Rinse, repeat, REPSYCLE: Merch and the 60th anniversary remasters of hide’s solo albums

When so much of a fan’s identity is now built around physical objects, perhaps it’s a surprise that most items that are sold are of exceptionally poor quality. Even the biggest, most respected artists aren’t immune to the challenges of conceiving, producing, manufacturing, and distributing apparel and accessories (T-shirts, sweatpants, cardigans, bomber jackets, underwear, bandannas, bracelets, necklaces), various tchochkes (key chains, figurines, tote bags, blankets, water bottles), and even music (vinyl records, CDs, cassette tapes, 8-tracks, believe it or not) with such a high turnover rate: Taylor Swift is now well-known to be following the old-school Japanese-model of physical music by releasing numerous variants of a single title with exclusive content to encourage multiple purchases of essentially the same product. Aside from the ethical and moral dilemmas of juicing numbers to increase bottom lines (and chart positions), and exploiting the passion of fans, this also presents the escalating problem of introducing an ever-increasing number of forever plastics and fibers into the environment and our bodies, all wrung out of the hands of overworked, underpaid, exploited laborers. And, one might snort indignantly, they’re not even good! $40 T-shirts with a silk-screened image of the album cover, $80 hoodies emblazoned with a two-word catch-phrase printed in tiny, illegibly-stylized font, $45 crop tops with the artist’s name in a simple Times New Roman font, and currently on sale at the Swift shop, a $95 plain black jacket with the words “All’s fair in love and poetry” stenciled across the back. Even (or maybe especially) legacy and deceased artists can’t escape the relentless march of capitalism.

And so, it is with every year that I tune into hide-city to see what sort of fresh buffoonery the team is cooking up to celebrate the life of hide, one of Japan’s most beloved, late rock stars. But while May 2, the day he passed, (and sometimes his birthday, December 13) is often the key touchstone, the hide-branded merchandise is a well-oiled year-long press that prints money as quickly as a rep at Universal needs a second vacation home. It’s a double-edged sword, when physical objects can often be genuine sources of joy: fun collectibles that bring a splash of color, amusement, connection, and even utility into someone’s life (we all have to drink out of something, why not a mug stamped with your favorite artist’s logo)? Unfortunately, the quest for profits is often out of line with consumers’ desire for sustainable, quality materials that are affordable, long-lasting, and beautiful. Instead, with it being cheaper to let truckloads of nurdles scatter to the winds during transport than to properly monitor and clean-up them up, we’re often stuck with expensive, cheap, hazardous materials that look as if they were conceived and designed on the margins of a Post-It.

And over time, as hide’s core fans have aged and moved on, the utility of releasing hide-branded merchandise has become increasingly cynical. While it’s great to introduce new, younger fans to his music, it also prompts the debate of marketing — are they just attempting to manufacture younger fans to whom they can continue selling merchandise in perpetuity for the single, upfront cost of a back catalog? Is anybody really dying for a pair of underwear emblazoned with an image of hide peering into a toilet? So considering how eager the hide memorial committee was to license and pump out hide-related merchandise well on twenty-six years after the artist’s passing, it’s a shock that they hadn’t released any official audio remasters. While there have been a number of compilations, greatest hits, and two rounds of vinyl records (singles on picture discs, and albums in a limited run), remasters were nimble at eluding what now falls under the fashionable marketing term “merch.” But at long last, this year a commemorative box set including hide’s original three solo albums, remastered for what would have been his 60th birthday, was released on May 1, one day before the 26th anniversary of his tragic passing. Finally, the CD remasters we’d been waiting for. Then the disappointment begins.

Setting aside the questionable title and box art for a minute (actually, let’s take care of it right now — who, exactly, is that supposed to be on the cover? What connection does this computer graphic have to any of hide’s visual aesthetic up to 1998? Do they own zero rights to a single image of him that could have been used? Why does the title REPSYCLE sound less like a clever play on what is referred to as hide’s signature “PS” stylization, and more like a literal description of what they have to offer now — the same content, released in new packaging over and over again, mostly as greatest hits collections and increasingly sour tribute albums? Is it really so signature when it was only used for one era?), it has to be acknowledged that hide wasn’t exactly prolific. He released two incredibly huge and influential solo albums in the 1990s, but he wasn’t Prince, sitting on a vault of secret, unreleased demos and recordings. In fact, there were really only three songs that could be scraped off a master tape after his death: two demos from the PSYENCE sessions titled “In Motion” and “JUNK STORY,” both released in 2002, and “Ko-GAL” — which was so roughly captured in early 1998, that the vocals had to be reconstructed with Vocaloid software — released in 2014 for his 50th birthday. Whether or not the label is holding on to any more material for future anniversaries remains to be seen, though what we’re getting for the 60th anniversary might be a good indication.

The novelty of the box set, remastering aside, stems from the content of hide’s final, posthumously released album Ja,Zoo. While two singles from this album had been completed during hide’s lifetime (“PINK SPIDER” was already in the can, but released just after his sudden death), the entire album had yet to be finished, with songs still in demo phases, vocals still in flux, and alternate mixes under discussion before hide had a chance to complete it. But as a touching tribute, Spread Beaver, the members of the band he had been touring, writing, and recording with, particularly co-producer I.N.A., decided to complete the album as best as they could, hoping to see hide’s vision through by re-calling their sessions together. This included cobbling together the closing track “PINK CLOUD ASSEMBLY” with hide’s brother Hiroshi Matsumoto’s spoken words for lack of clean vocals, and the absence of the demo “Ko-GAL,” which was in rough enough shape to render it useless. Yet, despite the hiccups and the omission of what surely would have been five or six more songs in keeping with his usual 16-track albums, Ja,Zoo released onto a grieving public grateful for nostalgia and memory, and who fully embraced the singles and the album as an authentic, canon-level piece of the discography, propelling the album to #2 on the Oricon. While the album can never truly be considered a genuine product of hide’s massively creative mind, it was close enough, giving everyone one last reason to celebrate and pay respectful tribute to a massively creative mind taken all too soon.

So while the box set leaves intact Hide Your Face and PSYENCE as is (no bonus b-sides, “In Motion,” or “JUNK STORY” remasters here, thank you), it does attempt to exhume the Ja,Zoo masters and miscellany to further align the album more closely to how it originally intended to be (presuming we overlook that hide probably didn’t intend to let family and friends profit off of his legacy with computer simulations of his voice and extremely uncanny cos-players) by providing alternate vocal mixes and inclusions of well-entrenched favorites using technology unavailable in 1998, but which comes at the unfortunate cost of over-correction.

Thus, Ja,Zoo, now subtitled 2024 Remaster&REPSYCLE to emphasize its altered content, includes several updates. “HURRY GO ROUND” received new vocals that were discovered by accident in 2018 during production of a hide-adjacent biopic, and mostly sounds unoffensive and unnecessary, neither adding or detracting from the original. There is the inclusion of the fantastic “Ko-GAL,” which hide presumably had planned to put on the album, with re-edited Vocaloid vocals; these sound smoother and less glitchy now, and though unnervingly authentic, still eerily soulless (my money is on AI here). In two of the album’s biggest changes, we get the inclusion of hide’s sung vocals on the closing track “PINK CLOUD ASSEMBLY,” a song which had only been performed live and couldn’t be extracted and edited well enough at the time. While not a total disaster, it is obvious that the vocals have been pasted in from a totally separate, live vocal take. Overall, it’s a cool novelty, but it strips the 1998 version of what made it so touching: while it wasn’t the song as it was “meant” to be, including hide’s brother with spoken word really cemented the album as a memorial piece rather than assuming the arrogance of a definitive body of work without its mastermind’s final input.

The worst of the changes is the alternative vocal take for “PINK SPIDER,” now written in the Latin alphabet rather than in katakana. As perhaps the defining song of hide’s entire career, this had a lot of pressure to carry, and it collapses spectacularly under the weight of both redundancy and overeager editing. While not significantly different from the “original” take, it’s different enough after twenty-six years of the original to always feel slightly off, like an uncanny valley effect, with the distortion on the verses turned up so high that it nearly drowns, and definitely overshadows, the music production and instrumentals.

This is in stark contrast to the rest of the remasters (and those on the other albums as well), which seem like they prefer the instrumentals over hide’s vocals. The backing tracks are bright and clear, with audio channels so delectably isolated that you can’t help but notice sounds and sonic landscapes that weren’t there before. That seems like a lot for a simple remaster of albums that were already largely excellent before and didn’t necessarily need a volume boost, but I wouldn’t be surprise if there was some subtle re-mixing involved, too. The originals now sound noticeably more compressed, which made for an interesting soup of sound that defined hide’s messy, grungey-, industrial-metal, while the remasters are a crisp, unmixed salad that feel fresh but a bit too cold.

As someone who has always preferred a remaster over the original, this was an interesting experiment, but a bit disappointing. Maybe the originals just hit too close to home, those particular studio recordings and mixes that were played so many times they have become interwoven through my DNA. But knowing that there isn’t any reason to eschew the original releases over these really renders this piece of merch as useless as a water bottle cap is to a recycling plant. I love a box set, but the physical box here isn’t a consolation: it measures about 10.5 x 8 inches, but doesn’t utilize that space, instead stacking the digipaks in a pile right in a center pocket with nothing but black cardboard surrounding it. There is one short booklet included that is the size of the box. A simple CD-sized box would have gotten the job done here, and while the concert footage included on the Blu-ray is a nice touch, I don’t think anyone was desperate for a concert that is largely available on the Internet.

For my money, the best memorial activities are the physical spaces that Japanese fans can participate in: the karaoke nights, meet-ups, pub crawls, and memorial concerts that are less about the ghostly specter of hide’s guitar occupying center stage, and more about the opportunity to share memories, stories, and excitement about an artist that most people have already forgotten. Those experiences can make older fans feel younger and enthusiastic again, while giving younger fans the opportunity to learn more and interact with older fans who bring knowledge, experience, and lore to the table. As for the music, both sets of fans, as well as curious listeners, looking for physical copies, can still find all of hide’s excellent albums in any used Japanese record or CD store for less than $3 a pop, and they still sound great. And for the ability to effect people emotionally and offer a chance to really connect and bond, even just for a few hours, those options are all probably worth a lot more than a plastic $30 key chain that’s about to get chipped.

Notes
[ All images are scans from the author’s personal collection. This isn’t a polemic against fans who buy merchandise. I have bought merch, too. For one example, I bought this disappointing box set. ]

The mystery is the message: Memoir-pop and Namie Amuro

There are times when a musician or performing artist’s work is irrevocably intertwined with their personal life in a way that makes it impossible to ignore, and also comes at the cost of understanding or enriching their work. Many celebrity-singers working today actively nurture and exploit their personal lives, capitalizing on tabloid gossip and Reddit rumors to craft a sort of extended Nonfiction-pop Universe, rather than using them in service of a song that is then tweaked to feel universal and easily grafted onto any listener’s life — the thing that makes popular music so popular. This isn’t anything new, and rather extends from a tradition including Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and Alanis Morrisette, but it’s taken on a certain recent vogue with the superstar ascendancy of Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift’s entire musical body of work is a literal memoir — to ignore her personal life is at best, to deny yourself a fully three-dimensional song, and at worst, leaves you totally perplexed. While you can theoretically enjoy the songs on their own, “Is It Over Now? (Taylor’s Version)” is not a song about the confusion, jealousy, and resentment left at the end of an on-and-off relationship where you’ve both casually dated others and realize you’re not cut out for that, it’s about Taylor Swift and Harry Styles breaking up while on vacation in the Virgin Islands, after which she was forced to leave alone, sitting on a boat in a blue dress. “The Boy Is Mine” is nominally a song about the heady and forbidden thrill of being The Other Woman, but it’s mostly about Ariana Grande feeling triumphant about being a homewrecker. Jennifer Lopez not only wrote a whole album, but created an entire film about her second time around with Ben Affleck. Maybe you feel a connection to a song that is about an all-consuming love taken for granted, but probably “Call Out My Name” is just about Abel Tesfaye nearly donating his kidney to Selena Gomez before she dropped him for Justin Bieber. Likewise, some J-pop stars also funnel personal narratives into their art, like Ayumi Hamasaki, who has written the lyrics to all of her songs from day one, and often uses her own experiences and those of her friends for inspiration, though only more recent work was explicit about it (and in ways that nearly demanded second-hand embarrassment).

But you never caught Namie Amuro using her songs as a platform to address gossip or work through personal trauma. Namie took the term “professional” to new heights, often content to serve as a conduit, completely divorcing herself from her music, which she often left up to other writers and producers, like Tetsuya Komuro, who created almost all of her solo work in the 1990s. Treating it like the job that it was meant that fans often knew very little about her, especially in the later part of her career where she continued to shun personal interviews and ignore the increasingly informal and open nature of social media networks. This was one woman who was determined to be nothing more than a hard-working fiction, a canvas in the tradition of pop music’s highest aspiration. This was even in the face of heavy personal drama that almost begged to be publicly addressed.

For example, in the late 90s, she had to admit that she was taking a brief hiatus from the industry after a quick marriage to Masaharu “Sam” Maruyama of J-pop group TRF, followed by the birth of their son less than eight months later. And in an even more dramatic and inescapably public arc, she made a tentative return in 1998 with the subdued single, “I HAVE NEVER SEEN,” hoping to put it all behind her and move forward. She then released a follow-up, titled “RESPECT the POWER OF LOVE,” on March 17, 1999, twenty-five years ago today, which happened to be the day that her mother was brutally murdered by Namie’s uncle (a news article from AP published that day states that she “was run over several times and possibly hacked with an ax” though other web sites say that she was run over and beaten with a pipe, or sometimes a hatchet). Her uncle was then found dead by suicide later that day (again, some reports state he was still alive when located, and died later in the hospital — you will never find Namie answering these questions). But  believe it or not, while Namie did cancel all of the promotions for the single, the music industry soldiered on and just four months later, she released “toi et moi.”

“RESPECT the POWER OF LOVE” became forever linked with the horrific incident, and it’s now sometimes hard to consider the song on its own terms, mostly because the pop song itself stands in such stark emotional contrast to the events. It’s also not much of a coincidence that Namie began working with new producers and writers on subsequent singles, perhaps in an attempt to distance herself from the series of tragic events that saw her sales and popularity decline, and which culminated in a 2002 divorce.

“RESPECT the POWER OF LOVE,” one of the last singles Komuro would ever write for Namie, sounds very much like a typical TK song, one that looks backward, perhaps for continuity’s sake in regards to her recent return to the industry. But unfortunately, by 1999, TK’s sound and popularity was also drying up, and this is reflected in the somewhat paint-by-numbers approach here. You get all of the signature keyboards, drum machines, and TK’s own elbowed-in vocals, accompanied by a straightforward, if low-key anthemic chorus. But none of it feels punchy where it should, instead lacking the essential element of genuine belief in the song’s message. Simply put, it was retreaded material, the kind of thing Komuro would normally have thrown to a lesser singer as a one-off favor, or on one of those late-stage Tomomi Kahala albums. It’s not a bad song, but it lacks the conviction and commitment of both its writer and performer, hinting at what had become a stale working relationship amid a rapidly evolving musical landscape. It didn’t help that it was thrown out on the dawn of an event that made it seem tentatively inappropriate and tone-deaf. The single also features a halfhearted remix titled the “NYC Uptown remix,” which also doesn’t do much — it gives the song more of an R&B, hip-hop edge, eliminating the poppier parts of the original, but as the melody and vocals itself lack much teeth, a remix isn’t sufficient to give it enough energy.

