I already asked you about your origin story, but where did it go from there?
I think my own fandom development is a bit akin to the five stages of grief, except inverted, and for 'grief' think 'Ayumi Hamasaki fandom'. If that makes sense (I've already lost track, this made a lot of sense when I was thinking about it earlier though).
Back when I originally discovered Ayu my fandom initially skyrocketed immediately. For the first six weeks after I happened upon the magic that was SEASONS basically nothing concerned me except Ayu. I listened to literally no other music than Ayu; I had my self-made compilation CD and, even more practically, a MiniDisc with some 27 songs, and this was all I consumed for that month and a half. I scoured the web for pictures, collecting them all in a folder and laboriously renaming them to 'Ayumi Hamasaki 0001', 'Ayumi Hamasaki 0002', etcetera - it wasn't much of a filing system, but clearly I was in it for the long run and expecting to amass thousands of pictures.
In those days, I could see nothing but perfection in Ayu and her music: every single song was a masterpiece, every picture was utterly amazing, every single fact I gobbled up. While perhaps it bordered on the unhealthy, I remember this time very dearly. I had not really had an idol before (on account of the type of music I listened to) and it was absolutely awesome.
After those six weeks of soaring in the clouds of Ayu fandom, though, I came down hard. One day, after pretty much living and breathing Ayu for two months straight, I just got sick of it and stopped listening to music for a bit altogether (I remember these dark times all too well, it was pretty awful). I couldn't hear Ayu's music anymore, couldn't stand it. I remember listening so much that teeny tiny details started annoying me (the main being the reverse cymbal sound in evolution, but there were others). I couldn't hear these songs anymore - I'd picked them apart and destroyed them in the process. For a bit I didn't touch anything Ayu-related. It was a hefty price to pay for too much enthusiasm. (It made me very wary in later years to become too excited about anything new I discovered and consume it too intensely for fear of ruining it.)
A bit of a cool-down period was enough, fortunately. My fandom resumed and I acquired my first Ayu items, which I think were RAINBOW and I am... (or LOVEppears?) as a gift from my parents for graduating secondary school that June. I joined AHS and got to share my fandom with others, which was fantastic. It was an exciting time: A BALLADS had just released and was still being promoted, & was coming out, the end of the year brought Memorial address - oof, what a time to be alive! I managed to build a small collection of albums, consisting of all the albums from A Song for ×× to RAINBOW, A BEST and A BALLADS, and Memorial address (I didn't buy singles then). Videos for some of my favourite songs of the time - No way to say, forgiveness, HANABI ~episode II~ - were released. The board was in its prime, with a huge community, a lot of activity, contests left and right. I made a bunch of friends through the board and was even able to share my fandom with two real-life friends, one from secondary school and one from art academy, where I had just started that year.
With the release of MY STORY, things took a bit of a turn. While I liked some of the singles (INSPIRE was a bop, Moments I found okay), the album itself - which I had pre-ordered (the excitement!) - I found underwhelming. It planted the first seed for Ayu-scepticism. A key feature of the community populating the board back then was that there were various contingents each with their own outlook - those that found Ayu absolutely perfect, the wildly positives, the moderate and realistic, the cynics, and so on. There was some appeal in the cynic contingent for me - I didn't like MY STORY and became increasingly sceptical of what was to come next. Through certainly no fault of Ayu's, just my own weariness, the result of ruining things for myself through hyper-consumption (is what I'd say in retrospect), she could somehow do no good anymore eventually. (miss)understood? Bah. Secret? Mediocre and drab. GUILTY? Dear lord, must we really? By the time Rock n Roll Circus rolled around, I definitively lost interest. It felt as if Ayu was hopping on every bandwagon in sight (also unfair in retrospect) and lost what made her so spectacular to begin with - that she was so incredibly herself (and so good at it).
I left the forum eventually and moved on to other musical pastures. Ayu became a bit of a relic of the past. She was still in somewhat regular rotation, but I did not move beyond Secret (which, yes, I had come to appreciate as much more than mediocre and drab - in fact, it became my favourite album for a while), listening pretty much exclusively to the first eight years or so of Ayu's discography (though I still did not touch MY STORY and (miss)understood). There were certainly moments my interest revived; however, these merely meant I just listened more intensely to my old favourites. Secret especially, as mentioned just above, became an utter staple. Otherwise, I didn't think to explore what had happened since. I became active elsewhere on the internet on more general music forums and review websites, where I occasionally revisited old Ayu albums and reviewed them. Reading those back, the scepsis prevailed, clearly; even the reviews of my favourite albums of the time are fairly dismissive and speak only to my disillusionment of the time. (miss)understood received quite a beating ('bland', 'mediocre', 'unpleasant'), to name one example.
(To give you the proper perspective on this whole 'waning interest', by the way, Ayu is
by far my most listened to artist on Spotify (which I use for 90% of my listening nowadays), so even my 'moderate consumption' still meant she outranked every other artist I listened to.)
For a while Ayu was pretty much off my radar otherwise. Now and then some things came to my attention (the deafness for example, the fact that the albums that were once almost annual events had pretty much slowed to a trickle, and then less) but that was it. Funnily enough, I think I can give credit to one of Spotify's functions for eventually reviving my interest. I was surprised to see Ayu pop up in the Release Radar. It was 23rd Monster, I think (edit: I was wrong, it was Dreamed a Dream). While I didn't find it amazingly exciting, it kind of rekindled interest and some hope that Ayu was indeed still a major player and that I had just not managed to keep up. Nonfiction also came, same story - alright, not brilliant, but good enough - and I somewhat hopefully set out to make up for lost time.
I picked a compilation to get back into the swing of things, and since I love good Ayu ballads perhaps more than anything, I went with the WINTER BALLAD SELECTION, which combined some of my personal favourites (JEWEL, No way to say, for instance) with some new tracks. I was surprised to say the least. How had I discounted everything post-2006 so ruthlessly? I was very wrong, I quickly realised. Various of the 'new' tracks on this compilation quickly became favourites: You were..., which shockingly turned out to be from Rock n Roll Circus, which I had once dismissed outright only for what I perceived to be a silly album theme; Days, from the album I had dismissed for derivatively cashing in on the electropop-trend (this was when Perfume had become super popular). Turned out I was wrong in my own disillusionment. Turns out I had dismissed perfectly excellent albums just because I had ruined things for myself.
And so came a period of reevaluation in which I could judge things in a fairer light. Not to invoke objectivity, of course not: finding You were... rekindled a flame that had been burning all along, the flame of fandom. The revisiting of albums I once didn't think much of (if I even gave them a fair shot) has been a huge pleasure. (miss)understood? Amazing. NEXT LEVEL? Amazing, and also not at all a derivative cash-in. Rock n Roll Circus? I dismissed it for being an idiot myself - it is actually amazing, too. And she keeps on rolling them out, too. I eventually got around to spinning M(A)DE IN JAPAN and was fully taken aback. Apparently, in 2016 Ayu could still easily drop material on par with the material from the period of time I had once deemed entirely sacred and superior of anything else after. Huh.
I made a graph:
Please don't misconstrue this as a negative thread, CELEBRATE YOUR FANDOM!
