Originally Posted by orbitalaspect
Boo, you are all about the truth this morning, aren't you? I have to be honest with you. I'm starting to think that her crying at the end of her performances on tour is also one of those automated processes that she's just so used to doing at the end of every performance, like a muscle memory. She probably walks off stage and does the actual crying behind the scenes.
I mean, the truth is this: it doesn't really matter how long Ayu has been in the business, or how successful she's been. The whole point of her job, as an entertainer, is to entertain people. And when you start slipping on that, you've got to pull yourself together, take the criticism, and do something useful with it. If I worked for a company for 15 years then showed up one day and said, "I'm only going to do the work I'm happy doing because I've been so successful for your company for so long, and I don't want to be a product of yours," would I still have a job?
Big, well-known, super successful artists tend to get so used to the platform that they don't realize it's a privilege to be there year after year, even if you've been there year after year. This is where I have to hand it to Namie because she took the horrifyingly bad sales and media criticism and did something useful with it, in the form of listening to her label and fans more, and came back as THE artist when all the solo artists were losing their chart positions. And you know, Namie gets that you're never done proving yourself when it comes to what you do. Just because you've been good at it for awhile, it doesn't mean the next set of strangers gets the memo. You've got to make yourself relevant to them.
So, I hope Ayu sees any of this discussion at any point, even if it's one of her people who mentions it, because it's pretty clear that Ayu's shift from proving herself year after year to just doing whatever looks interesting hasn't helped her career. Ayu has got to try harder, and she has to make this look like hard work, because the things she's done on tour every year for the last ten years look like second nature rather than delicate planning and hard effort.
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