Clearly Namie needed a reset across her whole life, as did music listeners. Fans, meanwhile, have made peace with the fact that there will be no juicy tell-alls — Namie will always be remembered as the woman you went to for escape, projection, and untouchable, blemish-free myth-making. You cannot study her interviews to find hidden meaning, or peruse her verses for Easter eggs, or discuss theories about telltale clues. “toi et moi” was not about coping with horrific trauma. “think of me” was a moving song about a broken relationship, but it was never definitely and specifically about Namie’s marital dysfunction and looming separation from Sam. Everything personal stayed personal. Nothing was confirmed or denied. Any attempt to breach the surface or invite speculation could be ignored, covered up, or lasered off. Like all of the world’s best pop music, the song plays, emotional connection is established in many different, brilliantly varied hues, touching you in a personal way that feels almost as if the singer has crawled into your heart and head to project outwards, and the song ends. It does not require footnotes or a feverish investigation board. It asks very little of you, except your undivided attention and willingness to engage. It is about everyone because it is about no one.

Notes [ Image in header edited from the original at Namie Amuro Toi et Moi. ]

2023 at a glance

An appears 2023 tumblr year-end round-up

I continue to sporadically post longer written pieces that feel a bit too informal to post here, mostly anniversary celebrations, over at the appears tumblr. Here is a summary of the ones that I posted throughout 2023, in chronological order:

Ayumi Hamaski’s A CLASSICAL: 10th anniversary
hide’s ROCKET DIVE: 25th anniversary
Every Little Thing’s Time to Destination: 25th anniversary
Ayumi Hamasaki’s YOU: 25th anniversary
f(x)’s Pink Tape: 10th anniversary
Pizzicato Five’s the international playboy & playgirl record: 25th anniversary
Ayumi Hamasaki’s No way to say: 20th anniversary
Namie Amuro’s Style: 20th anniversary

25 years of Ayumi Hamasaki fandom: An interview with Delirium Zer0

This week, Ayumi Hamasaki is celebrating 25 years since her major label debut single, “poker face.” In those 25 years, Ayumi has released 18 original studio albums amid a plethora of singles, EPs, and remixes on mini-CD, CD, USB, vinyl record, PLAYBUTTON, and streaming. She has been featured on numerous magazines covers, hosted her own talk show, toured extensively throughout Japan and Asia, released a line of clothing, posed for high-concept photo books, collaborated with Hello Kitty, explored the repercussions of fame and celebrity in several music videos, and even fit in some time to sight-see and meet with fans in far-flung places around the world.

There is no way anyone could do Ayumi’s career justice in the space of one article, but there is one important idea that stuck out to me during this anniversary celebration: without the hard work of passionate fans and enthusiasts who spend countless hours transliterating lyrics, translating interviews, uploading videos, cross-posting news, and sharing trivia, many of us outside of Japan would never have gotten to know and love a phenomenal artist and entertainer like Ayumi Hamasaki. These unsung heroes do what they do out of sheer love and for fellow fans, often for free on their own time, and they deserve all of our gratitude and recognition.

There have been many prominent fans that I can remember during my time as an Ayu fan — everybody from HCE who used to run the Hamasaki Republic web site and forums, to the twitter/tumblr account of ayu-vogue.net who has been hard at work sharing essential updates for as long as I can remember. One of the most important figures that has stood out to me and many of you in the Ayumi Hamasaki fandom community is Delirium Zer0.

I first got to know Zer0 through her thoughtful posts on the Ayumi Hamasaki Sekai forums many, many years ago, as well as through the translations and other articles that she wrote about Ayu on her own web site. She was also co-host, along with Loki, Jaylee, and Erin, of the highly entertaining podcast Gaijin Kanpai, which is where I first got the chance to speak with her about the overseas J-pop community. I contacted Zer0 in the hopes of doing something really special for Ayumi’s 25th anniversary: picking her brain on as much of Ayu’s career that one could possibly squeeze into anything less than book-length (I could have easily asked another thirty — or hundred — questions!), as well as discussing how the Ayu fandom, especially on the Internet, has changed since its inception. From shrines and web rings, to Panasonic commercials, minuscule liner notes of a CD booklet to alternate vocal takes, Zer0 is an absolute expert on everything Ayu, and I was floored with how extremely generous with her time and knowledge she was. We talked about everything from favorite albums and concert tours, to how Tetsuya Komuro has contributed to Ayu’s soundscape, to some of the really cool and rare pieces in her Ayu collection. I hope you all enjoy reading this as much as I did — I promise you will walk away learning something new and really cool here.

This year, let’s celebrate both 25 years of Ayu’s amazing career, as well as the creators and curators, YouTubers and bloggers, forum-lurkers, digital archivists, present and future friends, and everyone in between, who make experiencing our passions together so fun and leave behind valuable artifacts for everyone researching and seeking information to come.

Once again, a big thank you to Zer0 for everything that she has contributed to the fan community over the years and taking the time to share her thoughts on everything Ayu! Without further ado, let’s take a look back at 25 years of music and fandom. (My words appear in bold.)

appears: A lot of readers will recognize you from your work with the podcast Gaijin Kanpai and/or related work covering all manner of J-pop and J-rock history. I certainly remember you first as a presence on the AHS (Ayumi Hamasaki Sekai) Forums from decades ago, as a prolific poster and contributor. I also remember several web sites you created that covered song-by-song lyric translations and analyses of Ayumi’s work. But for those just getting to know you, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself, and when and how you first got into Japanese pop music?

Zer0: Well, the name on my birth certificate is “Lauren,” but online I’ve been called “Delirium Zer0” or some variation of it since I was about 15, and it feels more like my actual name! Most folks online call me Zero, but in the Ayu fandom y’all have always latched on to Deli! :D I’ve also done some lengthy question-answering about J-music on Reddit under the username zer0buscus, and occasionally I’ll dip into Quora to answer something about J-pop history or the J-pop industry. I’m active on twitter as @deliriumzer0, where I’ve exchanged messages with J-pop producers and critics with increasing frequency, which is fun!

I first joined the Ayu fandom as a member of the Ayudesign forum because I wanted to help Kurayami, the webmaster, with a new design he was working on for the splash page at the time. I think my next big Ayu web presence then was ClubAYU.com, where I helped Censations with the graphics and later posted news full-time when his own interest waned a bit. My first major project, though, was working on the database at ayu-mi-x.com with Yaten. The scans we did for that site still circulate the web even now, 20 years later, which is wild to me.

My interest in J-music culminated gradually over many, MANY years, probably starting with the music from the first two Sonic the Hedgehog games. My sister and I would harmonize along to Masato Nakamura’s melodies, making up stupid lyrics, not realizing the guy had a whole band on the other side of the planet! The ending theme for Sonic 2 was a particular favorite of mine, so imagine my delight when I learned it was a proper SONG on one of Dreams Come True’s albums! Anyway, between those early 90s gaming days and spring 2000, I’d slowly learned that I really liked non-English music (thank you Anggun and Faye Wong), and that Japanese melodies in particular seemed to hit me with ALL the feels.

How did you get into Ayumi Hamasaki’s music, and how long have you been a fan? Is there something specific about her or her music that drew you in?

My sister was on this old website called Scour that did exactly what its name implied, it was a search engine just for binary files that were available on any publicly-accessible http servers. A lot of people in 2000 still just uploaded things to the web, not bothering to create actual sites or pages, just to share and store files, if they had the web space and bandwidth available to do so. This site would let you search the metadata of music and video files really easily. Anyway, she was searching for MP3s by entirely different artists who were a bit obscure and hard to find music by, like Coco Lee and Milla Jovovich (whose debut album is surprisingly wonderful, by the way). She came across something called “track07.mp3” and gave it a download to see what it was, but didn’t recognize it. The id3 tag said it was a song called “TO BE” by Ayumi Hamasaki. We were both completely addicted. The melody was lovely, her voice was so cute, and looking up photos and lyric translations, she pulled me in so much! We found some websites that distributed new J-pop releases and I ended up hearing “vogue,” “Far away,” and some of the remixes on ayu-mi-x II as well as a few more tracks from LOVEppears. It was really the fact that ONE artist did “TO BE,” “Far away,” “monochrome,” and HΛL’s mix of “vogue” that made me go “Okay, this person is versatile as heck and there are NO misses here. I’m officially a fan. This is my life now.”

Do you remember the first song/album that you heard? What about the first CD that you ever purchased?

First song was detailed above. The first CDs I owned were all gifts I got for Christmas in late 2000: AUDIENCE and ayu-mi-x II version Acoustic Orchestra. LOVEppears sadly arrived a bit too late for Christmas morning, but it was in the same order apparently, it was just back-ordered a bit. The particular shine and gloss on the AUDIENCE disc, and the clear silvery-blue feeling of the LOVEppears packaging are things I will not soon forget. (Not to mention, “immature” and “too late” sounded different than I’d remembered because I’d only heard the single versions without realizing it, and they were so much better here!) In spring 2001 I finally bought some Ayu items with my own money, and I don’t remember everything in the order but I do know it included Far away, SEASONS, and the VCD of A Clips. And then Endless sorrow was the first new release I bought as soon as it came out.

What do you feel is your biggest contribution to the fandom, or where can people find the work that you are most proud of?

Honestly I think most of the work that’s still findable right now is some of the ayu-mi-x scans being reposted on the Music Pixels blog, and I also wrote a lot of the text on the VERY out-of-date Ayumi Hamasaki wiki at ayumihamasaki.fandom.com. Luckily I still have a lot of my translations and writing handy, and I’ve been doing a ton of scanning! I’ve been trying to find time to relaunch my own Ayu site, so stay tuned for that — everything I’ve done that I’m proud of, I wanna get it all available there in one place.

Is there any aspect of Ayu’s career that you feel you geek out over the most?

There is not just one thing, I go through phases. Sometimes it’s about the music, and I pick apart the mixing or arrangement choices in her songs. Sometimes I revisit mine and other people’s lyrics translations because I’ll realize I know the PERFECT way to translate something complicated in her lyrics. Sometimes it’s all about her visuals and fonts and cover art, or maybe it’s her costumes and fashion. Other times it’s about her career history and old versions of fan sites, her official site, and the history of her fan club. Sometimes I have moments where I want as much detail about her pre-avex career as possible. Sometimes I obsess over concert merchandise, or extremely limited giveaway items from CM campaigns, or exactly how to obtain rare releases, or what was a TeamAyu bonus… The great thing about Ayu is that there’s so much to her career that when one part of it loses its luster, there’s always something else to care about that you never thought of before!

A lot of Ayumi fans have amazing collections that consist of any and everything from box sets, to vinyl records, to concert goods like T-shirts, key chains, ayupan figurines, etc. What item(s) in your collection do you love the most?

There are so many! For one thing, Ayu simply has some really great merch. Honestly the camo storage box she sold during one of the TROUBLE tours is awesome, for example. As an adult I’ve come to love practical merch like that rather than T-shirts and posters. I don’t have enough wall or drawer space for any more posters and T-shirts, but give me home organizational goods ALL DAY. Storage boxes, cord wraps, phone stands, binders, pencil cases. And I love the hand dust mop with Papiko on it SO MUCH. I do actually use it, which… is not great for preservation, but I took photos so it’s fine. XD

And I really like that she gave us socks! I WANT MORE AYU SOCKS! lol

Some stuff I’m just proud I got a good deal on, like the “poker face” promo flyer I got for $10 when it was going for more than a hundred usually (thanks to the seller for putting a typo in the auction name, lol).

Other stuff was really hard to get at the time, like when I got my A MODEL phone you still couldn’t send batteries from Japan through the mail, so there’s no battery in it. Now, of course, you CAN send a battery, so it’s a bit frustrating to have an A MODEL I can’t turn on, but I was really proud I got it. Also, the person who sold it included a tabletop display for the phone (which typically held a non-functioning mock-up phone), which sometimes pops up on its own for auction, but it’s not usually cheap! So getting it as a freebie was really nice.

One item I just love for my own reasons is the pair of 20th anniversary Converse sneakers. Ayu has yet to release any shoes that I actually think look good (I never got the FTL Vans, and I only minorly regret that), but the Converse ones at least have my beloved leopard print. And they were not easy to find, either!

What item has the most sentimental value for you?

What’s funny is the two most sentimental items for me are both NOT official merch! One is my ARENA TOUR 2009 pink dress ayupan figure. Since it wasn’t genuine, I let my kid play with it when they were little, and one day they were a bit overzealous with it and the head came off. It’s been super glued back on since, and my kid was much gentler with it lol.

The other is a camo T-shirt I bought from an army surplus store and painted a big white “A” logo on it. I wore it to Anime Expo 2002, doing a “UNITE” cosplay. Puffy Amiyumi were at the con and when I met them their handler ID’d the cosplay and looked delighted that I knew who Ayu was (as most Japanese people probably would have in 2002, tbh). Socially awkward wreck that I am, I nervously insisted I loved Puffy too! XD (Fun fact: I sang a Do As Infinity song in the first round of the karaoke contest that year and did not proceed to round 2. The eventual contest winner, who ALSO sang Do As Infinity in round 1, went on to get a contract and was known as HIMEKA. I was bitter for years. XD)

What item in your collection is the most rare, or that you think most people would be surprised to see or even know exists?

I feel like maybe the most rare thing is probably the Tu-Ka nail set, which there were 500 of. (There’s a phone holster from the same campaign that’s on its way to me as I type this.) It’s packed in an absolutely lovely case that I’ve always found unique.

One thing that might be really rare is the black lanyard with Ayu’s name in pink Helvetica bold font, which I think might be a promo item for the A Song for XX release, but I’m honestly still not sure.

I got a really good deal on a set of Ayu vinyls once, and it included the “WHATEVER -version M-” vinyl, which is a rare one.

And I don’t know how rare the “WHATEVER” single poster is, but I do know posters for Ayu’s 8cm singles tend to go for a LOT of money and not come up very often, so that’s another thing I’m really proud of having.

I think there are a lot of things that fans might not know exist.

What is a “Holy Grail” item missing from your collection that you would love to have? Any that you regret passing up?

In 2002, if you bought STADIUM TOUR 2002 merch from the official avex Rakuten store, you had a chance to win a flag from the STADIUM TOUR stage. Only one person could win it. Someone did win it, and that winner apparently gave it to a friend of theirs, and that friend put it up on Mercari for about $1500 awhile back. I couldn’t afford that so I passed it up, and the listing went away. But then… it came back, the price slightly lowered. And then I saw it go away and come back AGAIN. And I am not even kidding, as I type this, that flag is on Mercari Japan for about a thousand bucks. I am WRESTLING with it. I want it SO BADLY. But I really don’t think I can swing that price! XD

Ayumi has graced the cover of dozens upon dozens of magazines. Do you have any magazine covers/photo shoots that are your favorite?

I will say though, the GIRLPOP July 2000 shoot, where she’s wearing the same outfit in two different colors and the ayu in black is holding a book and the ayu in pink looks like she’s in a storybook, and on the cover she’s holding eyeglasses with the wallpaper pattern behind her on the lenses… I adore that shoot. It’s just so symbolic and the storytelling is really good. Photos from that shoot were sort of EVERYWHERE at the time, too, so it’s really iconic and nostalgic for me.

