this.
Your description is on point, and I think it's probably the reason a lot of people's interest (especially the general public) decreased, but it doesn't make sense to me (and maybe that's why my interest in her is still, like, VERY HIGH, lol).
I liked her when she was this mysterious emotion-vessel supreme lyricists icon and I like her now that she's open and relaxed and allowing herself to be a more normal woman. In my eyes she just changed and grown up, not only in her life, not only in her music, but in her priorities and musical approach too.
If she's going back to her old ways of promoting, fine. But it's not really the point for me, I still find her lyrics and persona very relatable (relatively, because she's much older than me). She's so emotional and stuff.
But I totally agree with you saying Ayu started keeping it safe with her dropping sales, relying on her hardcore fanbase and gyarus. And I feel too she's trying to rediscover her past, but I don't think she's so desperate doing so...

[channy]

Ayu once said in a documentary that her time/era is about to end even 12, 13 or 14 years ago (don't know the exact date). So I doubt she's trying to sustain any standards of bygone times. Avex and Ayu know that her time is over but it's still possible to have her sell music to the die-hard fans. I feel, that has been the selling point of the past couple years.

[ayu-michan]

Originally Posted by channy

Ayu once said in a documentary that her time/era is about to end even 12, 13 or 14 years ago (don't know the exact date). So I doubt she's trying to sustain any standards of bygone times. Avex and Ayu know that her time is over but it's still possible to have her sell music to the die-hard fans. I feel, that has been the selling point of the past couple years.

That was from the 2004 documentary, and yes she did say "My era is over". I agree with you on the bolded part. Ayu never intended to be a musician in the first place. I'm positive that she only wanted to make music so she can be herself and express her feelings.

[waterballoon]

there's a difference between acknowledging your era is over, liking being a musician and then.. not putting in effort at all recently.

the question is, can she be like this again? perfect music with amazing arrangements and effort.. something that clicks and links everything together.. a musical package that we've loved so much?

[Andrenekoi]

Originally Posted by waterballoon

there's a difference between acknowledging your era is over, liking being a musician and then.. not putting in effort at all recently.

the question is, can she be like this again? perfect music with amazing arrangements and effort.. something that clicks and links everything together.. a musical package that we've loved so much?

The only thing I see there is a incosistent singer with a runny nose dressed on a birthday cake while singing a generic ballad...

[emi♡]

A generic ballad with an interesting, beautiful melody and gorgeous lyrics.


Makes all the difference when you actually have good, well-produced music.