Ayu's Twitter/Weibo - Discussion #36

[Aderianu]

"Thanks for 2 days, Shizuoka. We'll come back next year"

[tokyoxjapanxfan]

That pictured confused me so much.

I thought I was looking at a boat on a river with the moon and a tree.

Note: refrain from AHS upon first waking up lolol

[Ryusei]

Originally Posted by ExodusUK

I love Too Late for that very reason

This song was Ayu's good bye song to fans, right? When she considered quitting just before Loveppears came out.

She considered quitting? Why?

[attractive nausea]

I know she considered quitting when A BEST came out because she felt it meant the end of her career but i don't recall her wanting to quit when LOVEppears came out ?

[Delicious n Bold]

Hasn't ayu always been almost quitting?

[kotora]

Originally Posted by Aderianu

"Thanks for 2 days, Shizuoka. We'll come back next year"

I smell new album and new tour 2016 from this message.

[ayumisrael]

Originally Posted by kotora

I smell new album and new tour 2016 from this message.

Well, I'm not going to complain.

[adantatu2]

Originally Posted by Delicious n Bold

Hasn't ayu always been almost quitting?

Really ?

In many interviews I always read sentences like:
"I can't live without"
"Music is my life"
"I'm not quitting"

[kotora]

Originally Posted by ayumisrael

Well, I'm not going to complain.

If you did not complain or criticize, this forum would not be AHS.

Originally Posted by adantatu2

Really ?

In many interviews I always read sentences like:
"I can't live without"
"Music is my life"
"I'm not quitting"

She mentioned she wanted to quit before A BEST released because Utada "gave" her lots of pressures. It was in the interview on TV (It's called Light and Shadow or something..)and then she cried in the interview.

[chocopockymaster]

Originally Posted by kotora

She mentioned she wanted to quit before A BEST released because Utada "gave" her lots of pressures. It was in the interview on TV (It's called Light and Shadow or something..)and then she cried in the interview.

Except Utada had nothing to do with it, so...?

[BlackSilence]

^i think what they mean is that utada was releasing something at the same time as aye's A BEST came out and probably was getting successful so she had a lot of pressure to be better than her?

[Andrenekoi]

Most of the time the first Best album of a japanese artist that got big early is the last relevant release they will ever make. The artist goes from million seller to nobody, so, the first compilation is on several cases seen a headshot on the career.

Avex forced A Best on the same day as Distance to capitalize on the rivalry, and Ayu probably wasn't all that sure if there would be something left for her after that... This is actually the main theme from Duty (the album), her duty to keep her career going on even if she (thought she) knew everything would be over pretty soon.

[Delirium-Zer0]

The Girlpop interview from December 1999 is actually REALLY revealing about her state of mind after the A single (which I think did go into the "Duty" album a bit)...

She doesn't go into her reasons for it, but it seems that during the recording of "A" is when she started thinking she was ready to leave avex & stop singing. When "A" came out she didn't watch any music programs on TV, she didn't look at rankings - if she happened to see sales figures on TV by accident she'd change the channel as quickly as she could. She'd written "too late" as a sort of "goodbye letter" without really saying so in interviews or anything at the time, but fan messages & emails were like "This song feels like Ayu is going away, and I don't like it!" In the Girlpop interview Ayu said that the fans who sent those messages were actually pretty on point, and that she was actually VERY sure she wanted to stop... She apparently said she'd take some time to think about it after "A," even though she was pretty certain, but she did take that time - She actually spent about a month not coming into contact with anything that had to do with music, and then saw how she felt afterwards.

Fun fact, ayu had no idea what the sales figures were for "A" until after LOVEppears was done being made, and her reaction was just "...Eh?" lol

I'm still working on translating this interview... it's got some pretty interesting stuff, I'm really sad I never worked on it until now actually.

[Andrenekoi]

^She also said during AB2 promotion or the 10th anni that she only started to actually love what she was doing around the time of the Dearest single... So, the song is pretty important for her.

[ExodusUK]

Some more stuff about it...

