Quote:
Originally Posted by Surreal17
Ok, first of all your point isn't valide. The questions should be like : How many Japanese albums (to exclude her English attrocity, lyrically speaking) has Utada released since 2006? 2 plus mini album. So this equals less then 30 songs. And how many albums has ayu released since 2006? 10 plus 2 mini, so over 100 songs at least. Of course ayu is going to have a lot more love songs or repeated themes in her hundred songs than Utada in a few. And what's wrong with love theme? Its not like Utada is some highly experimental new age artist. Like someone else already said, she also sings very often about relationships. Ayu only started putting accent on this theme after 2010 when Utada started her hiatus. And how can you say that she's a better and diverse songwriter today, when she hasn't released a full Japanese effort in over 8 years.
|
Well, you bring up some valid points of debate. Utada has released, including ULTRA BLUE, exactly 30 songs since 2006. Of those, 11 total are about love and relationships. The rest have talked about growing up, her mother, her mother again, death, childhood, depression, and a few songs have literally been about things she thinks are fun.
Now, my count for Ayumi is 110 songs in the same time period, 63 of which are specifically about love, a relationship, a breakup, or missing a former love. By my count, starting with Love songs, Ayumi focused most of her records on songs about intimate love, whereas every record up to RnRC was
at most half about intimate love.
[# of songs] - [# of songs about love]
Secret: [10] - [4]
GUILTY: [10] - [5]
NEXT LEVEL: [10] - [3]
RnRC: [12] - [3]
Love songs: [13] - [7] <-- BIG change.
FIVE: [5] - [4]
Party Queen: [11] - [6]
LOVE again: [13] - [12] <-- Peak.
Colours: [10] - [7]
A ONE: [10] - [8]
sixxxxxx: [6] - [4]
Out of 110 songs since Secret, 57% are about finding, losing, or missing intimate love. Compared to Utada, whose 11 songs on the same subject account for only 36% of her total output in the same timeframe.
BUT!
There's that big change starting at Love songs. Starting with Love songs, Ayu has released 68 songs, of which 48, or 70% are about intimate love. It's also worth noting that more than 60% of her songs since Love songs have been ballads and midtempo tracks.
Ayumi's music has changed significantly, and it's become much less diverse than Utada's output in the same timeframe, but more so, it's become undeniably less diverse in the last five years.
Now, when I say that Utada is a more mature and diverse songwriter, I mean that only 9 of the 24 songs, or 37%, she released on ULTRA BLUE and HEART STATION were about intimate love. That may not seem like a big difference when you look at those comparisons, but if I applied Utada's proportion to Ayu's total number of releases, you're looking at 41 songs vs. Ayumi's 63 songs. That's a difference of
22 songs, or
two whole albums. You would have to replace every song on LOVE again, then replace all the love songs on Party Queen, and all the love songs on FIVE, with ANYTHING but songs about intimate love to proportionally even them out.
For Utada to proportionally equal Ayumi, she would have had to replace 8 songs she's released since 2006 with love songs.
And I think it's important to look at how heavy Ayu has loaded her recent albums. Even when she's experimented, she's put out records oversaturated with songs about intimate love. Love songs was a throwback, Party Queen was a smorgasbord, LOVE again was LOVE...again, Colours was an EDM-flavored album, and A ONE was her "return to herself"... for each, 50%+ of the songs were love songs.
While this is very topical, again, I implore you to think of memorable lyrics from any of these songs... lyrics that stick out to you more than lyrics from similar-theme songs from pre-2006. Are there any concepts she used that you thought were brilliant or creative? Was there any lyric she wrote that seemed like such a fresh way to describe her feelings? Or do they sound more like rehashes of ideas she used in songs before?
I have to be honest with you. I've listened to every Ayu album several dozen times, and I can't recall anything significant from the last five years that catches me like a line from CAROLS or Moments, or rainy day, or even as far back as SEASONS.
I don't think that has anything to do with the overall number of songs Ayu has written, but a lot to do with the proportion of new songs she's released which are about a similar subject, sound similar, and share a very similar writing style.
EDIT: Me do numbers wrong. 6am no sleep.
EDIT 2: On the memorable lyrics part, compare Ayu's lyrics since 2006 with lyrics and ideas used in similar-themed songs from Utada. I remember C.O.L.O.R.S. because Utada described all the various emotions of a dissolving relationship by colors. I remember This Is Love because she's literally listing off event after event joyously adding them up to the idea that they must mean she's fallen in love. I loved how HEART STATION related tuning into her like a radio. Or maybe like what was described with Beautiful World, where Utada describes her love for someone as a world of its own, with lines like "I don't need the newspaper... how are you doing?". And Sakura Nagashi, where Utada reflects on who she is long after being separate from someone, and relates the events of a popular festival for the deceased to her experience of returning to places where she once was with this other person, thinking about how they might be different then and not the person she once knew too.
I mean, Ayu wrote about whether love is shaped like a circle?