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Originally Posted by SunshineSlayer
How do you know that's the reason? Namie's style has never remained stagnant in her career ever - she has always changed with every album either drastically or by gradually adding on to what she did in the previous album. Plus she was never completely Hip HOP to begin with, but the more accurate self-proclaimed term Hip POP. And while that style may not have sold astronomically when it was first released, Best Fiction sold over a million copies and Play and Queen of Hip Pop certainly were no slouches either. That style certainly was indeed, selling. If she really wanted to play it safe and cash in, she could have stuck with that style, but she chose to change again. Couldn't a lot of what you described be applied to Next Level as well? Why isn't it acceptable that they both want to have their music change and grow? I would hate it if Namie just kept releasing Style over and over again, just like I would hate it if Ayu had never moved past Loveappears.
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But it's different for Ayumi, because she's always stuck to a very strict core genre, even if she experimented a lot. And that's how it usually should be (with a few exceptions, but Namie's case is definitely not one of them). You don't go from Japanese techno-pop to Western hip-hop (two completely~ different things) and then back again, at least not whenever you claim that the previous style is who you really are and you switch right when your new genre becomes popular. Ayumi has never claimed to be anything she's not; so even if she did switch genres, unless every time (like Namie) she switched to what was popular, I'd just say she was confused and was experimenting.
I'm sorry, because you're obviously a huge Namie fan, but to me she's a sellout, because, no, she wasn't originally hip-hop, and no, her hip-hop projects didn't do very well. And now she's doing electro/techno pop stuff, which is what's big now. So for that, I can't see her any other way. The most hip-hop or even R&B she had until after Hikaru Utada came out was a few ballades with R&B BEATS. Having an R&B or hip-hop beat doesn't make you that genre.
(Think Kumi Koda--just because she almost always has a heavy beat, that certainly doesn't mean all her songs are hip-hop. She's fake hip-hop a lot of the time, and Namie has many songs just like that - it's much more mainstream pop than hip-hop.) Play did sell pretty well, but not the other two, especially for a "Queen." Hell, even Play should have sold more, between the promotion it had and for all the titles both she and her fans claim her to be.
And I love how in her most recent interview she tries to claim that she's not doing hip-hop anymore, simply because she can't get into it right now. She made a HUGE deal for almost ten years about how she was full blown Western hip-hop--the QUEEN of hip-hop (or hip-pop--whatever, it doesn't matter)--yet now...she just doesn't care at the moment..? Coincidentally, right whenever she realises that this "reinvention" of her style will sell better? I'm sorry, but it's just too much of a coincidence for me to blow off, considering she wasn't exactly original in her style at the start of her career, either, and so I can't respect her as an artist, for that and a few other reasons. In my mind, she's a complete joke (especially this new thing she has, with moving forward to her greater future - beyond the hip-hop stuff, I guess :\). She's been extremely lucky throughout her entire career, and she's had everything handed to her. I thought Ayumi had the luckiest break, but no, I've recently found out that, again, it's Namie.