Ayumi has now released 18 original studio albums next to dozens and dozens of singles, EPs, remix albums, and greatest hits collections. She was recently named the female artist with the most albums in the Top Ten of the Oricon Chart at 54. Which albums, remix albums included, are in your top five?

5. Rock’n’Roll Circus
4. (miss)understood
3. Duty
2. LOVEppears
1. I am…

This was surprisingly easy. Although 3, 2, and 1 do shift around quite a bit, 4 and 5 are pretty steady for me.

I think we can acknowledge that any career as long as Ayu’s will inevitably have setbacks and missteps. Which albums, including remix albums, are in your bottom five, or the ones that you re-listen to/reach for the least, and why?

• 1. LOVE again. This is a pretty easy least favorite album for me. Primarily because of the ballads. It’s not that I’m anti-ballad, but I am very picky about ballads, and some of the ones here are the most stock, derivative ones in her discography, and I do often confuse a lot of the slow tracks here with others across her discography. Also I’m STILL bitter about how many tracks came over from the LOVE and again singles (which I will always call singles because avex marketing them as mini-albums was a bold-faced lie).
• 2. TROUBLE. Mostly just because “W” is the only track I’m ever in the mood to return to. “The way I am” is pretty good but tbh the acapella version from LINE LIVE spoiled me, it was really impressive and I almost never listen to the CD version! XD “aeternal” is slowly growing on me but it certainly didn’t wow me, and “We are the QUEENS” is really only good for the novelty value (I cannot separate it from the very fun but very ridiculous Clash of Queens campaign! lol). I know I’ll get things thrown at me for how “WORDS” does nothing for me, but-
• 3. LOVE Classics. Oh dear. What a clever concept, but only 2 or 3 of the tracks really felt like good matches with their classical pieces. Honestly just so disappointing after A Classical was kind of weak and I was hoping this would step things up a bit.
• 4. A Classical. It’s not that this one is bad, far from it, but the track list was the same set of tracks we’d already been getting Acoustic Orchestra and strings-focused live versions of for ages, so it contributed very little. I do have a few tracks I listen to occasionally, but not very many. (As I recall, Ayu used “favorite song” fan votes for the track list for this, but we didn’t realize what we were voting for so I don’t think it was really fair. XD)
• 5. ayu-mi-x 7 presents ayu-ro mix 4. By ayu-ro mix 3 the SUPER EUROBEAT tracks were starting to lose their teeth (that “Voyage” remix was… inexcusable), so I wasn’t really shocked when this album, outside of 1 or 2 tracks, was a demonstrable weakening of the Eurobeat spirit that made the genre so fun in the early 2000s. It’s like SEB was trying so hard to be inoffensive here, it falls really flat. Not to mention the re-remixing of tracks that already got the Eurobeat treatment. Why is this “Boys & Girls” remix even here??? Why would you revisit a track that was done so much better (TWICE!) 11 years earlier? And there was a one-off “INSPIRE” remix released on a random compilation years earlier that was MUCH better than the one here. And why, on the “Startin'” remix, is there almost NO BASS compared to the rest of the album?!?! (The “Sunrise” remix is pretty great though, honestly, like that’s not a song I’m crazy about but this remix is nice and eurobeaty and I do like it.)

In Ayu’s long career she has cycled through several looks and styles, both in her physical appearance and in her music. What is your favorite Ayu “era” and why?

2001, 2001, 2001. I wasn’t a fan of the A BEST-era hair, admittedly, but being a fan that year was so amazing that I don’t even care. It was the year of Ayu Hype, honestly, probably for all of us:

• The relaunch of the Ayumi Hamasaki Online Fanclub into “TeamAyu” was officially complete, and we started getting the TA magazine.
• All Ayu’s awards, whether for fashion or music or being Barbie in human form lol.
• The I am… singles era felt like it really officially kicked off with the hype for “evolution,” which started when she sang it at CDL and then we endured the long month of waiting for the CD to come out.
• “UNITE!” got announced with a few very different remix names (which seem to have been the remixes’ original names, based on the promo cassette that’s out there), and the remixes all use a different vocal track from the final song, which I STILL find fascinating even now 22 years later. [Editor’s Note: What?? I never noticed know this!]
• That year the internet reached a point where file sharing was particularly easy so sharing files for hype was more common and much easier than in 1999 or 2000, and there was more international overlap and more industry insiders sharing early MP3s so we were getting more news, info, and early-leaked MP3s than we had in the past. (Anyone remember Audiogalaxy? Or when Myspace was a file storage locker rather than a social media site?? Ah, nostalgia!)
• VCD-quality MPG files were easier to come across so I was seeing more Ayu videos than I’d ever been able to before (like one fan site just had all of “A Film for XX” up for download. AMAZING).
• Big name Ayu fans were starting to become a thing thanks to folks sharing files and screenshots and videos and news.
• ALL THE DOME TOUR HYPE, omg we spent all year waiting for the proper home video release based on the photos and news reports and stuff.
• I will never forget the sheer NUMBER of New Album rumors that started to appear as early as July.
• Ayu’s fashion at the time was just accessible enough to be absolutely iconic. Whether it was the leopard stuff still carrying over from Duty, or the camo seen in DOME TOUR, or the nail art in EVERYTHING she was doing, or the clusters of pin-badges on one side of her shirts seen in magazines, she was doing stuff we could copy or be inspired by WAY more easily than a lot of the simpler high-fashion or expensive streetwear she’s been wearing over the last while. (I was able to just BUY the rhinestoned bandanas she wore in the “Dearest” video. They were just there at Hot Topic. Right at the mall. For normal people.)
• OH and the mock-Vuitton pattern seen on the re-issued singles. So cool, I’m so glad she’s been using it again haha.
• OH WAIT the re-issue singles! We finally got some of the remixes from the ayu-mi-x box set on CD thanks to those, that was a big deal!
• Oh and all the CM campaigns! So many of her CM eras were active for all or part of 2001, from Morinaga Hi-Chew to Takanoyuri Beauty Clinic to Tu-Ka to Kose Visee to Kirin Supli, and at the very end of the year we got the beginning of her legendary run with Panasonic.

So yeah this was a big year. Granted, it was my first FULL year as an Ayu fan, so I may be biased. But honestly if I could relive those days, I absolutely would. (If only to save some of the files that were shared since they’re quite possibly lost now, d’oh!)

Ayumi is well-known and rightly acknowledged for the honesty and sincerity of her lyrics. Do you have any favorite Ayu lyrics?

So many. SO, SO MANY. It’s very hard for me to pick, so what I’ll do here is talk about the lyrics on Party Queen.

I’m really, really sad that the album had so many crappy mixing and production choices, and they were bad (and Timmy’s English rap bits in “NaNaNa” are… very not good lyrically, but we’ll brush that aside for now). The stuff wrong with that album really distracted from how amazing Ayu’s lyrics are, and I think the album’s poor reception made Ayu shy away from quite such personal songwriting for a long time afterward. Party Queen felt like one of the most honest albums she’d written in ages, addressing past trauma, isolation, poor self-image, support from friends and a lack thereof, taking on too much herself, and of course divorce and worrying she’d be alone forever. The root cause of a lot of what she wrote about here was her fame, though, and in 2012 I think we weren’t at a place where we wanted to fully humanize famous people yet (there was still a lot of sarcasm about “Oh you’re so famous, your life is so hard, let me play a dirge for you on the world’s tiniest violin” going on). I think the album might have been better received if it were released now, now that literally anyone is able to become publicly known via social media, and Ayu’s statements about separation between the person and the product are a bit more relatable. But even then, the mixing and production REALLY is terrible here (and I’m sad we didn’t get any vocal tracks from this album for #ayumix2020, I’d have looovvved to hear new arrangements for basically the entire album), so even with better release timing and a more understanding culture it probably wouldn’t have ever gone down in history as one of Ayu’s best. But with these lyrics, it deserved so much better than it got.

Let’s talk about some of the more technical aspects of her music. Ayumi has teamed up with a number of producers and writers throughout her career. She has also retained a loyal working relationship with many composers and arrangers, such as Yuta Nakano, Kazuhito Kikuchi, and Dai Nagao (DAI). Do you have any favorites among her team?

Kazuhito Kikuchi and DAI are absolutely my favorites among her composers, but also Ayu herself was a much better composer than she realized. I think she did the sort of rule-breaking as CREA that only songwriting beginners can really do. She felt her way through those, and you can tell, and it WORKED. I’m really sad we didn’t get more from her later.

I will always be obsessed with the arrangements we got from 1999-2003 era HΛL (and the sound Yuta Nakano dabbled in after joining the group, apparently stealing their secrets, and moving on XD). It was really nice to hear that sound come back a bit on “23rd Monster“! You can tell that one was produced by 2 former HΛL members, haha. (It was really nice to hear that return to form too, since their contributions to the TROUBLE EP did very little for me.) It’s funny to think that HΛL’s first work with Ayu was like… almost 100% plagiarized, lol. But hey, whatever gets your foot in the door I guess! 😛

And Shingo Kobayashi was an absolute master of ballad arrangement. “teddy bear” hurts me every time I hear it, and “JEWEL” is unequivocally one of the best love songs I’ve ever heard. Also, he turned the already-great “A Song for XX” into the emotional powerhouse rock ballad we got on A BALLADS. He really knew how to bring out the best in those songs. His passing was an absolutely massive loss.

Ayu has dabbled in dozens of genres throughout her career, from pop to rock, to metal, to R&B. Do you have a favorite? Any that you think suit her best?

Rock-with-synth Ayu will always be what owns my soul the most. I do think that’s what she does best, her vocal style is rock-expressive but with a synth-pop timbre to it, so to me that’s always been her strength. I don’t think she has the vocal chops for a lot of the sweeping pop ballads she’s done, although some of them have surprised me (“The GIFT” in particular). I do think she’s reasonably solid on the dancey stuff, but I definitely prefer her sad bops and the “searching desperately for hope” type uptempo tracks over the happy-scrappy “summertime with friends” stuff that she seems so fond of. I’m probably always gonna enjoy an “is this LOVE?” or “Last minute” more than a “Summer again” or “BLUE BIRD” regardless of the strength or weakness of the composition.

Ayu’s use of R&B was never one of my favorite things given her lack of an R&B voice, but it’s grown on me as I’ve realized how often she specifically employs it for particularly sad songs. It’s just not executed as well as it deserves to be. I’d love to hear a remix of “Secret,” for instance, because its instrumentation is, imo, too slick and shiny for how beautifully raw and tired her voice sounds.

I was pretty surprised that it took so long for Ayu to work with Tetsuya Komuro, whom she began teaming up with around 2010, and whom she has since stayed with. How do you feel about the way he, as a sort of representative of the avex trax sound, has contributed to Ayu’s soundscape over the last decade? Do you think he’s brought something unique, or new, to her music, or would you have preferred that he hadn’t gotten involved?

Uuuugggghhhhh I was gonna mention him earlier but it didn’t really fit in with any other answers, so I’m glad you asked this question.

First of all, to get it out of the way, I think Tetsuya Komuro is a garbage person and I would never personally work with him. Ayu remaining friends with garbage people is disappointing to me, but I don’t judge Ayu for trying to create the best product she can, blah blah blah okay that’s done. lol

So I actually find TK’s involvement in Ayu’s sound these days very ironic! One of the things that made Ayu stand out was her departure from the TK-inspired standard J-pop sound of the 90s. Her production style, the pitch correction keeping her on key (starting with LOVEppears), the raw and honest lyrics touching on isolation and depression, the more Western influence on the studio technology while maintaining the emotionally resonant Japanese types of melodies… all that stuff really shifted the J-pop industry in the early 2000s (I maintain that Ayu and Utada Hikaru represented a genuine slightly-Western shift in the industry that made J-pop really, REALLY good, but still unique compared to Western pop, for a solid 5 years, until it over-Westernized a bit).

TK being brought in for the Love songs era felt really disappointing at the time because to me the whole point of Ayu was sort of this rebellion against TK’s sound, you know? But! Color me shocked, I was actually pleasantly surprised by the final result… some of the arrangements were messy, and the album took time to grow on me, but the compositions of his songs were legitimately very good and honestly didn’t sound too much like his past work. They felt like a real evolution of his sound while still maintaining some of the character that made 90s J-pop such a huge moneymaker. “Love song” is an absolutely incredible piece of work, sadly it’s probably the best song on the album, but it is truly one of the great ones Ayu has given us.

On the other hand, “You & Me” is hot garbage! My child was able to come up with that melody on a cheap keyboard at age 6 (and no my child is not a musical prodigy at all, they don’t even listen to all that much music really). There is zero sophistication here, which makes the BPM change feel clumsy rather than elegant. (Also, not TK’s fault, but very tacky lyrics, and tasuku’s arrangement strengths are… not this). Among Ayu’s happy-scrappy summer songs that I dislike, I dislike this one the most.

By the time he returned for his contributions to A ONE, we were far enough removed in time for TK and Ayu to be sort of grouped together into the same era, and those of us with nostalgia for TK probably also have nostalgia for Ayu’s peak years, so this time around I feel like we got proper synergy. “NO FUTURE” is one of my favorite TK compositions of all time. It’s ringing in my head as I type this and I have zero complaints. I love the buildup and release of tension all through it, the crescendos and decrescendos are perfectly timed, it is a ROLLERCOASTER. Ayu’s voice really has to reach in this one and she delivers, it’s got almost a showtune-esque theatricality to it, and I like the “Well, eff you then!” sound it ends up having when paired with the lyrics. Which are definitely about Max.

“Dreamed a dream” is just so, so good. It was the song I’d been waiting for Ayu to make since M(A)DE IN JAPAN. MIJ really felt like a return to form for her after several albums that just weren’t quite there for me, so TROUBLE was really upsetting tbh. And then TK gives us this GIFT! Honestly I was so happy with it. Being that it was a TK song released after his “retirement” (which lasted all of 5 seconds, a disappointment to me at the time), I really didn’t want to like it. I was so ready to hate it. But dammit, IT IS SO GOOD.

And then “MASK” felt like an old globe song in the best way possible. (Honestly before TK turned out to be a piece of crap I imagined in my head a reformation of “globe” with Ayu on vocals and SKY-HI doing the raps, wouldn’t that have been totally sweet??? *sigh* ah well.) [Editor’s Note: I would love to hear what a collab like this would sound like!]

Long story short, I think he genuinely does contribute a lot – even if I don’t always love it, you can’t deny he’s given Ayu way more hits than misses and the hits are MAJOR. He’s demonstrably helping breathe life back into Ayu’s career in a way that I find very very frustrating given my dislike of him as a person. (A belated congrats to KEIKO on the divorce cuz like seriously fuck that guy lol.)

For a while, Ayu wrote her own music under the pseudonym CREA. What are your favorite Ayu-composed songs? Do you feel that her taking a step back from writing has had an overall negative, positive, or neutral impact on her continuing career?

“M” is, and always will be, one of the best songs in Ayu’s discography. The departure from verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure, the gradual buildup to a climax and then denouement at the end, the powerful melody, Ayu’s ownership of the song’s message, and the overall feeling like she started with lyrics and then built the song she wanted around them all make it such a strong piece of music. Perhaps it was beginner’s luck, perhaps it was the fit of inspiration she sounds like she had, I don’t know. But it is my favorite. [Editor’s Note: I think “M” is a perfect song and I every time I listen to it, I marvel both at how well it has and continues to age, and just how powerful and amazing it is. It defies logical belief that this is the first song Ayu ever wrote.]