Don't you think the course of love described in these phrases is very clear?
　Secondly, around the release of the maxi-single "A" (in August 1999), she felt she was at a deadlock and was going to quit. She herself told that the song "too late" put into "A" had been the confession of such feelings and the good-bye message to her fans ("GIRL POP" Dec. 1999). Many people were surprised to know that and supposed what had driven her into a corner in fact. The four principal suppositions I saw on internet are as follows.
　① The demand for making positive songs
　② The enlargement of the image of "Hamasaki Ayumi"
　③ The distance between her and her fans
　④ The aversion for the situation that she had to make lyrics one after another
　I think any of them is weak as the cause of a deadlock. As to ①, it's certain that she had been troubled with the problem when creating her first album, but she must have already found her answer by that time, as I had written before. On the other hand, it wasn't before the release of the second album that she was clearly conscious of the problem of ②. (It became one of the main themes of her third album "Duty".) And as to ③, it's quite doubtful whether she perceived it before holding a standard concert. (So she was going to quit without experiencing it !) ④ sounds true to some extent, but it's not imaginable that she would give up singing only by the reason. Don't you think we can persuade ourselves at length by adding one more reason to it, the personal affair of her losing love?
　Moreover, please look at the album title "LOVEppears". Don't you think it's very pretty pony~pretty pony~pretty pony~pretty pony~pretty pony~? According to the public explanation, it means the things like love. But, to express this meaning only, it's enough to name as "Love in Appearance", or, more simply, "Looks like Love". Why did she make such a coined word? -- I suppose she had wanted to cross out "A", in other words, one more meaning of "A was lost" was hidden behind the title.

　　　　　　　　2. Supposing the Situation (continued)
　Mostly because of the reasons above, I think it very much likely that she experienced losing love then. Still I can't assert it's 100 percent true. So I would like to go on under the supposition that it was a fact.
　Supposing it was a fact -- she must have been in quite severe circumstances at the very beginning of 1999. I'm not going to search who was her lover, but, considering that her lyrics of those days are quite serious, it's supposed she loved earnestly and was hurt so much. On the other hand, she had made all her efforts to create the first album, putting as many as fifteen lyrics into it unsparingly, there would have been almost no stock. What to do then? The three choices would have crossed her mind.
　① Take a rest telling that it has become impossible to write a lyrics
　② Write a fiction
　③ Write her thoughts and feelings honestly as she had been doing
　She could not choose ①. She had resolved to do everything for her life at her debut, completed the first album with much efforts, and was just going up the stairs to success. If she had gone down then, she couldn't have forgiven herself. And it was also impossible to choose ②. She had not written a fiction from the first, nor done the training of it. She wouldn't have known how to write it. (But, maybe because of such inner demand, she wrote her first fiction a little time later, which was "Boys & Girls".) There was no way but to choose ③ after all, and I think the songs written through the process were "WHATEVER","LOVE～Destiny"and the four songs of "A".
　But, easy as it is to write like this, can you imagine how hard it was in fact? Making songs showing own hurt of mind before it's cured is just like widening own wound. (Because to write is to fix and amplify the emotions.) And, as she is a singer of course, she must sing them and do acting in promotion videos. Was there anyone who did such before her?

More here: http://homepage2.nifty.com/morimasa/love1.html

Kinda hard to follow as the author's self-translation is a bit awkward.

[Andrenekoi]

^I remember the blond girl from ABBA saying something similar about being "forced" to perform songs about personal issues... On her case, singing and performing songs about the failure of her marriage written by her soon to be ex-husband

[Delirium-Zer0]

The band Touche Amore has a great song about the same situation, actually (called "To Write Content"). It can't be easy when you're a singer or songwriter and your pain is also the source of your income and popularity, but at the same time it's really hard to write when you're not miserable, so what's the trade-off? You either lose your soul, or you lose your job cuz you don't have anything to sing about.

[kotora]

Originally Posted by chocopockymaster

Except Utada had nothing to do with it, so...?

It was the public media pressure to her. At the time media often made comparison between her and Utada, and she has received lots of pressures from the public. I remember that was the reason. Utada didn't give her pressure directly.

Regarding Dearest, that was the first song in which ayu wrote and implied "management, go f*ck yourself. My personal love life should not be involved in my career and you could not control my love life. My songs should not be forced by you, f*ckers." That is the message behind Dearest PV. That's why she started loving what she did.

[Andrenekoi]

Originally Posted by Delirium-Zer0

The band Touche Amore has a great song about the same situation, actually (called "To Write Content"). It can't be easy when you're a singer or songwriter and your pain is also the source of your income and popularity, but at the same time it's really hard to write when you're not miserable, so what's the trade-off? You either lose your soul, or you lose your job cuz you don't have anything to sing about.

I believe this is more a case of personal taste than a fact... But for some reason we tend to see "negative" feelings as "more artistic" than "positive" feeling on the west...

[BlackSilence]

^ don't they say that bad memories leave a deeper impression than the good ones?
I mean look at McQueen for example. It is very biased but that guy did very very dark stuff in his career and he was considered a genius at some point a provocateur, because it pulled strings of people's brain and hearts. They didnt know what to make of the things he did, and why he did them. We all know where he ended, though. I just think negative feelings in people make some of them think more out of the box, it beomes less direct and more abstract and symbolic.

All of those bad feelings have a lot of things mixed up in there, some that are taboo. Hapiness, however, is happiness. It always comes off as, well, happiness. Maybe that's why it's not so interesting.