“Will” with DAI is so freaking good though and I feel like she still had more to offer, but I don’t think she was nearly as confident in her composition skills as she deserved to be. I was looking forward to more. But I think that’s the last CREA composition we’ll ever get, unless she goes back to the CREA demos written in the past. (And we do know at least one does exist, so who knows?)

I think she’s done, since if she were to start composing anew again, she probably wouldn’t be as good anymore, given her lack of formal composition training. Her compositions felt like she was feeling her way through those, and doing that requires listening to, and making, a LOT of music. Pop music is on some levels a language, and like any language, you can definitely learn it through immersion, but when you stop using it before you become fully fluent you lose it over time. I think given her hearing she may not be able to get that immersion as easily anymore (and she’s said she doesn’t listen to much music anymore, which is fair). I do think her music quality has been lower overall since she stopped composing, but I’m not sure if there’s a correlation there really. Too many variables!

Ayumi has teamed up with a couple of surprising one-offs throughout her career, like Noriyuki Makihara. Personally, I would have loved to see her team-up with more women songwriters. What are, or have been, some of your dream collaborations?

MIYUKI NAKAJIMA! *sobs dramatically* Oh my god if Ayu sang something written by Miyuki Nakajima I would LOSE MY MIND it would be SO GOOD AAAAAAHHHH

Also it’s not a composition collaboration but I always thought BT’s style of pop/EDM production during his Movement in Still Life/Emotional Technology era would have been such an amazing fit for Ayu at the time. Hearing him do Ayu remixes would have been incredible.

Ayu’s vocal technique has changed many times over the last 25 years. When did Ayu’s ever-evolving vocals hit your sweet spot?

I feel like Duty is a cop-out answer here because that was the first album where I experienced the full release cycle, but that to me is like… the quintessential Ayu Voice, and I tend to compare the rest of her career to it, so. I’ll go with that. She did sound really good on Colours but I don’t actively enjoy listening to it as much.

Do you have any producers or DJs that have remixed her songs over the last 25 years that stick out to you, or are a personal favorite?

I have a soft spot for Seiki Sato’s “nicely nice” remixes, particularly those for “M” and “Endless sorrow.”

HΛL’s mixes were always consistently awesome. Newer fans will never understand how much the entire Ayu fandom loved when HΛL remixed anything! lol [Editor’s Note: Yes!]

I really enjoy the noisy organized chaos of D-Z mixes. Their remixes of “monochrome” and “SEASONS” were particularly great.

The history of Ayu’s discography is also a micro-history of avex trax. Do you think Ayumi stands as a good representation of the record label and its sound, or do you think she’s more of an outlier?

She’s definitely an outlier in a lot of ways, but the parallels are too strong because avex tied their success and failure to her way too tightly.

Ayu was always more into rock, R&B, and acoustic-type music personally, but Max’s love of dance music made dance-pop music the primary focus of the label as a whole, and TK being a major player at avex (with Namie, globe, hitomi, and some other TK family artists) helped drive that. So Ayu ended up becoming really well known for multiple genres of dance music, which I’d imagine she wasn’t entirely happy about at first, but she’s taken it in stride and had fun with it. So there’s that.

But it makes sense that avex would drag Ayu onto the dance train. I mean, the label had a really strong brand in the early 2000s. Like if I tell you to picture the avex blue color in your head, you know what color I mean. That little yellow-haired mascot, and the blue a-nation teddy bear, the old blocky crazy font, all that stuff is really stuck in my mind as part of “avex” back then. The company sort of had this “small business” feeling to it, where they felt accessible. They held auditions that were publicly known, and their website always had a surplus of information about new artists and releases, and when a group or artist caught on they gave the people what they wanted because they didn’t feel as disconnected from the public as they would later. The people liked Ayu, and avex knew it, so if avex was doing a thing, you knew Ayu would be there somewhere, whether it was an issue of Beatfreak magazine, an episode of Channel A, or a summer music festival. avex felt accessible, and she was relatable, and they helped each other in that way.

The problem is, she was lightning in a bottle and that’s hard to pull off twice. In 2001 when the industry was panicking over Ayu dating Tomoya Nagase (“what if she gets married and retires?!”), there was a lot of buzz about avex searching for a “second Ayu” — although they also talked about pivoting more to K-Pop given the success of BoA, S.E.S., and H.O.T. at the time. In the midst of that panic a few artists showed up and were given Ayu-esque styling to try and recapture the magic, like Hiroko Anzai (whose initials probably put dollar signs in their eyes) and HΛLNA (who captured even Ayu fans’ hearts and wallets given the production being HΛL so it actually sounded good), but Ayu didn’t end up getting married and retiring so avex’s panic subsided.

I think this led them into a false sense of security though. They learned not to put ALL their eggs in the Ayu basket, but they hung onto Ayu too long and lost touch with the Japanese public in a pretty major way. Despite Max threatening to leave if avex branched out beyond music too much, avex did indeed branch out (I think avex group has more anime companies than music companies now… including a healthcare one, which… what?), and they went from relevant to irrelevant despite financial growth right alongside Ayu, to be honest.

Even just on the music side of things, Avex would experiment with things like streaming services, weird proprietary digital album formats, etc. and Ayu was often the guinea pig for it all because avex trusted we’d spend the money even if it was a gamble that didn’t pay off for us. (Do anyone’s PLAYBUTTONs work anymore? [Editor’s Note: I only have one of these and never actually opened it.]) Meanwhile, other record labels and services are actually paying attention to consumer demand and giving the public true globally accessible experiences, better services, and music formats people actually want rather than whatever “new” format Max was convinced was “the future,” probably thanks to some really crafty salespeople. So we end up with Ayu having all these releases on very short-lived formats like the SACD CAROLS single and the DVD-Audio of RAINBOW and MY STORY (and the DVD-Audio version of A BEST getting cancelled) and the Blu-spec version of FIVE and the USB version of NEXT LEVEL and the PlugAir single for XOXO and M(A)DE IN JAPAN getting its AWA release first because oh surely AWA will catch on and overtake Spotify, right? (You’re a freaking DANCE MUSIC label. Vinyl is RIGHT THERE. I can have Daichi Miura’s best-of on vinyl but y’all won’t put A COMPLETE on vinyl okay I see how it is this is an attack on me)

Anyway. avex now seem to get the most success from nostalgia, but it’s not enough success because it’s poorly executed. And, unsurprisingly, the same mostly seems to go for Ayu.

One of my favorite things about Ayu is that she’s always been an original thinker, trendsetter, and icon who always stays true to herself, whether or not someone is along for the ride. One well-known moment was her clipped dismissal of trendy K-pop music at a press conference. Do you think her continued adherence to her mostly signature musical style over the years has hindered or helped her career?

I mean that depends on your definition of career success, doesn’t it? Her style still varies enough that there are a lot of old fans still listening (Hi everyone!), and I know at least I haven’t gotten bored yet (well, some ballads… lol). I think her musical style has very little to do with her financial success these days, so I’m not sure it’s had any effect at all on that measure of success. But being true to herself does seem to have kept her happier. I think dismissing the pressures of the rest of the industry is really risky if you’re trying to be the most popular artist out there, but if you’re just trying to express yourself then it’s probably for the best.

Are there any moments in her discography that you think were judged unfairly, or that you think deserve better recognition/appreciation?

See rant on Party Queen above XD

Ayu is known for surrounding her working life with close friends, particularly for live shows, such as the two back-up singers, PECO Hamada and Yoko “Princess” Yamazaki, as well as Timothy Wellard. Why do you think they have been such polarizing figures in the fandom?

I feel like this is a question that answers itself, lol. When you work with people you know, you’re not necessarily working with the best people for the job. Ayu’s loyalty to her friends is amazing, but let’s face it, PECO’s voice was never a good match for Ayu’s voice, it’s too warm. (Forgive my synesthesia, but PECO’s voice has a matte finish and Ayu’s voice has a glossy finish. That’s the best way I can think to describe it.) I love PECO as a choreographer — her choreography era gave us the “Trauma” dance and the simple-but-notable “too late” dance that we saw again at the 24th Anniversary concert, and then once she was a background singer instead, we got the dramatic flailing era which still. Hasn’t. Ended. — But she wasn’t a good fit for Ayu vocally at all. Because of that, it was easy for me to find everything she did annoying. (Princess is a little bit better of a fit, but not much. But some of the new backup singers are much better!)

Similarly, Timmy was brought on for one thing — his songwriting — and became a concert backup vocalist. And since his style, like PECO’s, was always very big and ostentatious, it felt a bit like he was encroaching on Ayu’s territory as the star of the show (although this is 100% something Ayu enabled for a very long time. If you pause a DVD of almost any of Ayu’s shows from like 2006 to 2018, chances are you’ll see the audience, a wide shot of the stage, or dancers, and Ayu will be out of frame or invisibly tiny. For awhile it really felt like Ayu was trying to make everyone except herself the star of the show, and fans didn’t respond well to that. Timmy was representative of that problem in a big way, I think, and I mean look at the HOTEL Love songs stage setup! Right during Timmy’s era, that was peak “Ayu isn’t the star” time!)

The other thing, too, is that Ayu had a band in the beginning. They were dudes we knew. It was a little family made of Ayu, Enrique, Yo-chan, Shingo Kobayashi, and Nobuo Eguchi and then PECO & Princess had to come along and INVADE our little FAMILY and it was a bit off-putting, lol. And as the dancers became a bigger part of the crew, we got used to them and they became a family too, but then we got different dancers and the lineup changed and that was never easy. Change is always hard. I miss the old lineup sometimes. (Don’t ever leave me, Midoringu! ;_;)

How do you think Ayu’s personal life has affected her image with fans and the public over the years, particularly the media’s portrayal of her marriages, the birth of her children, and the TV drama that portrayed her relationship with producer Max Matsuura?

Well, that Tomoya Nagase related panic in 2001 was quite the mess, wasn’t it? I mean Ayu’s never just been allowed to date, the way normal people can date. That’s the nature of fame as a woman, sadly, and in Japan it was even worse back when she was at her peak. It’s terribly unfair, but they’d always frame her as this walking disaster because of it.

I don’t think she’s necessarily any more of a walking disaster than anyone else. She’s managed to hold on to far more of her humanity than a lot of celebrities do, and tbh I think she deserves some commendation for that, but I think that there are still a lot of people who see her as perhaps flighty or emotionally-driven or weak or easily distracted by men. I think it’s not too hard to connect the dots and realize why she’s done what she’s done or why she’s felt some of the things she’s felt, so I totally understand the urge to gossip and share the mystery-solving you feel like you’ve done, sure. I don’t hold that against the public too badly, I certainly wasn’t immune to it.

I do think, however, that the onus is on us as the public to not base our own identities on the behavior of strangers. Whether you’re a big fan freaking out as soon as Ayu does anything you feel is “inconsistent” with who you thought she was, or if you’re a member of the general public who makes a hobby out of hating on celebrities for their failures. Ayu has done her best to keep Ayu and Ayumi Hamasaki as separate as possible, which wasn’t something she knew how to do early on in her career, but she’s done as much work as can be expected.

The public, to their credit, mostly seems to have chilled out. That’s almost certainly in part because Ayu simply isn’t at anything remotely close to a commercial peak anymore, sure, but it’s also because we’re 20 years older and 20 years wiser. The TV drama and book were definitely just a short “Haha, yeah, I knew it” moment for anyone who followed the tabloids in the early 2000s, and a fun bit of nostalgia for parents like myself who can pass the Legend of Ayu on to their kids. (I mean that’s a half-joke, but my kid enjoyed the drama quite a bit, haha… I gave running commentary about the industry at the time, which was fun.)

The way we treated Ayu when she was dating, married, divorced, dating, married again, divorced again… Every story was framed to put her in the most foolish and tragic light possible, and that wasn’t fair to her at all. But it’s no different than how most celebrity women are treated, is it?

Let’s talk about Ayu’s live performances. What is your favorite, overall, concert tour? Which one would you recommend to first-time watchers?

That’s probably a tie between concert tour 2000 Act 2 and ARENA TOUR 2006 ~(miss)understood~.

AT06 is one I recommend often, actually, in part because I recommend (miss)understood as an album to people a lot, and it makes sense to watch that tour afterward. But A museum is a really good first concert as well because a lot of Ayu’s tour traditions and typical costume styles got nailed down around that time, and that “A Song for XX” costume is absolutely ICONIC to me.

Do you have any favorite costumes or looks?

See above, haha 😀 I also love pretty much any time Ayu’s ever worn a leather or moto jacket. She nails the punky rock star look SO well.

What are some of your favorite, stand-out performances?

• “teddy bear/Memorial address” at ARENA TOUR 2003-2004
• “Because of you” at the 2004 MTV VMAJs
• “A Song for XX” at a-nation ’08
• “Love song” on Music Station
• “M” at ~POWER of MUSIC~ 2011
• “JEWEL” at 15th Anniversary Tour ~A BEST LIVE~
• And just in general the new version of “ourselves” she started doing in 2017 is very cool.

If you could go back in time and be in the audience of any one concert tour, which would it be and why?

I mean yeah ALL OF THEM to be sure, but probably DOME TOUR 2001, just because it seems like the kind of spectacle that the cameras couldn’t quite capture. (Although I would have loved to sneak a camera into the UC Card Limited Acoustic Live show… lol)

In regards to story or visuals, which are your favorite music videos?

In chronological order:

• 1. “WHATEVER.” I love the look of the metallic room Ayu is sitting in, and the story that plays out in the burned ruins is just heartbreaking.
• 2. “kanariya.” I feel like what’s going on is up for interpretation but I like the idea that experiments are being done to show how music affects mood, perhaps. I feel like Ayu has a lot of ideas about, well, the power of music, right? 🙂 And maybe this was the first time we saw that in her actual product. Also it’s just a cool looking video, full of Y2K-era video tropes like overlaid geometric/LCD text and TV screens and just generally being cyberpunky, and I get the warm fuzzies when I remember that era stylistically.
• 3. “vogue/Far away/SEASONS.” Wasn’t it weird that this video happened before 9/11? (Not that it could have possibly happened after). I loved its moodiness, the way they created this huge barren space on such a tiny set with matte paintings and green screens, the abstractness, the symbolism of the drawings going from black & white, to color, to reality, and then drawings of the past coming up at the end. Honestly this video did NOT have to go so hard but it did!
• 4. “Real me.” GREAT futuristic visuals (again, LOVE the Y2K-ness, haha!), love the holographic cloak thing, love the dance routine, love the not-so-subtle nod to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. In fact I used this video in a film class once and made that comparison, haha. (I got a very high A despite my presentation being too long. lol)
• 5. “ourselves.” Legitimately creepy, great environments and framing, very good editing. The video makes for such a good combination with the lyrics, too, illustrating the full picture of Ayu trying to separate the person from the product. (More fun facts! My sister makes videos and this one is her favorite Ayu video. She used it as inspiration for “No Strings Attached,” the music video she directed & edited for indie rapper Alyssa Marie.)
• 6. “STEP you.” I’m really into this muted-color art direction, aren’t I? Mostly here it’s the characters showing Ayu’s different sides. I love how well designed they are and how well Ayu acts out their personality. And then they all come together to create one complete Ayu, and I love that more and more every year, as society pressures us to create brands and only show pieces of ourselves to the world.
• 7. “alterna.” Such an EXCELLENT examination of what the pop music industry does to people, and I don’t think its message was fully appreciated, but the execution of the message was top-notch and fans certainly enjoyed that! It’s horrifying visually (the creepy bunny in the puppet show frame, the House of a Thousand Corpses clown styling, the way Machine Ayu is styled and dismembered). The way it’s edited contributes to the terror too; the extended pause as the video prepares to show you Ayu’s fate midway through? MASTERFUL execution of that. Seeing what happened really punches you in the gut. Reminds me of the original version of The Stepford Wives thematically.
• 8. “Don’t look back.” How many times has Ayu said a video had a twist that wasn’t really much of a twist? But THIS. THIS one was good, and so extremely well done! The editing, the use of the A BEST 2 photo, the metaphor of the rotting fruit, only showing one side of Ayu’s face for ages… honestly every choice was perfect.
• 9. “Last minute.” The red/black art direction of her dresses, the lamp swinging, the Ayu characters alternating point of view, and Ayu’s frantic emotional thrashing and raw facial expressions make this just a REALLY emotionally effective video. When it came out it had been some time since an Ayu video hit me that hard, and I remember being so blown away by it. I still am.
• 10. “FLOWER.” Some of my favorite Ayu video things came out here, didn’t they? First of all, single-shot. Something I love in general, honestly, but this is my favorite single-shot Ayu video. Then we get my muted, moody color palette, Ayu emotionally thrashing, and the cutting-hair-because-FEELINGS thing. God, I love this video.

OH MY GOSH I forgot “Ladies’ Night.” I don’t feel like renumbering the list but it’s in there too, lol. Oddly enough, this time I like the creepiness mixed with the sickeningly bright color palette. It works really well for contrast, and I mean that outfit is truly iconic. Look how many cosplays it got! (Although to this day I still wish I could buy a life-size “fascist dictator Ayu” tapestry.)

I really felt like her last album rollout and the anticipation for Remember you was close to the same excitement in the fan community as older albums used to have. Did you feel the same way?

Oh my goodness YES. The fandom excitement reeled me back in SO easily! It felt like a big group party again, for the first time in YEARS. I honestly don’t feel like I’ve been this hyped for an Ayu album before its release since… Love songs, maybe? It’s been wonderful to see how much everyone is enjoying this era of Ayu’s music. (Although all of us do seem to wish we were getting an old-school promotional push, but we’re suffering through that misery together, and that’s what matters! XD)

Some things I really miss from the early days of Internet fandom are the self-made fan sites, forums, and informational web sites, which have since migrated to social media sites like tumblr and Twitter. Is there anything you miss from the early days of Ayu fandom? Do you feel the new tools have made the fandom community stronger, weaker, or notice no real change?

I really miss fan sites in general. I miss when enthusiasts were some of the best sources of information on a topic, and I miss when you could Google a topic and find enthusiasts rather than ads and spam sites that just search-engine-optimized their way to page one. [Editor’s Note: Yes, yes, and YES!]

What has been your favorite thing about being an Ayu fan?

My favorite artist has enough material and variety to keep me occupied for the rest of my life, and everyone else’s favorite artist doesn’t! *Nyah nyah nyah*. XD

Aside from that, honestly, the friends I’ve been able to make and keep because of Ayu and J-pop in general (which wouldn’t be anywhere near as big a part of my life without Ayu) have been really important to me. I’m not very good at keeping in contact with people as an adult (it was so easy when I was a teenager with more time and energy!), but I’m trying to get better about it now because my Ayu fan friends are absolute treasures.

What do you think Ayumi, and being an Ayu fan, has contributed to your life, if at all, over the years? What impact as she had?

I’m a creative person (both by profession and in my spare time), and Ayu has been a muse for almost every one of my creative pursuits. I used to design wallpapers and fan sites back in the day and now I’m a UX Designer. I really liked writing and translating, and now I have a linguistics degree. Even now I use Ayu for inspiration for SO many things, from what I do in creative video games like ACNH and House Flipper, to fan fiction I’ve written for a different fandom. I’ve gotten more interested in media preservation too, from art restoration to digital archiving, in part because of my desire to keep artifacts from Ayu’s career alive. And keeping my merch collection clean and in order is one of the reasons I clean my house at all! LOL

What do you hope for Ayu moving forward, either personally, professionally, or musically, in the years to come?

I hope she stays true to her expectation that she’ll never fully quit or retire music, but I also hope she keeps working at whatever pace feels right for her at any stage of her life. And I hope she takes better care of her health going forward. She has an example to set for two little boys now, after all. I hope they learn it’s okay to set boundaries and take care of oneself first, and I hope they learn that because Ayu is doing those things for herself. And I hope those boys give her the unconditional love she always thought she didn’t deserve. And I definitely hope we get a lot of songs about it. 🙂

Ayu’s history and career can be overwhelming for those just starting out and discovering her. What advice or guidance would you offer to those just getting into Ayu’s music and the fandom?

Send me a twitter DM with artists you like and why, I’ll make you a playlist and we’ll go from there. XD It sounds like a joke but honestly, Ayu’s discography covers so many sounds and genres and vocal styles, I feel like the right entry point for Person A won’t be the same as the one for Person B! She has something for everyone.

What other fandom communities are you a part of today, and where can people find you?

I don’t really have anywhere else I can be found consistently just yet, however! I’m mostly active @deliriumzer0 on Twitter (for however long that lasts) and in the AHS discord server. Like I mentioned earlier though, I AM working on finally getting a proper complete Ayu website put together so people will be able to find me and my work there. You’ll be able to get to it from deliriumzer0.com, but no word on the actual final URL yet.

I mostly watch fandom from afar these days rather than truly participating, but I am definitely aware of the goings-on in a couple of major fandoms that I won’t disclose here because yes, I have some degree of shame. XD

I do play World of Warcraft again, I stopped around Ayu’s Secret era but I started up again during Colours lol. If anyone else is out there, I play on Uldum-NA, my toon’s name is Papino. I created her when Pino was still alive, and Papiko & Pino were a set with that name. I name all my WoW characters after Ayu’s dogs, when possible. On my original account I had multiple characters named Marron. 😀

25 years is a long time, and I’m sure that I missed some important things! Is there anything essential that I didn’t cover or anything you wanted to add?

One thing that comes to mind is how in the early days, the English-speaking fandom relied a LOT on the Chinese-speaking fandom. A lot of people in places like Hong Kong and Singapore were bilingual, so we got English translations of articles based on their Chinese language versions. Sites based in places like Hong Kong gave us a lot of otherwise rare and valuable photos and leaked MP3s. There were also a lot more bootlegs from Southeast Asia that made their way into anime shops in the USA, both online and offline. There were also a lot more pirated goods like wall scrolls and laminated posters thanks to those industries where copyright was less tightly enforced. The Ayunite forum was a huge source of info. Ayuchina gave us a ton of scans. Queen’s site (Who Ayu, ayu_everfree, whatever you want to call it) was a HUGE source of new photos during Ayu’s peak.

It’s funny that that’s shifted SO much over the years, as China holds more control over the Chinese-speaking world than it ever has, so laws are getting tighter, and trade with China, HK, and TW has definitely had some… shall we say, political issues. All the while, it’s only getting easier to shop from Japanese sites thanks to more and better middleman services. And VPNs and auto-translations directly in your browser are making it easier than ever to use Japanese sites, and TeamAyu allows foreign membership now. We used to rely so much on Chinese-language resources, but that’s really shifted a lot and we’re getting more info and merchandise directly from the source now. I remember when immel bought all that ARENA TOUR 2006 merch it was this big huge deal because no one else had really been able to get that much of a haul directly from the tour itself, but now a lot of us get batches of our favorite tour merch as soon as it goes live. A lot of scans I did for ayu-mi-x were of Taiwan or Hong Kong releases of Ayu’s CDs because that was what was affordable from YesAsia, and now I have PILES of original Japanese pressings because buying them used via Tenso & Buyee got so easy to do.

Very crazy how that’s changed so drastically. The distance between the English-speaking world and Japan is definitely closing, and watching that shift happen in real time over the last couple decades has really been something. [Editor’s Note: This is such an excellent and important point. I still own several “overseas” copies of Ayu’s CDs but only out of nostalgia, as I have been able to quickly and very cheaply replace them with original pressings over the years. This also has a lot to do with the decline of the prestige a CD used to hold in general, as CDs as a format have gone out of fashion. But the huge, and swift, changes in technology and communication that has made buying and getting goods and information directly from across the world is just amazing to consider).]

I just want to personally thank you for your work providing so many resources and points of knowledge for both myself and other fans in the Ayu fandom over the years. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer all of these questions and spend time reminiscing over Ayu’s incredible 25-year career in music. It’s always a special treat to talk about Ayumi with fans, enthusiasts, and experts like you!

The people-pleaser in me wants to apologize for not being more consistent about my contributions over the years, so this genuinely means so much to me! I never really set out to be a major figure in the Ayu fandom (and I’d argue it shows, lol), so when people compliment me or tell me something I wrote about Ayu affected them or even when they just yell “OMG DELI IS HERE” when I appear on the discord once a year, honestly it makes me feel… like I’ve found my ibasho, really. I neglected it for awhile, but I think I’m properly back now.

Thank you, Anna, and thank you to everyone in the Ayu fandom who’s made me feel welcome, whether 23 years ago or today. I will love this fandom until the day I die, I’m sure of it. ❤

Notes
[ Image sources are from personal scans, Discogs, Jame-World, PNGItem, @chiiwayu, AramaJapan, @ayuarchive (twice), @2030_TeamAyu, ayu-vogue, jpopcdcovers, HABR Fanblog, TeamAyu, CDJapan (twice), mu-mo, Random J Pop, and ZyreX. There are also some images used that I had saved on an old hard drive for so long time that I no longer remember where they came from. If you see any scans that belong to you, please let me know and I will credit you! •  ]

An appears 2022 tumblr year-end round-up

In case any of you don’t follow the appears tumblr, I continue to sporadically post longer written pieces that feel a bit too informal to post here, especially anniversary celebrations. Here is a summary of the ones that I posted throughout 2022, including the full week of birthday celebrations for Ayumi Hamasaki, in chronological order:

Shoujo Kakumei Utena OST, Zettai Shinka Kakumei Zenya: 25th anniversary
Ayumi Hamasaki birthday week: GREEN/Days
Ayumi Hamasaki birthday week: NEXT LEVEL
Ayumi Hamasaki birthday week: Moments
Ayumi Hamasaki birthday week: AUDIENCE
Ayumi Hamasaki birthday week: WHATEVER
Ayumi Hamasaki birthday week: L
Ayumi Hamasaki birthday week: M(A)DE IN JAPAN
J-pop history lesson: globe extreme and X Japan’s Trance X: 20th anniversary
move’s super tune ~BEST SELECTIONS~: 20th anniversary
capsule’s FLASH BACK: 15th anniversary
MEG’s BEAM: 15th anniversary

Johnny’s, KinKi Kids, and a Macro Snapshot of J-pop History

As one of the most prolific and popular talent agencies in Japan, Johnny’s Jimusho is a household name in the country, boasting a lineup of trainees, juniors, actors, singers, dancers, and even gymnasts. It takes a lot of time and development before an individual is finally chosen to debut, but that’s exactly what Koichi Domoto and Tsuyoshi Domoto of KinKi Kids finally did in July 1997, the first group to premiere under the new Johnny’s Entertainment, Inc. record label (before then, music was released under various second-party labels like Pony Canyon). Needless to say, the sheer market saturation and beloved reputation of a Johnny’s group was enough to propel the duo into overnight success.

Despite music being only a piece of the wider component of a Johnny’s group, it wouldn’t have helped if it was terrible, so it was to the company’s benefit to pay attention to singles by employing skilled writers and producers. As a testament to that commitment, the group teamed up with some of the most iconic, legendary songwriters and producers in Japanese pop history. It was a big, bold statement by the company, and a rare show of power that committed to the group’s, and thus the label’s, importance, boasting of their buying power and influence by uniting the twin conceits of business and art in an astronomical show of money and talent. Three prominent examples of this can be found in the group’s early singles, which were composed by city-pop pioneer Tatsuro Yamashita, gentle disciple and disruptor Koji Makaino, and prolific composer and hit-record holder Kyohei Tsutsumi. By marketing the group with music created by an ascending ladder of Japanese pop royalty already nationally recognized, Johnny’s Jimusho intentionally took its seat at the head of the table, coupling Japanese music history with its future in their own company.

Tatsuro Yamashita

The group’s debut single “Glass no Shounen” was written and arranged by none other than recent city-pop celeb/godfather, Tatsuro Yamashita. Now recognized around the world for his hits from as far back as the 70s, he, along with artists like Eiichi Ohtaki, are credited for helping to create, and embodying the quintessential sound of, city-pop, the hybrid of pop, jazz, and soft rock that gained prominence in the “economic miracle” of Japan’s comeback success in the 1980s. It reached #1 on the charts, and is the group’s best-selling single to date with over 1.7 million units sold, though the song itself gives no indication as to why, with its bitter, milquetoast admonishments to a woman who sold out her future for a new love and a shiny ring. Yamashita cropped up again on singles like the Sandals-esque jingles “JETCOASTER ROMANCE” and “Happy Happy Greeting.” This was not a high point for him, though I wonder how much of his work for KinKi Kids was heavily edited under strict boy-band company policy (it’s also worth noting he recorded his own version of the latter that ended up on the Rarities album, and it doesn’t sound much improved). Maybe it’s giving too much credit to the overlords at Johnny’s, but suffice to say, after the resurgence and worldwide respect given to city-pop in the last decade, Yamashita was given a redemption arc to exercise his unique and distinctive sound palette for the label much later, on one of the greatest pop songs in recent memory, Arashi’s “Fukkatsu LOVE.”

Koji Makaino

Their sophomore single, “Aisareru Yori Aishitai” was written by a personal favorite, Koji Makaino, also a seasoned veteran who began his career in the 70s penning album cuts on the less-popular releases for idols like Megumi Asaoka (“Sayonara no Kawari ni,” “Yuuwaku no Toshigoro“), and who peaked in the Golden Age of the 1980s writing incredible songs for Yu Hayami (“HONEY na Hirusagari“) and magical girl anime like Mahou no Tenshi CREAMY MAMI (all of them, actually, but the ones everyone remembers and loves best, too). Makaino was versatile: despite often being connected with idols and idol culture, he was born into a musical family and also composed countless scores for TV, film, and anime like The Rose of Versailles and Bubblegum Crisis, the latter franchise of whose music comprises what are some of the most definitive 80s-sounding tracks of all time (I imagine the recently remastered box set is a real treat for fans who can afford it!). His contribution here illustrates his adaptability, with a pop song steeped in modern techno, as intricate and robust as its accompanying choreography. It’s a sonically delightful romp for someone as clearly dedicated to craft as he is the modern-day currency of popular sound among teens – the hit might now be as dated as any of the others on the first KinKi Single Selection, but twenty-five years ago it was a boy-band banger to rival the likes of the Euro-influenced Backstreet Boys.

Kyohei Tsutsumi

Finally, we have Kyohei Tsutsumi on “Yamenaide, PURE.” Tsutsumi, an absolute song-writing monster, started his career in the 1960s, scoring #1 hits for dozens of artists like Ayumi Ishida (“BLUE LIGHT Yokohama“) and teen idols Hiromi Go and Iyo Matsumoto, up through the 2010s. His catalog runs so deep, that hours-long YouTube videos have been sliced over multiple segments to cover the sheer depth of his songbook (though he did have a noticeable habit of launching artists, sticking around for their peak years, and peace-ing out just before the public lost interest in them). You could spend hours swimming in that sea, so let’s keep it brief: part of what made Tsutsumi so successful is that there is no signature Tsutsumi sound, save one as vague as the definition of pop music itself. If anything, his style, like those already mentioned, was nurtured in an environment that valued colorful melody rather than a good beat, giving him the ability to mold  kaleidoscopic notes to technical developments in modern sound, which has cemented his reputation as an evergreen composer who was still writing hits for kids while in his 60s. At what point this went from genuinely great music, to a silent, assistant-heavy boost by younger arrangers, to respectfully, but maybe sheepishly, kissing the ring, is anyone’s hot take, but needless to say, here at 59, his name is behind the most hip-hop-leaning of the trio thus far, bringing a somewhat old-fashioned melodic approach to an unfortunate JNCO-inspired wardrobe choice.

And so on

Rounding things out, there was Takuro Yoshida (“Zenbu Dakishimete“), who helped an idol group like CANDIES grow up, newly-minted producer HΛL (“FLOWER“), who would go on to establish himself at a little indie label called Avex Trax with rising star Ayumi Hamasaki, and lesser-known names, including member Koichi himself (“Suki ni Natteku Aishiteki“). With a roster like that, it’s easy to see how ambitious and eager the team behind KinKi Kids was, ironically bowing to history and tradition with their forward-looking, modern J-pop duo. It’s no wonder that their first single collection sold so well and remains one of the group’s hallmarks — you are guaranteed to find at least fifteen copies in the KinKi Kids section of any used record store today. Nothing would imitate this run of composers in the group’s career ever again, though they continue to enjoy recognition to this day, regularly releasing singles and albums since, and dutifully make the rounds to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their debut this summer.

The only downside is that despite the names involved, all of these great songwriters were either already considered beyond their best days, or hampered by what I imagine was a strict adherence to the Johnny’s sound. One case in point is that so many of these songs carry the same style and feel to them, like being run under day-one Instagram filters, rather than bearing the distinctive thumbprints of their creators — one imagines Johnny himself popping in at the end of each recording session to remind everyone who was signing the checks. Tsutsumi and Makaino might have always been more flexible in their sound, adapting to the trends and technical capabilities of their current era, but a Tatsuro Yamashita song almost always sounds like a Tatsuro Yamashita song. Or rather, it does now that this is exactly what people want and expect from him.

But from 1997-1999, a more bland and consistent sound with the edges smoothed out was the order of the day, with most of the songs typical of what Make Believe Melodies dubbed the “Johnny’s house style”: upbeat, fluffy pop with heavy influences from disco, Latin styles like samba, and, at least in the last three years of the century, Euro-pop, with its safe major keys and hints of synth cheese. KinKi Kids illustrate that well enough on these slightly blurry debut singles underlining their epic mission by a series of absolute legends, hired to do what they now could do in their sleep, for an agency with more power and pull than most people wanted to believe, for that evergreen institution known as a boy band, at a time when that institution was enjoying the last of the kind of success it would ever see again until the explosion of K-pop.

Notes
[ The banner is an edit of a personal scan from the album KinKi Single Selection. The single covers are from here, here, and here. ]

Bold & ambitious: Innovation in Ayumi Hamasaki’s (miss)understood

On January 1, Ayumi Hamasaki marked the 15th anniversary of her seventh studio album (miss)understood, which seems as good a time as any to celebrate one of her last truly great, ground-breaking, and all-around amazing albums.

It’s amazing how observing wild animals in their natural habitat can help lend clarity to human behavior. In his New York Times-Notable Book of the Year, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, Carl Safina observes sperm whales, scarlet macaws, and chimpanzees, drawing fascinating parallels between their world and that of humans. Here’s one line of thought that I kept circling back to in the course of reading: is it inevitable that cultural innovators will become conformists over the course of time? It started with Safina’s rumination on “culture”:

One definition of culture that is pretty good is: “the way we do things.” Behavior is what we do; how we do it–is culture. […] But one big thing is missing from that definition: to have culture, someone must do something that is NOT the way we do things. We live in an automobile culture, but only because an innovator invented an automobile. We listen to rock music, but one person electrified the age-old guitar. Ironically, culture–a process of learning and conformity–depends on individuals who don’t entirely conform to the way we do things. Culture depends both on doing what you’ve seen done–AND on someone, at some point, doing what no one has ever seen done.” (47)

Not only in terms of sheer numbers, but in reach and depth, it is inarguable that Ayumi Hamasaki was one of the great innovators of J-pop culture in the early 00s, and I would argue that (miss)understood was one of the last times she released an album unlike anything else in the genre, and unlike anything she herself had ever done. It was one of the last times her music, and not just her fashion or personal life, made an impact on the industry, changing the way record labels approached the creation and packaging of solo artist/performers, due to both circumstance (the resurgence of idols and idol groups like AKB48, who were just about to release their debut single “Sakura no Hanabiratachi,” and decline of female solo artist/performers as we knew it, notably marked by Hikaru Utada’s hiatus two years later) and the beginning of her focus on other aspects of her career at the expense of the music, which she no longer had a hand in composing by her sixth album MY STORY (though she continued to write lyrics). (miss)understood, was, in many ways, the last time Ayumi Hamasaki seems to have effectively (hang on, Colours-fans) created an album with a risky, over tried-and-true, approach, taking a chance on a style she had till then never explored. It is an album that demonstrates exactly how Ayumi was the massive star she was, and why she deserved the recognition and status as a massive force and principal creator — that fabled “innovator” Safina is referring to — in Japanese pop culture for nearly a decade.

This is not to say that Ayumi stopped releasing great albums or songs, but rather that she found a musical space within which comfortable and safe slowly started to take precedent over experimentation. The difference between all four of her first albums, from A Song for XX to I am…, all sound vastly different from the one next to it, while the sound and production of Secret and GUILTY sound very similar, as does nearly everything from Love songs to M(A)DE IN JAPAN. A couple of albums (and singles) stick out in terms of quality, with a few going the extra mile in terms of concept, like NEXT LEVEL or Party Queen, but nearly all carry the distinctive hallmarks springing from the foundation she laid down in the early 00s. In 2002, everyone wanted to be and sound like Ayumi, but by 2012, the musical and cultural landscape had changed so wholly, from Yasutaka Nakata and the emergence of electronic music, to the influence of K-pop, that Ayumi was now a stark alternative rather than a driver of any one of these trends. To her admirable credit, with only a few exceptions, she rarely jumped onto any bandwagon, choosing instead to forge her own path, for better or worse; as she famously quipped in response to a press inquiry about K-pop: “I don’t really care if it’s trendy or not. I (stick) to my own style.”

While I never stopped being a fan, (miss)understood did mark a line for me, one from where I could never cross back. The moment “Startin’” and its music video were released, was one in which the rose-colored glasses of naive, uncompromising fandom could never overshadow the critical antennae necessary for deep analysis. It would take a few years before I learned that a critical eye doesn’t spell doom for our most treasured past times and pop stars, that instead, it does the important work of allowing one to question and examine closely with intelligence and detail, and that it can deepen empathy and a better understanding of people, and celebrities in particular, in all of their flawed and very real humanity. It is, in fact, programmed to reveal complexity and heighten appreciation. But in between that time, both history and I had changed.

Which is all to say: it wasn’t really Ayumi’s fault. Any analysis of album sales and popularity will show a natural decline in sales and quality across almost all recording artists. Human beings are designed to seek out novelty and many a star’s continued success has depended on trust and loyalty, two hard-won virtues that can only be gained by a sincere devotion to craft, a strong work ethic, and frequent, heartfelt gratitude to the fans who continue to make their object of devotion relevant. Ayumi Hamasaki is 3/3. So while I spent 2006 and 2007 going through major changes in the way I approached listening to and writing about music, it was inevitable that the simple and natural act of growing up would be doing most of the subconscious work for me, silently hacking away at the kind of unquestionable idol worship every kid is free to indulge in before they reach adulthood and come face to face with the stuff beyond the theater of life’s surface.

This is a birthday, not a funeral

With the release of the 20th anniversary edition of her sophomore album, LOVEppears, in 2019, Ayumi Hamasaki has firmly settled into legacy mode. While this status update might have once elicited a gasp of horror, it brings a kind of relief now. As I’m sure many artists who have found themselves in this privileged sphere have come to realize, it’s like falling into the perfect bathwater at the end of a really long, really hard day, one that offers time to reflect on amazing accomplishments while resting weary old joints. So let’s reflect and pour some love all over it: (miss)understood, one of the best albums Ayumi Hamasaki ever released, one that distinguished her as what Safina would label an “original innovator.”

The singles

There were four major singles released in the run-up to the album’s release: STEP YOU/is this LOVE?, fairyland, HEAVEN, and Bold & Delicious/Pride. At this point, Ayumi was well past her remix-phase, having stopped the practice of album-length maxi-singles in 2002 with Daybreak. What followed was a series of conservative or triple A-sides, with the gradual integration of a standard A-side/B-side duo beginning with INSPIRE.

Physically, STEP you/is this LOVE? is notable for being the last single to feature the same cover art on both its CD and CD+DVD versions (actually, this happened only twice, with this one and 2004’s CAROLS — why offer one or the other when you can sell both?). Musically, it’s a doozy – the A-side features one of the most propulsive pop songs in Ayumi’s catalogue, while the B-side boasts one of her finest hard rock tracks. This tight duo is a nearly perfect combination of a sound that was unlike almost anything else in J-pop at the time. The music video for “is this LOVE?” utilizes some of the coolest effects she would ever feature in a PV, because let’s face it, slow motion makes everything cooler, especially when it’s exploding. The DVD also features the music video for “my name’s WOMEN,” a track off of her previous album, MY STORY. It’s one of the few music videos Ayumi has ever shot to feature a back story before the music kicks in. It’s not my favorite track or song, and the delivery of its message is a little confused, but it’s fun and gives her the obligatory showgirl moment that every diva is obligated to have at some point in their career.

fairyland, released four months later, is one of many summer-themed singles, notable for its music video, which was the most expensive at the time. Shot on location in Hawaii, it features gorgeous panoramic shots of the islands’ colorful flora and fauna, as well as an entire building that catches fire and burns to the ground (also in slo-mo, naturally). Its B-side was the wholly A-side deserving track “alterna,” one of many songs Ayumi used to portray her career-long struggle with fame and celebrity. It draws from her ongoing inspiration, Madonna, and contains one of her most literal experiences of the entertainment industry, with plastic Ayu-dolls being assembled in a factory, the suits and media portrayed as clowns, who raise her up only to throw her in the garbage dump later, and the whole thing wrapped up in surreal, storybook portrait frames. It’s Ayumi as Aesop, a moral she had to learn the hard way. (One of my favorite shots is the newspaper headline that reads “Almost Human!!,” a succinct phrase to describe the way women have been treated in the media, especially in the mid-00s). It’s basically brilliant and I still marvel at how she managed to get away with it; nobody was this candid about the industry in Japan without some fallout, yet it only boosted respect for her willingness to be forthright and transparent.

“HEAVEN” was the last really great winter-ballad we got until 2009’s You were…/BALLAD combo. The quiet, gently-paced intro makes way for a breathtaking deluge of instrumentals and breathy vocals, sweeping the listener up in the expansive space created by longtime collaborator Kazuhito Kikuchi. One thing worth highlighting is her vocal performance: in 2005, whether it showed all the time or not, it was obvious Ayumi wasn’t settling for good enough, and still doing the regular work involved in being both a good singer and a good vocalist. Whoever coached this vocal performance out of her, in particular, did an incredible job of toning down some of the harsher aspects of her delivery that came out occasionally and is now done with frequency. The B-side, “Will,” was a very new kind of ballad for her, proving just how experimental she was still willing, and could afford, to be.

It also shows a confidence and trust in her audience, one manifested in somewhat riskier moves, like the 360° of the final single “Bold & Delicious,” which utilizes a full choir for the backdrop to it funk-based rhythm. We’ll get to Sweetbox, the composer of this track, later on, but what’s notable here is the production Ayumi and her team brought to the song, which far exceeds the original (later released on Sweetbox’s album Addicted, which also featured the original versions of B-side “Pride” and album track “Ladies Night“). The videos for this single were shot in New York City, a sort of homecoming for Ayumi, who first featured the city’s iconic skyline as a prominent character in the video for “appears” (Note: Behind-the-scenes photos for a feature in Ayumi’s exclusive Deji Deji Diary series for ViVi has photos of more sight-seeing that never made it to the video, particularly the iconic locales of several scenes from Sex and the City, which was still hugely popular in Japan at the time, including the Magnolia Bakery, and home of Carrie Bradshaw, a brownstone located between Park and Madison. It’s a very, very of-its-time, photograhic capsule of the period). The kind of risk-taking we hear on “Bold & Delicious” is euphoric, and needless to say, we never got another out-of-left-field song as wild ever again.

The album

One of the most interesting and frustrating things about Ayumi’s albums at this time for those who prefer a cohesive, consistent sound, was the sheer variety of musical styles that it offered. This workedboth  for and against the album: on one hand, it offered a something-for-everyone approach, reflecting both Ayumi’s diverse personality and maximalist approach to style, and causing a sort of disjointed listening experience, one that started with one of the most joyous songs she has ever done, “Bold & Delicious,” to hard rock, to gothic balladry (“Pride”), all the way to eager, sunshine-filled larks (“Beautiful Day”), followed by gloomy poems (“rainy day“). This style of sequencing began back on I am… (when a traditional rock song like “I am…” was followed by an upbeat interlude, which was followed by a straight-up trance song, which was followed by more rock), but is also something of a given, as singles in Japan are often composed and released independently over the course of a year until the rest of the album tracks are arranged, seemingly in a final, tight series of recording sessions. This means that many of the singles can seem to stick out among tracks that have a bit more of a cohesive feel to them.

Of course, the other particular reason for this new sound was Ayumi’s decision to work with Geo of Sweetbox for the album’s non-single tracks. Sweetbox were a fledgling German pop group/project formed in the 90s, who composed the tracks “Bold & Delicious,” “Ladies Night,” “In The Corner,” “Pride,” “Beautiful Day,” and “rainy day.” In fact, the only non-singles composed by someone other than Sweetbox were the title track (a rock song penned by Tetsuya Yukumi, a longtime collaborator who worked on six tracks for MY STORY), and “criminal,” by Kazuhiro Hara (who seemed to have been inspired by the big sound of “Bold & Delicious” and whom we’d see more of the following year on “Startin'” and “Born to Be…“), and the interludes.

The interludes on (miss)understood are another puzzle, one belonging to a whole other discussion: do interludes belong on pop albums? What role do interludes play on an album that feels wholly disassociated with them, as many do here? While the interludes on many of Ayumi’s albums began to feel pro forma by this point — a nod to the CD as a medium, and the freebies-feel of filling out the extra space of an 80-minute run time just because you could — it’s luck that many of the interludes on (miss)understood are…fine. Many funtion as mood-breaks, like short, moving sidewalks that carry and deposit the listener to the next section of the album, from part one’s mammoth hits, to the weightier second part mostly filled with ballads and heavier cerebral pieces, to the somewhat indecisive, mixed-bag that makes up the final trio. For Ayumi, that makes a conservative two, none of which are bad at all, but also none so great that they would invite extended mixes like “opening Run” (“JK’s extended mix” on the Daybreak single), or “Mirror” on GUILTY (which became the single “Mirrorcle world“).

Despite the wide array of musical styles, it is the lyrics that bring it all together. Though Ayumi mostly stopped composing her own music after RAINBOW, she never stopped writing her own lyrics. Her earlier work focused inwardly, using her own personal experiences and perspective as a sort of filter through which stories of pain and catharsis emerged, but her later work began taking on the more difficult task of turning outward. Despite the change, they have always remained true to her unique world view, the thread and stamp connecting and identifying any seemingly random music choice. As she said in an interview in the January 2006 issue of CD Data,

“I had a hard time trying to decide the sequence of the songs. (laugh) But, if I looked at the lyrics booklet while listening to the songs, I could hear them being sung by a cute girl, a girl who is worrying over love. Thus I was able to listen to them with a lighter heart, sort of like listening to background music flowing softly out of a room. Whenever I am thinking of many different things, or when I am looking to find myself, just looking at my lyrics booklet while listening to the songs really helps me to see the other side of things.”

The themes are consistent, with some of Ayumi’s favorites cropping up like perennials, among them the sublime awe and horror of mega-celebrity and the possessive, all-consuming, but also fickle, allure of fame, which she’s grappled with since A Song for XX through to promo campaigns for A BEST, and songs and videos like “ourselves,” “Because of You,” and “Don’t look back,” to the present. On (miss)understood, the title track and the video for “alterna” perform the heavy lifting, as does the title and overall concept of the album itself, as represented by the stiff, disingenous grin on the CD-version jacket, and the deliberately covered one on the CD+DVD version. Again, from CD Data, is Ayumi talking about the ephemeral quality of fads re: a popular television commercial, and a not-so-subtle dig at the industry and those quick to abandon when the next best thing comes along:

“But it’ll probably be forgotten soon with amazing speed, like all things. Just as if nothing had happened, and everything will settle down quietly again. Everything’s like this nowadays. When you fall in love with something, from the time you start liking it, you’ll spend all your time and energy pursuing it with all your spirit, concentrating on it totally. And when its time is over, you’ll withdraw from it, or discard it completely. That’s actually very scary when you think about it.”

That terror manifests through the loss, anger, confusion, and uncertain future present on the album. Even the moments of joy stem from fear, as in “Ladies Night,” when Ayumi takes a friend out to distract her from boyfriend troubles after the friend calls her up in tears. She ultimately pins the blame on her friend who refuses to see reality and have the strength to walk away from a bad relationship: “This so-called fight with your boyfriend / Is truly a fight with your inner self.” A night out with the girls ends in “laughing like we’re crying” and “singing like we’re screaming.” In “is this LOVE?” she berates herself for a love that doesn’t work out, “Why isn’t it me? I won’t ask / Such a ridiculous and trivial question.”

The looming threat of emptiness also pervades the album, as on “Pride,” where she recognizes the futility and somewhat pathetic effort of moving forward when others would have given up long ago. “Even if others laugh and call it pointless / Let’s go together, because there is / Nothing more frightening than giving up.” Sure, there’s bravery in moving forward into the unknown, but it offers no guarantee, something others might see as naive or even perhaps a bit stupid. It’s an admirable tenacity that speaks volumes about Ayumi’s determination and relentless perseverance. “You already know / That being beautiful doesn’t mean you will attain beautiful things,” she says in “Beautiful Day.” She doesn’t care: she feels the fear, ignores the doubters, and does it anyway. Beautiful days don’t just happen, she makes them happen.

The photo books

Ayumi’s career has been synonymous with travel since she moved to New York in the late 90s to undergo vocal training before her debut. For the album, she set out to New York again, notably to film the music videos for “Bold & Delicious” and “Pride,” as well as the photo for the jacket cover. However, it is her time in Hawaii, where she shot the video for “fairyland,” that makes up the content of the two special photo books, on my way and off my day, included with first-press editions of the album.

Photo books have cropped up serially throughout Ayumi’s career, from fashion books like A BOOK and uraayu, to the commemorative 15th anniversary book Tell All. We can gain some insight into the purpose of on my way and off my day from Tell All, as the latter was essentially a recreation of the former (of Tell All, said Ayu,”I want to create a booklet like the one we did for (miss)understood“.) Copies of the 70-page on my way were included with the first press editions of the CD+DVD versions, and showed “private,” behind-the-scenes photos. While it’s obvious all of these were purposely staged, they still offer insight into the type of image Ayumi wanted to project, riffing off of some of the popular “Stars! They’re just like us!” pages of tabloid magazines, with trips to the grocery store (in full hair and makeup), seeing the local sights, dinner with friends, and so on. off my day features behind-the-scenes photos of Ayumi working on the album.

Ultimately, there’s nothing as genuine and real here as Ayumi’s lyrics. Seeking to understand anything through what are essentially promotional vacation slides is a fool’s task, a red-herring dropped in Ayumi’s repeated quest to be heard, but also provide the fantasy the public came to expect, cornering her in an unavoidable trap. They’re nice photos, but they are, essentially, the “Hamasaki Ayumi” she referred to, as opposed to “the real ayu” (S Cawaii! April 2012), the “miss” before the “understood” (draw your own conclusions in connection to Tell All, and an album titled (miss)understood by someone who has stated “I’ve never wished for others to understand me. I aim to get through to others, to make them believe in me, but everyone is free to feel whatever they want.”).

The legacy

It’s easy to break down an album into its disparate parts and then reassemble it using hindsight, context, and the cooled-off distance that only time can lend, but harder in the moment, when the promo campaign is intent on exposure by any means possible: numerous magazine features, third-party commercial tie-ins, television appearances, photo shoots, and giant Shibuya billboards, all designed to drum up enough passion, hype, and excitement to get you to buy the album in the first couple weeks of its release for the bragging rights of units moved and numbers charted. It worked, I guess: (miss)understood debuted at #1 on the Oricon chart and stayed in the Top 10 for four weeks, the top 50 for eleven, and ended as the eighth highest-selling album of the year in Japan. Commercially, it was not her most successful album, falling just behind the sales of MY STORY, and the fourth album in a row to sell less than the previous one, a trend that would continue nearly indefinitely to today (in 2015 A ONE sold more albums than the previous year’s Colours). I, too, as a fan, reveled in the excitement and immediately purchased a copy when it was released, proceeding to listen to it not in fits and bursts, but almost non-stop for the first two months that it was out.

Because I was rooted in various fan communities and forums like LiveJournal blogs and the Ayumi Hamasaki Sekai forum, I understood that not all fans enjoyed the entire album from start to finish. This made sense considering the album’s departure from the sound that gained her popularity on LOVEppears and I am… To this day, Ayumi’s music has divided fans, causing not a few rifts and bemused debates on the freedom and duty an artist has to their fans. On the 15th anniversary of her debut in the industry, just seven years removed from (miss)understood, the author of the album’s photo books, Takako Tsuriya, marveled in Tell All at how much Ayumi had changed as a person, artist, and performer.

“It’s been 7 years since then… The [A]yu who spoke in stunted English had now become someone who could converse with the foreign staff in fluent English, without the help of an interpretor, and that was only one of the changes she had undergone. However, as I looked through the 2 previous booklets, the words I had written 7 years ago are still relevant to the person [a]yu is now. In a good way, it shows that her true self had withstood the test of time.”

Another seven years later, and we’re looking at an even bigger growth spurt: in addition to the events that prompted Ayumi to remark that she could never go back to the person she was before (twelve more singles; six more albums; twelve more concert tours; a Vegas marriage; a divorce; presumably friends, fans, and co-workers that came and went), she has released another four albums, embarked on nearly another dozen concert tours, married again, divorced again, had a child and conceived a second child — neither decision for which she felt the need to explain or defend — and saw the literal end of another era, as Heisei made way for Reiwa. At the end of it all, one presumes what she said in Tell All has held fast.

“I don’t need to be perfect, nor to protect myself anymore. I’m really afraid of nothing now. In the past, I created an iron wall with things such as hair and make-up, and felt safe when enclosed inside. Now, whenever I make myself up to be perfect, it just feels different and sort of lonely. Being perfect now feels incomplete.”

To be fair, (miss)understood, is not perfect, though it’s clear that was the ballpark for which Ayumi was aiming. It was astoundingly close. Today, the production still sounds as massive as any major release from one of the world’s biggest pop stars is meant to sound, but more importantly, it still sounds exciting. The songs sound fresh and promising, evoking joy and pathos. Most importantly, it comes from a place of honesty, that wish to communicate on a genuine level that marks all great works of art. At times assertive, vulnerable, insecure, headstrong, smug, self-satisfied, brave, and moved to grief, it highlights the myriad emotions and personalities that made up the woman behind a revolving door of expectations and personae crafted to entertain and satisfy. It would take several more years for Ayumi to stop striving for that perfection, to be comfortable in the mistakes and open wounds she shared with a public not always ready to forgive or treat with empathy, but (miss)understood is the sound of that beginning. The end of Ayu-chan, squeaky with high-pitched, awkward coquetry, to Ayumi Hamasaki, assertive, grown-up and at ease. Chasing after understanding and approval is the fruitless task of the young, something Ayumi has moved far past in life and in her career — it is the self-acceptance she feels closer to obtaining that resonates now.

“Either way, no matter how I am, it’s more important that everyone is enjoying themselves. It doesn’t matter if that means that I’ll be exhausted, and have to travel a long way, because that’s important to me. This thing, which seems so natural, is what I have chosen. When I realized that, I really became fearless.”

That fearlessness seems to have manifested not only in her personal life, but in the approach she takes to the once-crushing sense of obligation to fans and the public, for whom her current music and life choices never seem to be good enough. However, while the open sense of fresh novelty has long since worn off, with albums following this one ranging the gamut from solid, to surprisingly good, to disappointing, none have offered something as innovative, fresh and also successfully executed since (miss)understood. Put it plainly: we never heard from Sweetbox, or a  Sweetbox-equivalent, again.

In many ways, conforming to her own standards is a natural endgame of  anyone around long enough to no longer be chased by the necessity of capturing attention. Conformity, as Carl Safina points out, observing the behavior of chimpanzees within their social groups, provides refuge and safety. He tells the story of a line of wildebeests going to water who follow a straight line, one behind the other, without so much as deviating around a tree. Why? By the animal’s continued existence, that path was proven to be safe for the guy ahead of him. What happens to the free-spirited springbok who decides to take a risky sip in the middle of the night, on his own? He’s spotted by a lion and promptly eaten (257). However these two things have to co-exist.

“CULTURE is mainly about conformity, consistency, and tradition. Fact is: culture requires BOTH innovators, who create some new thing never before learned (and are often ignored and resisted), and adopters, who, by learning, narrow themselves and conform. […] Being conservative is safer than thinking freely. Safer than experimenting and innovating.” (260)

In this case, “safe” meant albums (as great as they were) like GUILTY and Secret. Like LOVE again and M(A)DE IN JAPAN.

I don’t know if conformity or caution is inevitable, a kind of by-product of growing older, the instinct or learned behavior to keep doing what works because it’s proven effective and not gotten you eaten by hungry mountain lions or offended music critics, but I can understand where it comes from. It’s all the more reason to remember and celebrate all those with the courage to take a chance on something fresh and unusual, even when it doesn’t always work or takes a few listens to appreciate (full disclosure: I didn’t like “Bold & Delicious” when I first heard it). After all, if Ayumi is conforming to any sound, it’s her own, one she created and perfected at the peak of her abilities.

Again, “[w]ithout some original innovator […] there is NO knowledge, skill, or tradition that can get shared; there is no culture to copy and conform to. Innovation is to culture what mutation is to genes; it’s the only way to make any progress, the root of all change” (47), so it’s worth underscoring: if anyone was out there setting standards in music and fashion in the early 00s, it was Ayumi Hamasaki. A lack of innovation after (miss)understood simply hit the brakes on the musical evolution, not necessarily quality or consistency. Ten years ago, it was kind of depressing. Today, considering what a gigantic back catalog she’s given us to listen to, and think and write about, and argue over, and love and hate in equal, sometimes maddening, measure, I’ll take a fulfilled, confident, well-adjusted, and happy Ayumi enjoying her well-deserved success, over chasing popularity and culture-resetting pop songs. She gave us LOVEppears, and Duty, and I am…, and Memorial address, and (miss)understood, and that’s not even the half of it. After all of that, and seven years removed from that previous statement where she placed the happiness of others over her own health, I hope she’s found found the confidence to switch the importance of “everyone” enjoying themselves, to Ayumi enjoying herself first. I’d like to think she has.

Notes
[ All images original scans by author, except for magazine scans by iloveayu.com and AyuAlanis@NihonWa, which were posted to the AHS Forum a lifetime ago, and this gallery of scans. • Special thanks to Misa-chan’s J-pop Blog for all of the amazing translated interviews and lyrics that provided so much insight. • I understand that some of my parallels to the animal world stretch the imagination, but all of those far reaches are my own fault (even when I’m reading about the cultural differences between bonobos and chimpanzees, I’m thinking about music, and I think I’ve proven more than once on this blog that I can relate just about anything to Ayumi Hamasaki), not Carl Safina’s, whose book, Becoming Wild, is fascinating. I encourage everyone to read it and think deeply about its content (the section on whales and their songs is particularly good). ]

Top ten East Asian pop/rock albums of 2020

In a year that I dedicated myself to listening to as many albums in the top ten of various physical and streaming Japanese and Korean charts as I could, I was struck, as usual, by how many of the best albums were those on the periphery, those that just missed out, or never even saw the top thirty. But I was as equally struck, as usual, by how big and fun and all-encompassing pop albums are, as long as you’re willing to dig a little, to slog through the ten or twenty average or terrible albums to unearth the one that reiterates why it’s so important to listen as carefully, and widely, as possible. This year, we all took comfort in the familiar as much as possible, and many of the names on this list reflect that bias. The real surprise this year was how little it mattered, and how good it felt, list-making album or not, to see old favorites step up to the plate and bravely deliver what they were capable of in a year they very well could have sat back and took a well-deserved break. Here, in chronological order, are ten of my favorite. (Note: Some of these blurbs interpolate pieces from previous notes posted earlier on this site.) Thanks for spending the whole week looking back with me!

LatuLatu: Mangekyou ETERNITY
(2020.01.22)

LatuLatu were billed by HMV as a “desktop rock unit” that gained some fame on TikTok in 2019, but Mangekyou ETERNTY, the band’s first mini-album boasts an ambition beyond the boundaries of an office chair. Full of energy and earnestness, this quick shot of high-speed J-rock proves that while hibernating, J-rock is not nearly as listless or dead as any number of Oricon or streaming charts might have you believe. It feels like LatuLatu have the ability to breathe some fresh air into the lungs of a sometimes anemic, sometimes too anime-pop-reliant genre, a challenge that subsequent singles have proven they’re up to.

Sumire Uesaka: NEO PROPAGANDA
(2020.01.22)

For years, Uesaka has cultivated a uniquely gifted hyper-pop sound, one reliant on styles as far-reaching as idol-pop, chiptune, techno, metal, and military marches. Somehow, she makes them all work, creating a world so sonically exciting, it’s practically visual. NEO PROPAGANDA is just another installment in that ultra 4K world of poly-tempos and speed shifts. The album boasts song writers both old and new like Kenji Ohtsuki, Ryohei Shima of The Dresscodes, and MOSAIC.WAV who have imbued the album with all the hallmarks that have defined her sound from rolling Rs and high-pitched shrieks, to gonzo interpretations of Russian culture. So much unpredictability would make it an exhausting trek if it weren’t so much fun.

Reol: Kinjito
(2020.01.22)

Reol may be new to the J-pop scene but her sound is now as old as the first wave of electro-house that hit shores a la Nakata in the mid-00s. In fact, with her vocals turned up to computer glitch, she sounds remarkably like J-pop’s other blink-and-you’ll-miss-her indie-android, MAA, who released Monkey Kingdom exactly ten years ago, signed to a major, and promptly disappeared. One hopes Reol’s bio will read differently; Reol hopes so, too, with the aptly titled Kinjito, the culmination of years presumably learning how to push buttons, and cut and paste, in just the right ways. While the sound itself is nothing unique, Reol brings a charm and warm perspective to a sometimes erratic and jarring genre that can often feel downright arctic. Here’s hoping we see more from this personality than we did from those whose footsteps she’s following.

Shuta Sueyoshi: pret a porter
(2020.02.12)

Sueyoshi has spent the last few years carving a small groove in J-pop for himself, one he can now comfortably afford to dig into as AAA goes on hiatus. Following the release of 2018’s JACK IN THE BOX and last year’s EP WONDER HACK, pret a porter is Sueyoshi on his continual quest for the ever-elusive male solo star label, one coveted by many and achieved by almost none. While pret a porter doesn’t signal a victory, it does point in the right direction, a laid back blend of ironed out R&B and dance-pop-lite that wears its vocalist’s experience more than the desperate, youthful hunger of so many newcomers. It’ll take a bit more oomph to stand out and prove he’s worth sticking out for, but in a year of few direct contenders, pret a porter is a perfectly edible slice of contemporary Avex, with plenty of fun on the side.

ONEPIXCEL: LIBRE
(2020.02.26)

It’s not easy being a J-pop trio, not when you debut in hopes of drawing upon the same fan pool as Perfume and callme (or kolme, as it were now), and definitely not when you want to transition to the level of a Fairies or GEM or E-girls at a time when all of those groups have or are on the verge of disbanding. But in fact, this makes a group like ONEPIXCEL all the more vital, women singing for other women and girls and themselves, and boys and men, too, if they want, not exclusively for the hearts and pocketbooks of a convenient niche. Backed by an audaciously Avex-pop sophomore album, LIBRE, ONEPIXCEL make their struggle look and sound as fun as it should. As a veritable anomaly I applaud them. And pray.

Gesu no Kiwami Otome.: STREAMING, CD, RECORD
(2020.05.01)

In 2020, we reached peak-Enon Kawatani. With fingers in various pies, all maintaining consistency in brand and sound, and numerous releases flooding the market, we’re just at the beginning of what could be the end. So, with goodwill precarious, but still intact, it’s a good time to celebrate STREAMING, CD, RECORD. While the album doesn’t land the same punches as the group’s early records, it’s by no means a lackluster addition. Whether extensions of his other projects, or leftovers, it’s pure Kawatani, all dandy pianos, studied rap-singing, and audaciously wacky interludes, on par with the seasoned, almost so-easy-it’s-boring vibes Kawatani is giving off. This can easily start to fall into the existential throes of condescension for either his work or his audience, but for now, Kawatani still manages to make it sound easy in the spirit of experience, rather than cynicism.

BBHF: BBHF1 -Nankasuru Seinen-
(2020.09.02)

Across all genres and languages, BBHF’s BBHF1 -Nankasuru Seinen-, an ambitious 2-disc concept album chronicling one man’s emotional journey through a labyrinth of history and emotion set to a wave of poppy 80’s synth rock, is one of the greatest albums of the year. It’s honest and refreshing, a J-rock band refusing to hide behind dour epithets without any genuine emotional anchor behind them. “Apps that I merely touched once and don’t use / I deleted them all, that is the pleasure of getting rid of things,” the opening track opines; “Sooner or later, everything changes / I’m not happy at all / For better or for worse, this country is falling into a depression” they lament in “1988,” folding the twin tragedies of a burst bubble and a broken heart into an excuse to get wasted. During a year we all had to navigate a new world, it was easy to relate to a desire to leave it all behind and start somewhere new. But as the hero discovers for himself, there is no genuine escape, only the boring, unromantic work of dealing with baggage you can never leave behind anywhere you go, today, tomorrow, and every day for the rest of your life.

TAEMIN: Never Gonna Dance Again : Act 1
(2020.09.07)

SHINee-member TAEMIN released two solo EPs this year, and it is the first of the pair that continues to shine, leading with the slinky single “Criminal,” and “2 KIDS.” Unlike the second set, which so desperately needed to balance Never Gonna Dance Again : Act 1‘s darker side and didn’t, Act 1 showcases TAEMIN as a man who comes alive in the pageantry of performance with a sound down pat from a lifetime of training and practice. It’s hard to be upset that his team rarely thinks outside of this box when he excels so well inside of it — a TAEMIN playing in his own shadowy sandbox instead of the bright ones his SM peers are often found running amok in is part of what preserves his iconic imagery. It’s a thin line between indulging and wallowing but Act 1 gets it right, incorporating some more uptempo tracks like previous Japanese hit “FAMOUS” to illustrate TAEMIN’s ability to be both artist and pop star, one of the closest living talents we have to the Super Stars of old.

SuperM: SuperOne
(2020.09.25)

SM’s answer to BTS is SuperM, their “Avengers” super group, featuring members hand-picked from groups SHINee, EXO, NCT, and WayV. But while good looks and unique abilities have captured the attention of long-time fans and curious, new eyes, it has been up to the music itself to deliver the final ingredient. For their first full-length album, SM spared no expense in flexing their resources, pouring massive amounts of time and budget into the songwriters who chorus, by verse, by sample, by effect, stitched together a defining statement for the group, one perhaps leaning a bit too heavily on aggressive boy-band energy with typically masculine imagery (fast cars! motorcycles! predatory animals!), but that bares its teeth in the service of catchy hooks and of-the-moment trends nearly pile-driving each other into infinity. Super One nails it: with no expense spared, it sounds just as rich as it cost, and just as good, too, the best pop money can buy. And 2020 is a year we all deserved to splurge.

TWICE: Eyes wide open
(2020.10.26)

TWICE continues to defy expectations with their releases, a not always welcome back and forth between otherworldly, next-level pop, and head-scratching hiccups. Like last year’s Feel Special, Eyes wide open is the former, a deliciously indulgent callback to K-pop’s dance roots, with lead track “I CAN’T STOP ME” recalling groups like T-ara and Dal Shabet at their best. The synthy 80’s sound finds further purchase in songs like “UP NO MORE” and “DO WHAT WE LIKE,” stopping only for lower-key vibes on the back half, like “GO HARD” and “HANDLE IT.” The entire album is like a guided tour of the best of the last decade in K-pop girl groups, from 2NE1 to WJSN, all the way up to BLACKPINK, and while this might not say much for TWICE specifically, it makes for a particularly cozy listening experience that surprises and delights with each track.

Honorable Mentions

Mia REGINA: MIAUSEUM -CURATION-
Ayaka Ohashi WINGS
CY8ER: Tokyo
KAI (EXO): KAI
RINGOMUSUME: Cool & Country

Top ten debut albums of 2020

The debut category is one of the most fun of the year, a chance to celebrate what riches may lay ahead in the future. While these albums and EPs may not be perfect, they can stop you in your tracks, spark intrigue, and tantalize with the promise of everything yet to come. While some may never make good on these promises, it’s the optimism that keeps me coming back to this category each year with necessary delight, an optimism we could all use now more than ever now. In chronological order, here are some of this year’s best debut music releases that, along with the vaccines, makes the future worth holding out for. (Note: Some of these blurbs interpolate pieces from previous notes posted earlier on this site.)

FANTASTICS from EXILE TRIBE: FANTASTIC 9
(2020.02.12

The EXILE franchise continued to expand in 2020 with the addition of FANTASTICS from EXILE TRIBE even as other branches were lopped off entirely. The group released four notable singles over the course of 2019, culminating in a previously-heard-material heavy debut album, released in February. FANTASTICS are like the dancier, poppier, gentler cousin to GENERATIONS, with an emphasis on dance over hip-hop, and it all goes down as smoothly as some of the more Western Hey! Say! JUMP cuts. FANTASTIC 9 needed some serious trimming, but which hopefully stems more from an over-eagerness than lack of direction — the former can be harnessed, the latter can pull you under quicksand fast. Since this album, the group has released a few more singles, with “High Fever” in particular a stand out, all boding well for the future of this particular J-pop boy band.

MCND: into the ICE AGE
(2020.02.27)

We all lived on an entirely different planet back in February, one where the terrain of upcoming K-pop debuts felt wide and expansive. At that stage, a group like MCND felt like just another drop in the debut ocean, yet over time, as the number of debuts were culled, or folded from financial strain, MCND stood out more for its relative unique position, rather than genuine potential. Despite a lackluster followup that relied too heavily on their “element” gimmick over creating a stand-out hit, “ICE AGE” remains one of my favorite debut singles of the year, with a particularly good pre-chorus. It’s hard to see anything dramatic coming of this group, but MCND offer a pleasantly nostalgic look back at the state of the generous, forgiving, and hopeful mind we could all afford to be in ten months ago.

Nanaka Suwa: So Sweet Dolce
(2020.04.15)

So Sweet Dolce might rely a bit too heavily on its predecessors, from Aya Uchida to Yui Ogura, but its commitment to a (somewhat hackneyed) concept and relentlessly upbeat personality made this album a welcome distraction in the spring. While the album trades in a sound as expendable and nutritionally deficient as its thematic content, I’d argue that its sincerity and commitment give it some lee-way: junk food never promises anything more than a pleasing and evanescent mouth-feel and delicious sugar rush, followed by a crash that leaves the consumer lethargic and unsatisfied. On that front, this album comes fresh out of Wonka’s factory, perhaps all the better to keep it so short and so sweet. Suwa has since released a follow-up EP in November tha,t while scaling down my personal expectations, does portend a successful career in fresh-faced, anison idol-dom.

NiziU: Make you happy
(2020.06.30)

In a K-pop world where nearly every girl and boy group have fallen prey to BTS/BLANKPINK-syndrome (a terminal condition presenting with symptoms of similarity and pandering, with a fierce, almost desperate sense of competitiveness), including such venerable institutions as SM Entertainment, it was nice to see a group that went for a completely different approach, instead tailoring their sound to airy Japanese idol-pop. Though technically a “pre-debut,” this EP containing four songs has grown on me more slowly, but firmly, than any other debut this year, with its unbridled joy and warm-pancakes positivity. Their Japan-side buzz promises more of the same and I hold out hope that the group doesn’t capitulate to pressure to compete on a world-stage by diluting what makes them so great.

YUKIKA: Soul Yeoja
(2020.07.21)

I’m not completely sold on this debut album, but I have to admit its place in 2020 as a stand-out is nearly unparalleled. For example, YUKIKA’s commitment to city pop could do with a bit more consistency on the production side. Soul Yeoja leads with its jazzy, laid-back singles like “SOUL LADY” and the glimmering “NEON 1989,” giving every indication of a proto-Korean Dance for Philosophy before devolving into standard K-pop. Take “Yesterday” or “Day for Love,” which go for the bare minimum in vintage before “pit-a-pet,” an adorable homage to puppy love, boasts all the familiar tropes found on a standard GFRIEND or OH MY GIRL album. Still, the potential for YUKIKA to transcend easy familiarity is high, and if Soul Yeoja is just the first in a line of skillful homages, it deserves credit for whetting appetites hungry for something different, even if city pop, in general, is as far from “different” as we can get a decade into the existence of Bandcamp.

Ava Max: Heaven & Hell
(2020.09.18)

While Axa Max lacks the quirky magnetism of The Fame-era Lady Gaga, she projects the same intrepid effort on her debut full-length Heaven & Hell. The basic Euro-pop foundations lend a steady purpose to an extended run of music, a stepping stone path of a track list that wraps up an almost 3-year block of fun, but indistinguishable singles. It’s not the best representation of what a major label like Atlantic can offer, but there’s raw material within Ava Max, one that hasn’t yet been tapped by truly innovative pop, the kind that gives songs an instantly recognizable personality. I would love to see what Ava Max can come up with with an A-list producer, and hope to see her get the chance to make magic in the years to come.

Dagny: Strangers / Lovers
(2020.10.02)

Dagny’s years in the trenches of pop music, writing for bigger artists with bigger budgets and bigger labels has paid off in her first full-length Strangers / Lovers. Collecting a handful of previously released singles, alongside new tracks, the album focuses less on fresh than fun, rooting itself in conventional dance-pop, while drawing upon little variety in production for a consistent, rather than diverse, palette of sounds. However, the songs emanate a deft skill and attention to detail crafted by an obviously seasoned hand. One hopes Dagny has finally proved she deserves more time and resources to devote to her own career.

beabadoobee: Fake It Flowers
(2020.10.16)

My aversion to grunge is tempered by the intense nostalgia it provokes, one that beabadoobee has harnessed to success on her debut album Fake It Flowers. Combined with sometimes naive, heart-on-its-sleeve confessions, the album focuses less on wrapping up a tidy package than on the process, one that indulges in all the messy feelings and everyday cliches that make up honest human relationships. The sound, reliant on the aforementioned 90’s alternative and indie rock sound, suits this very candid and clearly cathartic debut album from a voice that will only benefit from more time and experience.

Nova Miller: The Passion
(2020.10.16)

It’s time we all face the changing landscape and accept that TikTok is the new YouTube, brimming with undiscovered talent and up-and-coming chart toppers. As a succinct premonition, the debut EP The Passion from multi-talented Swedish singer Nova Miller exemplifies the riches we have to look forward to from some of the unlikeliest, and often derided sources. This EP is everything Strangers / Lovers could have been if it had managed a bit more luck in the catchy hook department. But we’ll be in for a real treat when Miller finally figures out how to incorporate and showcase her wide range, marking this as a true debut: one that teases rather than fully delivering.

RAYE: Euphoric Sad Songs
(2020.11.20)

Like Dagny, RAYE already has a history, giving her a leg-up on other debut albums, one that proves this distinction can get a bit murky and muddled when you’re trying to organize all the singles and collabs, and figure out what distinguishes an EP from a true full-length. I’m going with full-length here because there’s nothing that captures my attention faster than a throwaway 00s Eurodance sample, like RAYE incorporates into “Regardless,” her bouncy collab with Rudimental that references Nadia Ali’s iconic trill for iiO’s “Rapture.” Euphoric Sad Songs relies a a bit too heavily on this tongue-in-cheek homage to 90’s dance, but not without an endearing earnestness and genuine appreciation. I’m not sure if there’s a long career in this kind of largely niche sound, one that relies on a very of-the-moment retro callback, but it’s so fun, it’s hard to simply dismiss.

Honorable Mentions

color-code: Re∂l
Muni Long: Black
Gabby Barrett: Goldmine
Haruka Kudo: KDHR
Re:Complex: Neo Gravity